AS champagne corks popped to mark the arrival of 2004, Margaret Tuckwell sharpened her pencils and prepared to start work on her 15th novel.

Her 14th, the second part of a trilogy about an upper class West Country family and their country house, has just been published.

And now the Highworth author who writes as Margaret Bacon, her maiden name, is letting her characters move the saga that began with the horrors of the 1914-18 war into the Swinging Sixties.

While she is writing about them those characters become real people. Margaret says good morning to them as she walks into her study to start work. They dictate how the story is to unfold.

The trilogy began with Northrop Hall, set around the Gloucestershire estate of the Arndale family and in the trenches of the Somme.

Its pages told how people's lives and hopes were devastated by the war that was supposed to end all wars.

Part two, The Years Between, is the story of the Arndales' beautiful daughter Diana and of her marriage to a dedicated doctor who is more interested in the rehabilitation centre which he has created for disabled soldiers at Northrop Hall than he is in her.

It tells how Sebastian, the man she had loved as a teenager comes back into her life.

Now book three will propel a third generation into the sexually liberated era of rock 'n' roll and flower power.

But there are no steamy chapters in her books.

"I prefer to leave what goes on in the bedroom behind the bedroom door. I'm just not very good at writing about explicit sex," she said.

Margaret, who has a history degree and taught the subject before her marriage to civil engineer Richard Tuckwell, does long and meticulous research for all her novels.

"The whole world changed in the comparatively short period between and after the two world wars. They shattered the social and hierarchical system and it was important to get things right."

Her husband died suddenly 15 years ago. Margaret has two daughters. Caroline, a lawyer, is married and has two children. Penelope is a trilingual secretary and works in Switzerland.

Northrop Hall and The Years Between have both been accepted for the catalogue of Swindon-based Book Club Associates. Book three of the trilogy is unlikely to be in print until next year.

Margaret still writes her first drafts in exercise books with a soft pencil. She also revises and rewrites up to a dozen times before typing her manuscripts on computer.

Being a published novelist, she said, will never make anyone rich. Unless they are a John Grisham or a Danielle Steele.

The Years Between is published by Severn House at £18.99 and in Swindon is available at Waterstone's.