Wendy

Wendy is a good Welsh dragon, living on Pendragon hill in Llandraig. She has friends and lovers, past and present, in many parts of the world – under the water in Loch Ness, on an island in Polynesia (an emigrant from Cader Idris in Wales), in Edinburgh (once on Dragon Hill at Uffington, where he took umbrage at the inaccuracy of his portrait carved in chalk on the hill), under the Drachenfels on the Rhine in Germany (where he took refuge from a Wanderer and a young Hero with a sword), in Cambridge, in Turkey, in castles in Romania and Hungary, in Qumran overlooking the Dead Sea in Israel, in Bolivia with an ex-Welsh community (who had quarrelled with Merlin in Arthurian times), and in Armenia. Wendy is now making and selling magic carpets (with full anti-missile properties), and others.


She also has six children to get settled in good jobs and with nice partners or even a husband or wife (and who knows how to organize a dragon marriage?). One, a true Welsh red dragon, first becomes a member of the Welsh Parliamentary Assembly and then an ambassador for the Prince of Wales. The second agrees to settle on the Drachenfels, which despite its name has had no dragon since Fafner hid himself deep below. The third has a job, shared with her Chinese husband, as the cuckoos of a giant dragon clock in a Swiss valley. The fourth becomes an attraction in Days-of-Oldeland at Lake Havasu in Arizona, where he meets other survivors from older times. The fifth becomes the charge of a Chinese dynasty who traditionally looked after the Imperial five-clawed dragons, and who settles with her in Scotland – where she falls in love with the son of Wendy’s old friend in Loch Ness. And the last, after finding that kangaroos are indigestible, falls for the son of the magic carpet maker.


The book is full of musical references, unpolitically-correct remarks about bankers, politicians, and others, and puns – telling how Wendy travels the world, visiting her old friends, getting her children settled down, enjoying good food (often of unwary passers-by), and reviving all her old affections.


Jeremy Montagu is a retired university lecturer in Oxford, well-known as the author of many books and articles on musical instruments world wide. This is his first excursion into fiction, started originally to entertain his 95-year old mother after she had a stroke while on holiday, and finally completed to amuse his friends and any others who may like to read it.


Still living in Oxford, the author is now an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, an area editor for and contributor to the forthcoming revised New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, and writes books on instruments – the next, appearing probably in 2014, being The World of Brass Instruments.