Check out the event by CLICKING HERE
Be sure to invite your book lovin' buds!
~ ~ ~
~~BOOK SPECIALS~~
Friday May 31- Sunday June 2 be sure to pick up your complimentary copy of our featured authors' book
"The Cuckoos of Batch Magna." Click here
~ ~ ~
Hidden Earth Series Volume 1 Maycly the Trilogy. . .
. . .all three parts / ebooks are only .99 cents each now through June 30!
Download the entire trilogy for under $3 on Amazon!!! Click here
~~BOOK SPECIALS~~
"The Cuckoos of Batch Magna." Click here
~ ~ ~
Hidden Earth Series Volume 1 Maycly the Trilogy. . .
. . .all three parts / ebooks are only .99 cents each now through June 30!Download the entire trilogy for under $3 on Amazon!!! Click here
Welcome everyone! Thanks so much for taking the time to stop by and visit with us here on the JLB Creatives Blog. If you're not already a follower, we'd like to personally invite you to become one of the 300+ who are already enjoying the weekly posts and features here on the JLBC blog.
Author Peter Maughan
When Sir Humphrey Miles Pinkerton Strange, 8th baronet and
huntin’ shooting’ and fishin’ squire of the village of Batch Magna in the Welsh
Marches, departs this world for the Upper House (as he had long vaguely thought
of it, where God no doubt presides in ermine over a Heaven as reassuringly
familiar as White’s or Boodle’s), what’s left of his decaying estate 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, 9th 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 image of rural
England – a vacation 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 are above any consideration of filthy lucre and stand
their ground for tradition’s sake … and because they consider eviction notices
not to be cricket.
Each disgruntled faction sees the other as the unwelcome cuckoo in the
family nest.
So, led by randy pulp-crime writer Phineas Cook, and Lt-Commander James
Cunningham DSO, DSC and Bar, RN (ret) – a man with a glass eye for each day of
the week, painted with scenes from famous British naval victories and
landscapes that speak of England – the motley crew run up the Union Jack and
battle ensign and prepare to engage.
But this is Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And does …
An excerpt
“The Cuckoos of Batch Magna”
by
Peter Maughan
The scene in which Phineas Cook, off the Cluny
Belle houseboat, walks the hills of the valley shortly before the eviction
notices arrive, and looks down at his home as if seeing it for the first time –
or the last.
… The
small black and white farms of the valley among orchards, and the houses and
half-timbered cottages of Batch Magna, a Marcher village, the cross of St
George, flown from the Steamer Inn, a riposte to the red dragon of Wales above
the door of the Pughs’ post office and shop. The cricket field and pavilion
behind the churchyard, and the great, immemorial yew, the centuries in its vast
girth corseted with rusting iron bands, shading a church which bore in its nave
the marks of Norman chisels, and among its gravestones a sundial which told the
time in Jerusalem.
And the tall, star-shaped chimneys and gabled
black and white timbers of Batch Hall, home to the Strange family for over four
hundred years, set with Elizabethan ornateness in what was left of its park,
its lawns, under horse chestnuts heavy with bloom, running down to the Cluny.
And the castle, a fortress once against border incursions and the forces of
Cromwell, open now to Welsh rain and rabbits, the archers’ loopholes in the ruined
towers blinded with creeper, its red sandstone turning to coral in the sun.
The forgotten country, this part of the Marches
had been called. A country largely ignored by the rest of the world, apart from
a trickle of tourists on their way to somewhere else, and the odd company rep
who had taken the wrong turning, in a place with need for few road signs. A
valley lost among its ancient wooded hillsides and winding high-banked lanes,
on a road to nowhere in particular.
Phineas had arrived there by accident, after
taking a wrong turning himself, when on a road to nowhere in particular.
Falling into the valley, as he came to see it, like Alice, and five years later
was still there.
He thought occasionally, in a vague sort of way,
about moving on, getting back to what he vaguely thought of as the real world.
But there never seemed to be any particular hurry to do so.
And that of course was the trouble with
the river, as he’d had occasion to point out before, to himself and to others,
sparing no one. Whether boating up and down it, or simply sitting on it, there
never seemed to be any particular hurry to do anything.
Well, now he had the feeling that all that was
about to change. That now, with the General no longer at the wheel, they stood
exposed to more unsettled weather. That the real world, which had always been
over there somewhere, beyond the blue hills, was perhaps about to come to them.
He whistled for Sikes, busy putting up a few
panicking pheasants and the smell of wild garlic as he blundered through the
undergrowth after the scent of fox or badger.
They had walked this wood together in all the
seasons. In autumn, when it ran like a damp fire through the trees, and in
weather that had shrivelled Sikes’s testicles as he padded warily through undergrowth
crackling with ice or got himself buried in snowdrifts along the rides. The
winter bareness like a ruin now in early summer, overgrown with new growth,
letting in the sun and with the sound of birdsong up under its roof.
The sunlight lay among the drifts of bluebells
and red campion, and reached with long slender fingers deep into the wood,
where the new grass and ferns were tender in the shade between trees. And above
him, high in the green and golden heart of an oak, a blackcap opened in sudden
song. The sweet, poignantly brief notes flung, carelessly, on the morning air
like a handful of bright coin.
