Rhys Davies was one of the most prolific of Welsh authors in the early twentieth century with an output of twenty novels, three novellas and more than 100 short stories. I read one of his best known novels — A Time to Laugh — for Reading Wales Month in 2022 but found it laboured and repetitive.

The Rhys Davies I encountered in Selected Stories is an entirely different kind of author. The socio-economic arguments about workers’ rights and conditions in the coal mines that were much in evidence in A Time to Laugh, are noticeably absent in this collection. Instead the focus is on domestic life and fairly ordinary people in the South Wales communities.

The twelve tales in this collection are perceptive, witty and lively. My edition of Selected Stories has a blurb taken from The Sunday Times whose reviewer called Rhys Davies “A Welsh Chekhov … Davies’s observation is total and objective, and truly compassionate.” Davies does indeed have the knack of getting under the skin of his characters and a good ear for they way they speak. He may well have modelled some of his characters on people he knew from his own village and whose conversations he could listen into when they came into his father’s grocery shop.

What Davies does in these stories is to lay bare the drama of human life where every event is captured and amplified by gossip. All the characters live in tight-knight communities where very little escapes the attention of the neighbours. Tongues are always wagging and curtains twitching in Davies’s world.

In The Fashion Plate, for example excitement mounts every time Mrs Mitchell, wife of the abattoir owner, parades through the town centre. The residents even move plants and furniture away from their windows so they can get a better view.

There was no-one else like her in the valley. Her hats! her fancy high-heeled shoes, the brilliantly elegant dresses in summer, the tweeds and the swirl of furs for the bitter days … The different handbags, gay and sumptuous, the lacy gloves, the parasols and tasselled umbrellas! …The women drew in their breath as she passed. She looked as if she’d never done a day’s work in her life.

The work-weary women feast upon this vision, speculating how she can afford all these clothes and part of them hoping to learn something scandalous.

Scandal does cast a shadow in a few of the stories. In The Dilemma of Catherine Fuschias, Catherine spins an elaborate yarn to explain why Lewis The Chandler was lying dead in her bed. It’s the biggest piece of gossip ever encountered in the village, chewed over from every angle in the pub, the post office and in every cottage, Though there isn’t a lot of sympathy for the widow (too proud), they’re pretty sure they don’t want a Jezebel in their midst. They may not be able to pin anything down on Catherine but if she thinks she can escape scrutiny by moving far away, some of the women folk have an ace up their sleeve. Gossip and rumour will, they decide, follow this girl wherever she goes.

Hardship is universal in most of these stories. Characters die because they can no longer cope with failure and poverty. Men lose limbs in accidents in the coal mines. Wives are worn out by the daily drudge of cooking and cleaning for bullying husbands.

The saddest story of all is Nightgown where the matriarch of the family cuts a lonely figure. Her husband and five strapping sons keep her so busy with cooking, cleaning and getting the water hot for their baths that she can’t even sit for an hour, day dreaming about a trip to the seaside or a nice, clean dress instead of her usual garb of drab flannel skirt and broken shoes.

The family seldom pay her any attention — she’s just the provider of hearty meals. She talks only to one neighbour over the back wall between their houses and to the shopkeepers. Her only pleasure comes from gazing at the mannequins in the window of the draper’s shop. “Looking beautiful beyond compare, these two ladies were now more living to her than her old dream of a loving daughter,” we’re told.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the short story form until now but reading these stories has been an eye opener. What a great start to ReadingWalesMonth’25!