When I learned Nick Davieson had published his debut novel Skerrid Mawr, I knew instantly that I wanted him to be the subject of my first author interview.
Nick and I have known each other for well over a decade – we first met at Newport’s parkrun and later I joined the same running club. It soon transpired we had another connection: I used to give his late mother Audrey a lift to Newport Writers Circle in the early 1990s.
Born in South East London in 1962, Nick moved to Newport as a child when his father Norm accepted a job in his, and my, homeland. Nick is recently retired, having run his own successful document archiving industry for twenty-seven years with his wife Karen. He has three grown-up children and three grandchildren.
Nick, I had no idea you were an aspiring novelist? What prompted the writing of Skerrid Fawr?
As you know, my mother was a writer. She started a travelling theatre company and wrote her own scripts, mostly aimed at primary school children. I think most of us remember such visits to our schools – especially if you mother was in it!
I recall that many of her scripts were often written out on her old typewriter, usually in the middle of the night – The Water Babies being one of them. On other days, I’d wake up in the morning only to find she’d gone off to North Yorkshire or suchlike [laughing], leaving a £10 note, upon which my brother and I were expected to survive. Luckily, we learnt how to cook!
Somehow, I decided to take A level English at school and enjoyed it, particularly because I was learning more about what my mother did, so I started to appreciate her efforts a little more. My novel’s not quite in the same parlance as her writing, but it was something I found myself thinking about more in my late fifties. I think I have amazed myself in that it has come to fruition.
As a man, you write about Tam’s self-consciousness about her ageing body in a very believable way, which isn’t always the case. Was there any input from Karen or your daughter Ally?
No, none whatsoever. That was basically my observations. When I was young, I always respected women, which was quite unusual in our era – the seventies were a sexist time, with the likes of The Sweeney on TV, and I never believed in that suppression.
In my teenage years I went on to see some things that I just didn’t want to see, which I felt were derisory to women. It wasn’t the sort of thing you would talk to your mates about as a young guy, but it’s how I felt.
Seeing how my parents never got on was another factor. At that time, I used to think it was all my dad’s fault, but it wasn’t. You observe and learn how couples start to break apart, which was upsetting of course.
What impact, if any, did your parents’ divorce have on you?
Well, they were always arguing, but it was about October 1977 when they got divorced. I stayed with my mother as she had custody. We only moved half a mile down the road, which worked out better, as I could regularly see my dad and forge a new relationship with him. But, to really touch on one point in the book, my mother was bisexual so my brother Martin and I were living with another woman as well, which was quite difficult in that era. In fact, there were people in the neighbourhood who were really quite horrible about it. It was an invidious position we found ourselves in.
Again, as a teenager in the 1970s, it wasn’t something you would talk about with your mates, just deflect away from it if the topic arose.
First time novelists often inject elements of themselves into their characters. Did you?
There are certainly elements of me which are dotted all around the novel. Kee is very much a normal guy, he’s a worldly, yet sensual guy, so there’s a bit of me in there for sure.
The wife who he considered to be his best friend left him for another woman. He had no-one to talk to about his plight and it causes him to be guarded with women thereafter. Hurt is a very powerful emotion.
The catalyst for the plot is the Modern Pentathlon event in the Olympics, which took place in Germany in the early 1990s. Did this event really happen or did you invent it?
Well, yes and no. The modern pentathlon is a minority sport, although it featured in the 2024 Olympics in Paris. What fascinates me is that the rider is paired with a horse for twenty minutes before the equestrian competition. It’s just pot luck – you could get the horse from hell or an absolute star. I wanted to show how someone can be the best athlete/rider, but if they get drawn a bad horse, they can lose. In Amey’s case, she was a really good athlete paired with a good horse, but obviously circumstances beyond her control took place.
In Skerrid Mawr, I wanted to centre in on a minority sport, yet even modern pentathlon has been forced into change now. I wanted to get it into a story before the horse riding element was removed from the Olympics.* Definitely for the worse I feel.
The idea came to me because I always remembered how a guy, called Richard Phelps from Gloucestershire, won the World Pentathlon Championship in Darmstadt, Germany in 1993. In Skerrid Mawr, I changed the year to 1992, had the event take place in Frankfurt and created an East German female competitor – Amey, as the focal point of the event.
What happened to Amey – and the lingering trauma for those who witnessed her accident – is a key plot point. Did you need to do a lot of research?
Not a great deal because I’d immersed myself into the sport previously. Furthermore, my children attended Pony Club where pentathlon type events were a mainstay in the winter months.
