Rhys Davies was an outcast: a writer from the Rhondda, a gay man and a dandy in a time of coal-caked clothing. Many of the stories in this collection echo back across the ages from Davies’ time, a hundred years ago. Matthew G Rees’ End Game speaks of blood feuds battled out over the whitewash of the rugby pitch, and throughout the selection much is made of the mist and fog clinging to roads, as the writers evoke the weather of Wales in different contexts.
The Wales represented here is mainly a pastoral one, or at least a Wales marked out by the natural impact of weather and landscape. Family bonds are frayed where they have been tied too tight in a world where the legacy of the mines and the men they bred looms large. Colloquial language is used well throughout, especially by Daniel Patrick Strogen in Cracked/Duck where the imagery is at once beautiful and dangerous.
These may be modern stories but they are concerned with the schoolhouse, the sports field, the home and what it means to lose any of these bedrocks of Welsh life. With the exception of perhaps Satterday Shaw’s cautionary tale, My How To Guide, these stories represent the Wales most of us grew up in; and so too, it feels, did Rhys Davies.
Cree: The Rhys Davies Short Story Award Anthology, Elaine Canning [ed.] (Parthian)
Price: £10. Info: here
words JOHN-PAUL DAVIES