Pete Peru

Hello, my name is Pete Peru. I am the co-author of “The Reeking Hegs”. I wrote it in collaboration with my writing partner and friend, Lord Tupelo. The story of the writing of TRH is a story in itself. It all began way back in 1987! Tupelo and I shared a cottage in Cubbington, a village on the outskirts of Leamington Spa in the U.K. We often got together in the evenings in Tupelo’s kitchen where we’d generally watch a bit of something on his tiny TV, drink a few beers and chew the cud. Up there he also had an old portable typewriter and one night, I don’t recall who initiated the fun, one of us started to tap out some sentences on the typewriter in a totally impropmtu manner. That done, the machine was passed across the table and the other carried on either responding to the prompt or going off at a maybe completely unrelated tangent. In this way we completed the first page or two of what was to evolve in The Reeking Hegs. Although sections of TRH were written in many different locations and more often than not upon anything that came to hand; scraps of paper, the inside of a cereals box…whatever, we stuck to that original method of writing a piece and then handing it over to the other to continue throughout. We both enjoyed the strange twists and turns this method produced in the narrative. We both enjoyed feeding of the other’s imagination. We were both awed at how, seemingly out of absolutely nothing, by some weird magic, the entire story grew, developed, mutated and took over our lives! That process was deemed “finished” in 1992, by which time I had moved to Spain. I lost contact with Tupelo and my copy of the manuscript sat in a box that somehow survived the turmoils and upheavals in my life over the next 25 years. In 2017 I decided to, once and for all, transcribe the manuscript version onto my word processor – I’d started doing this twice before but had never got it completed. This time I stuck to it and got it done. Having done that I thought I might as well present it for publication and was overjoyed when Montag Press of San Francisco came through with an offer to publish. However, I then faced the task of finding Lord Tupelo who I’d not heard of since 1992! Knowing the man I knew he would not be found on “social media” but as luck would have it I turned up another friend from Cubbington days, got in touch and was told that he and Tupelo met every Thursday for a game of table-tennis! Thus was the Peru-Tupelo axis re-established and in July 2020 The Reeking Hegs appeared in print.