Stevie Davies

Stevie Davies is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University. She has published widely in the fields of fiction, literary criticism, biography and popular history. Her novel The Element of Water (2001) was long-listed for the Booker and Orange Prizes and won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year in 2002. Her novel The Web of Belonging (1997) was adapted as a Channel 4 television film. She is a keen cyclist and sea-swimmer.

Davies’ latest work is Earthly Creatures, a riveting, epic historical novel set in 1940s Germany. For all her life, 20-year-old bookworm Magdalena Arber has been split down the middle: veering wildly between fidelity to indoctrinated Nazi beliefs, and her father’s humanist values. Then comes the summons – the Nazi War Labour Service is conscripting her into a teaching position in East Prussia. Magda is elated. It’s a release from the cosy cage of childhood, and a chance to form young minds.

She enters a lush rural world of forests, lakes, and meadows, where order prevails. Yet there are monstrous hands out to shape the whole continuum of earthly creatures. The Gestapo are a lurking darkness. There is bombing further East, and news of a moving Russian front. Will Alt Schonbek burn as well? Can Magda survive?

Thank you Stevie for answering a few questions for Libraries Wales. Tell us a little about your background…

My Morriston-born father was an Air Force sergeant, so we were constantly on the move – from Swansea to Egypt, Cornwall, Scotland, Germany (Hildesheim and Geilenkirchen, Plön and Hamm), Suffolk, Bridgend and home to Swansea. I attended sixteen different schools, three of which were boarding schools (two in Germany) where I learned the bitter taste of homesickness. I educated myself along the way. Born in the wake of the War, I was one of the early beneficiaries of the Welfare State – free glasses, free education, free health care, university grants for three degrees. Thank you, Ernest Bevin: I am forever in your debt.

What memories and influences stand out from your childhood?

Endless moves. Strange, new and haunting landscapes. Foreign languages. Aeroplanes roaring low over the housetops. Men marching and saluting. Bouts of unbearable grief from the age of 12 at being far from my parents. Recurrent joy at visiting my grandma, aunties and cousins in Swansea. Swimming in Lake Timsah in Egypt, in the sea at Rotherslade (which I still do) and in Lake Plön in Germany.

As a young person, who or what influenced you?

To further my education, my parents decided to invest in a set of encyclopaedias – I remember the Encyclopaedia Man coming to our house to flog us the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The outlay was huge. We bought 8 red volumes which from then on accompanied us on our travels. My father read entries with me every night. I could choose. Although nowadays this might seem a dull acquisition, then it was anything but. It offered a series of windows on the world.

People: the overarching, faithful presence of my parents, however difficult and contrary I seemed and was. My mother covering me in her skirt during a sandstorm in Egypt, like a bird protecting her chick.

We had no television. Memories of a big wooden Marconi radio which travelled with us, and the BBC News as a constant background. The Dandy and the Beano. Our only books apart from the Bible were my mother’s wartime recipe book entitled The Right Way to his Heart (!) and the said encyclopaedias. In the 1960s: university and freedom. Deep and loving friendships for life. Feminism, the peace movement, socialism, environmentalism.

What influences you now?

Al-Jazeera. Environmental science. Hatred of war: Gaza, Ukraine.

When did you realise you wanted to write, was there a ‘eureka moment’, and did any particular factors make a difference?

I started writing and illustrating stories at the age of 5 or 6, more or less the age when an intuitive feminism kicked in: I saw the way the world was organised along gender lines and felt compelled to argue with it. My earliest works included an illustrated tale set in the Second World War in which a group of Nazis gunned down everyone in sight, including one another – at which point the story found its natural terminus. In my teens I began to write poetry: I am a failed poet.

Tell us a little about Earthly Creatures, what inspired you write this book, and what do you hope readers will get out of the story?

When I came to write novels, I found that the varied landscapes of my childhood had given me discrepant settings and perspectives, enabling me to ponder history in a very personal way. From my early childhood in Egypt came Into Suez (2010); from the lakeside Forces boarding school in Northern Germany came The Element of Water (2001), when I discovered that in 1945 High Admiral Doenitz had been named as Hitler’s successor, in those same buildings. Such coincidences enable us to focus the great wheel of history from the modest arc of an individual’s experience.

