[We] can explain much of the passionate imagery in Davies' work as the outcome of a childhood of repression and introspection. This aspect of his art is particularly traceable in his early novels, and we know that before he left the Rhondda for his first paid job, the young dreamer wrote down innumerable tales and also vague phantasies of an imaginary race of Welsh ancestors….

Childhood impressions form much of the basic material in his novels. Their harsh features belong to the rigid Welsh Nonconformist puritanism in which he grew up, the "physical phenomena of the slagheaps and slums, over-drinking and furtive sexuality", while the lyrical element, veiling his naturalism in all his novels to a greater or less extent, is drawn from his dreamworld of childhood. In the boy-hero of To-Morrow to Fresh Woods Davies has created not only a portrait of himself as a child and...