Arrest Me, for i Have Run Away

This mature and substantial collection of short stories by the renowned novelist Stevie Davies explores with great insight and tenderness all kinds of relationships. As she writes in the last story, ‘There are many kinds of love'. The kind of love most often depicted is the maternal – whether literally between mother and child or in the form of a mothering, nurturing relationship. These range from the humour of incorrigibly fertile ‘Pod’, filling the dentist’s waiting-room with her noisy kids, to the agonies of the mother in ‘Inside Out’ while her daughter undergoes an operation. Despite its intensity, her love accepts that the healed girl will grow away from her. Two of the subtlest and most affecting stories involve mothering by those who are not mothers. The loving kindness of Carly in ‘Ground-Nester’ towards her partner’s grandson extends to understanding and teaching the boy’s hopeless slob of a mother. In ‘Auntie and Uncle at the Wedding’, by far the most successfully maternal figure is the bride’s aunt. Childless, feminist, journalist Laurie has brought up her dead sister’s child, April, and their mutual affection contrasts strongly with Enya’s selfishness and desperation and its effect on her younger sons. This is a gloriously funny, touching and well-plotted story which could make a good film. Love between friends can be as intense and central to life as romantic love. In the brief final story, ‘Star Nursery’, elderly Mair and much younger wanderer, Pearl, ‘fall in friendship’ which lights up and fulfils their lives. In the fascinating title story, Stevie Davies imagines the lives of two slave girls in a Roman household. South-Walian Tertia loved the noble, untameable Quinta but dared not follow her to death. The story explores the strange mixture of brutality and intimacy in the Roman familia. Stevie Davies spent some of her life in Egypt, and two of the stories hark back to the war in North Africa. ‘Oud 1942’ is a delicate sketch of a love affair which transforms expat Delia but may or may not survive the war. ‘Red Earth, Cyrenaica’ is a heart-breaking story of loss and survival and of a trio whose connection is more trinity than triangle. There are betrayals and failures among the relationships created here but the overwhelming impression is of the strength of love to endure and to nurture lives, despite the effects of ageing, loss and death. -- Caroline Clark @ www.gwales.com