Stevie's War

raped by her father. Does she really like men at all?

'DID my book shock you?'' Not a question you are normally asked by

authors. No, though her writing is extremely emotive, but it did worry

me. Do some women really see men as being totally to blame for every

violent, inhuman act in society?

Actually, she doesn't really want to give all men the bullet, Ms

Davies. And she has a sense of humour. ''As someone who has been a

feminist all her life and would like the world to be restructured with

social care and concern at its heart, a nurturing, loving world, a real

nannie society if you like, I'd hardly like the word militant to be used

in describing me. But I do want gentle maternal qualities to be

glorified. I want the patriarchal world which celebrates aggression and

violence to open out and include them.''

Yet you have to look quite closely to find a decent, caring man in Boy

Blue, her first novel which won the Fawcett Society Book prize three

years ago, or in Arms and the Girl, her latest publication.

She wrote it, she says, to set family cruelty within the wider context

of a violent, military-minded world.

The image which triggered the book, three little girls playing

together in the garden of a manse, hanging by their legs from the bough

of a beech tree, laughing and talking, is innocent enough. But two of

the girls live in a stark army camp in the north of Scotland, a setting

which Ms Davies saw as an appropriate setting for the kind of bleak

existence which triggers off the pattern of violence.

''My father was in the Air Force and I was born just after the war and

travelled around these camps with my family. I saw myself, like many

others, as a child in the shadow of war.''

She insists that there is a kind supportive man here and there in her

books -- the lorry driver who does not take advantage of her mentally

and physically battered heroine. ''I brought in these characters to

compensate for the darkness of the overall male image but I'm not

dealing with nice happy norms, I'm dealing with things which are

abhorrent, evil.''

From simple violence, whether in the family or in war, to child sex

abuse, wife battering, repressed sexuality, religious fanaticism, class

divisions, and the erosion of female power are all packed in there.

''The stories come and all these aspects of life interlock. Just think

about your own views of life. They encompass all these problems and when

I write they just fit into the overall story.''

The single warm, humorous man featuring briefly in Boy Blue has a

brief existence, exits as a war casualty, and you are left with the

psychological wreck of a woman who dreamt she gave birth to a bomb and

then cannot bear looking at her male child, a twin. His genitalia, she

notes, are worn on the outside.

Ms Davies has never given birth to a boy child but she has two girls,

one of whom has read Boy Blue (''No, I don't think it has put her off

men. She is nearly 16'') and the other sister, 12, is reading Jane Eyre

for the third time.

Stevie is married to a retired English schoolteacher and lives near

Manchester where she was a university lecturer in English literature for

13 years.

Over the years her work has included books on Emily Bronte and

Virginia Woolf so she is well aware of the history of feminism. ''Some

of the battles these women fought are all but won, like the fight to

become part of the working world, but we still live in a world that can

be loveless and compassionless and people pretend it is not happening.''

And this is the reality that feminist writers cling to. Stevie Davies

says she remembers becoming aware that the world was not exactly the

sort of place that the childhood security given to her through mother

love -- she did add ''and father love'' -- had led her to believe.

And she says she does sympathise with even her vilest male characters.

''The father in Arms and the Girl is wicked but he has lived in a

military world where violence was approved of, where kindness in

weakness.

''Society forgives violence in men much more easily than in women. He

is also the product of poverty, of a lack of mothering, of a violent

society. I felt his pain almost more than anyone else's when I was

writing.''

Yet the lives of the three little girls in the garden are ultimately

destroyed by this man and others. You are not allowed to forget it, and

there's not a lot of room for sympathy.

But it's worth remembering that most men would sympathise with the

girls too and with Ms Davies's anti-war stance, including the late

George Bernard Shaw who plagiarised the first line of Virgil's Aeneid 60

years ago when he wrote Arms and the Man.

* Arms and the Girl by Stevie Davies, The Women's Press #6.99 and

#11.99