Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

The circumstances surrounding Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain and his subsequent mental state remain uncertain — an uncertainty, of course, that invites fictional exploration — and have given rise to a variety of texts by his contemporaries and subsequent historians, ranging from the sober to the sensational and slanted. In the absence of a consensual historical understanding of his behavior, I sampled an array of this work, including The Nuremberg Trial by Ann and John Tusa, The Infamous of Nuremberg by Burton C. Andrus, 22 Cells at Nuremberg by Douglas M. Kelley, Hess: A Biography by Roger Manvell, The Case of Rudolf Hess by J. R. Rees, The Murder of Rudolf Hess by Hugh Thomas, Hess: The Missing Years by David Irving, The Loneliest Man in the World by Eugene Bird, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 by Richard Overy, Nuremberg Interviews by Leon Goldensohn, and A Train of Powder by Rebecca West. My subsequent portrait of Hess draws on (and in some cases responds to) these works, but is also informed by the imagination and certain exigencies of plot (concerning the timing of events, for example). Rotheram and all the officers and men guarding Hess are fictional.

I’m also grateful to Ben Wicks’s No Time to Wave Goodbye for information on evacuee children, and to Jan Morris’s The Matter of Wales for details of Welsh history. In addition, exhibits at the Imperial War Museum in London and Duxford, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., were invaluable resources, as were the holdings of the libraries at Cambridge University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Michigan.

PETER HO DAVIES is on the faculty of the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan. His debut collection The Ugliest House in the World won the John Llewellyn Rhys and PEN/Macmillan awards in Britain. His second collection, Equal Love, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review for its “stories as deep and clear as myth.” It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a New York Times Notable Book. In 2003 Davies was named among the “Best of Young British Novelists” by Granta. The Welsh Girl is his first novel. The son of a Welsh father and Chinese mother, Davies was raised in England and spent his summers in Wales. He is married and has one son.