I see Earthly Creatures as a kind of partner to The Element of Water. It concerns the awakening of conscious resistance in the mind of a young German woman, called up to serve as a teacher in 1941. Magdalena Arber is sent east, to lodge with eccentric and lovable teacher Ruth Daschke and her 6-year-old twins, Julia and Flora. The disabled twin, Flora, is labelled ‘subnormal’ and sent along the chain of killing institutions, never to be seen again. Mrs Daschke – who becomes a figure for grieving, outraged motherhood – departs in quest of Flora, leaving the so-called ‘viable’ twin to the care of Magdalena, who grows to love and cherish Julia as her own. The novel is in the deepest sense a love story – between mother and child, father and daughter, woman and woman, teacher and pupil, friend and friend. Hitler is recorded as acknowledging in 1944: ‘Women’s political hatred is extremely dangerous.’

Meanwhile, Magdalena teaches – and learns. Her chance meeting with the Nazi zoologist Dr Vogel initiates the theme of genetic manipulation in humans and animals, for we exist on a continuum of creaturely life. Such dark themes are unbearable to imagine. I hope I have mitigated this effect by humour and irony, childhood banter and tantrums, the persistence of ordinary blessedness in the family and village worlds – and in the sheer beauty of East Prussia. The heartbreaking flight of millions of women and children in 1944-5 before the onslaught of the Russian army seemed as I wrote terribly mirrored in the current war.

In around 1960 my father took me to the concentration camp at Dachau, asking me to bear witness that such things were permitted to happen in a ‘civilised’ European state. Living in postwar Germany, I also saw the way the British strutted around, considering ourselves a kind of master-race. Frankly much of our behaviour was arrogant, racist and self-righteous. I remember seeing from the window of a flat we occupied in Hildesheim a group of English children exercising their superior culture by tormenting German children at a bus stop, calling out Schweinhund! Schweinhund! Even then I wondered: under comparable political circumstances and pressures would we citizens of ‘Great’ Britain have acted so very differently to the Germans? I have created Magdalena Arber from this position of empathic witness. Wherever possible, I’ve used the English equivalents of German political titles – ‘The Band of German Maidens’ for Bund Deutscher Mädel, ‘The Leader’ for Der Führer – so that readers might not dissociate from my characters, as if all this were happening ‘over there’, but would enter into the complexity of my characters’ conflicted thoughts, feelings and decisions.

What are your favourite reading genres, and what book are you reading at the moment?

I read voraciously and my tastes are catholic. I feel I’m still educating myself and have a long way to go. Since 1981 I’ve kept a Commonplace Book, as readers used to do in past centuries, noting the title of every book I read, with comments and quotations. When I began, I was breastfeeding twins – so awake all night pretty well, and improving the not-so-shining hour by reading. As you see, I began the year with Greek tragedy and comedy so God only knows what Grace and Robin were imbibing with their milk. (They survived.) Here is the first page of the first book:

In what way have libraries influenced you during your lifetime?

Home from home in childhood and adult life. I remember sitting cross-legged in Oystermouth Library as a child leafing through poetry books for children.

Do you have suggestions of how to encourage children and young people to read more for pleasure?

Read with them every night. If they have a chance to meet the author and talk to her or him about the books, that can create a living bond. If the author and illustrator can come along together, that’s even better.

Do you have a quote that inspires you?

George Eliot’s Middlemarch has been my guide along the way…

She teaches the art of listening empathy and something of its cost:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Here is part of an entry in my Commonplace Book for August 2021 about rereading George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

It’s now 54 years since I first read this greatest of English novels – and it taught me how to live, or at least showed the way – and I would always fail, like Lydgate, like Dorothea, like Bulstrode even – but would get to my feet again, having fallen, and see the woman holding the light ahead – and go on, in the hope of being my best self.

Thank you Stevie.

Earthly Creatures was published 5 September by Honno.