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The Cuckoos Of Batch Magna - An Interview With Author Peter Maughan
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AmeriCymru: Hi Peter and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by AmeriCymru. Care to introduce the Batch Magna novels for our readers?
Peter: Thank you, Ceri, for inviting me. I appreciate it. The novels, of which The Cuckoos of Batch Magna is the first in the series, are set in a river valley in the Welsh Marches, the borderland between Wales and England (though I’m sure that doesn’t need explaining in this company). The squire of the village there, Batch Magna, dies, and what’s left of his decaying estate crosses the Atlantic and passes, through the ancient law of entailment, to distant relative Humph, an amiable, overweight short-order cook from the Bronx.
Sir Humphrey Franklin T Strange, 9 th baronet and squire of Batch Magna, as Humph now most remarkably finds himself to be, is persuaded by his Uncle Frank, a small time Wall Street broker with an eye on the big time, to make a killing by turning the sleepy backwater into a theme-park rural paradise for free-spending US millionaires.
But while the village pub and shop, with the lure of the dollar in their eyes, put out the Stars and Stripes in welcome, the tenants of the estate’s dilapidated houseboats take a different view, and when they’re given notice to quit by the new squire they stand their ground. And the fun begins.
The novels were inspired by nostalgia, of a time in the mid 1970s spent gloriously free living in a small colony of houseboats on the River Medway, in deepest rural Kent. The houseboats there were converted Thames sailing barges; for my houseboats, on Batch Magna''s river the Cluny, I used converted paddle steamers (once part of an equally fictitious Victorian trading company, the Cluny Steamboat Company), simply because I like the vessels.
They are feelgood books (The Wind in the Willows for grown-ups, as one Amazon reviewer described Cuckoos), pure escapism - for me now, looking back, and I hope for my readers.
AmeriCymru: What is the connection with Wales? How much of the action takes place west of Offa''s Dyke?
Peter: The stage is shared equally. The books were conceived with a nod both to Mercia and to Powys. The imaginary Welsh/English border running through Batch Valley and its village twists and turns, bestowing Welsh nationality on one villager in one part of it and English on another. And their accents, as they tend to in the Marches, share that duality, sounding Welsh to English ears and English to Welsh. A duality which also allowed me to have fun with Welsh/English banter.
AmeriCymru: How many books are there in the series and how would you say the plot and characters have developed over time?
Peter: I have two sequels to Cuckoos finished and waiting their turn (why this is so involves rather complicated reasons when I was under contract to my last two publishers), and I’m several chapters into a third sequel. And I think there’s enough mileage in the characters and place for at least several more. I don’t think anything changed much really, apart from the plots. The characters, I suppose, like actors, have settled into the parts more in the sequels, are more perhaps rounded, but rather like Batch Magna itself, everything else is just as it always was.
AmeriCymru: I have to ask....did you have any particular village in mind as a model or paradigm for Batch Magna?
Peter: Yes, well two villages, actually, Ceri, and appropriately enough, one was in England (Somerset), the other in Wales (Pembrokeshire). The interior of the Batch Magna pub, the Steamer Inn, was taken from Somerset, the shop and post office from the Pembrokeshire village.
AmeriCymru: How has your background as an ex-actor, fringe theatre director and script writer influenced your writing?
Peter: That’s an interesting question. I am all of those when writing. I write the script, while seeing the scene through the eye, as it were, of the camera, direct and act it out on paper. But it’s that first bit, the ‘seeing’, I think that is important, it’s from that which all else follows. The late Yorkshire novelist John Braine said you can break all the rules written about novel writing, and still write a good novel. But if you break the rule which says you must see the action as you write it, no matter how trivial that action might be, then your words will stay on the page, will never take on a second life in the imagination of the reader (and reading should also be creative). And when a writer hasn’t done that then I think it’s noticeable – especially in any kind of action novel.
AmeriCymru: Are all the books in the series currently available? If so where can readers go to purchase them online?
Peter: It pains me to have to past up an opportunity for a plug, but I’m afraid the answer to that must be that your readers can’t, not yet. The second book will be out sometime this year. but I can’t even give a date for that yet.
AmeriCymru: What are you reading at the moment? Any recommendations?
Peter: I’m reading a book I picked up the other day in a second-home book shop in Hay on Wye (where all the second hand bookshops of the country are massed, ready to make a last stand) It’s a book of essays called At Home and Abroad by one of the great travel writers, V. S. Pritchard, a writer with a marvellous ability to conjure up the essence of a place and its people. (He was also of course, in addition to his biography and literary criticism, a renowned short story writer)
AmeriCymru: What''s next for Peter Maughan? When can we expect a new episode?
Peter: Well, as I said, there are two sequels finished, which, as with Cuckoos, I’m bringing out under my own imprint of The Cluny Press, and I now have to judge what is the optimum time to release the first one.
AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru? .
Peter: Well, if they’ve followed my ramblings this far I’d like to thank them for that. And to thank you also, Ceri, for having me. And from me to them and you: hwyl fawr.
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