I just felt it was a good focal point for a back story especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It also gave me the chance to show that the reunification of Germany wasn’t as straightforward as it might have looked to the wider world.
Modern pentathlon is very much attached to the military. Many modern pentathletes have been in the Army or the Navy. If you have sporting prowess, then the Forces actively encourage participation in such disciplines.
Another important theme in Skerrid Mawr is Tam coming to terms with her middle-aged body. The scene when Kee helps her overcome her natural hesitancy and experiment with naturism is unexpected and beautifully written.
I love that bit in the book myself. I’ve done exactly the same thing as Tam did.
I felt that exact self-reluctance myself, so I presented my feelings through a female character instead. Men, of course, have their own body issues, but women often seem to have more hangups about their bodies than men, especially as they get older. I know the menopause is often a factor, so I wanted to show some compassion to the subject.
In the book, Tam sees an older couple on the beach who were, for want of a better phrase, no longer as slim and svelte as they probably once were. It resonated with her, due to the negativity directed at her by her philandering husband, effectively about her no longer being a size ten.
She observes that the older couple don’t give a second thought to their nakedness which gives Tam the final motivation to be free and liberate herself from such negativity.
You write convincingly and persuasively about naturism. When did you become curious?
As I said, we used to take the kids down to the South Wales coast to ride their ponies on the sands with the Pony Club – usually in the winter time. One of the organisers said to me, ‘You don’t want to come down here in the summer – there’s naturists down in the sand dunes.’
Her comment just intrigued me. It planted a seed in my mind, one I did nothing about for several years. Then, one sunny day, as I was driving to and from Swansea for work, I found I had plenty of time so decided to make a detour. I walked along the full stretch of the beach. I didn’t see anything or anybody that day, but there was that feeling of freedom and liberation, one I had to explore further another day.
Ultimately, my viewpoint is that being naked shouldn’t matter. We were all born that way. It isn’t exhibitionism nor a sexual experience. If it is, then you’re in the wrong place. I’ve quietly been a naturist for about eight to ten years. When I have met other like-minded people, I have found them to be friendly and non-judgemental. If there are clothed people around, then I would cover myself up if appropriate. Most don’t care, so we are all happy. It’s all about respect.
Naturism is crucial to the connection between Kee and Tam, of course.
The vast majority of naturists I see are middle-aged men. They, too, are often finding themselves, often due to body or mental health issues too.
That’s why Kee explains, ‘Listen, Tam, here is the scene. You will see more men than women today. The few women you see will almost definitely be with a man, but most men will be alone. I don’t speculate about their motives, that is their business.’
Kee tells Tam this so that she (and the reader) can understand what a naturist location is, typically, going to be like when they get there.
I wanted to show that, in my personal experience, genuine male naturists are very respectful of women, acting without any agenda other than comradeship.
Tam takes a leap of faith with Kee and she is richly rewarded as he offers both the space and security she needs.
US diplomatic immunity rears its head twice in Skerrid Mawr: first in 1992 and then again in the current-day storyline. Was there a reason for this?
First, I hate that everything fundamentally British now has to be ‘Americanised’ in the UK. What ever happened to Bonfire Night, why on earth do we have baby showers and where do terms like ‘from the get-go’ fit in here?
As Hugh Grant [playing the British prime minister] puts it to the US president in the film Love Actually, ‘we’re not going to be dictated to by you anymore.’
Then, there was the real-life case of Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a US diplomat, who was found guilty of causing the death of 19-year-old motorcyclist Harry Dunn by careless driving and initially claimed diplomatic immunity after the crash in 2019. That really bothered me. How can diplomatic immunity – and she wasn’t even a diplomat herself – allow people to get away with something like that? That festered in my mind.
That’s really why I ran with the two things and I merged them together. Brig isn’t based on anyone, she was just a figment of my imagination, but I made her a brash American. Brig is too free and liberal with her views – she picks up partners of both sexes and treats them, and others, with total disrespect. I thought Brig needed her comeuppance.
Although Brig poses a physical threat to Tam, the novel, as a whole, feels very gentle.
I didn’t want violence in the novel. At one point I have Tam saying she abhors violence – well, so do I. Personally, I can’t stand the sort of films I see my kids watching – everything is bang, bang, bang with computer-generated imagery, car chases and car crashes. It’s all noise and no reality.
I just thought, if I wrote that kind of thing, what makes my offering any different to what they’ve just watched? Nothing is the answer. So, I had to write something fresh, something sensual and very, very real.
That’s difficult as a guy, because you get comments like, ‘You must be gay to write stuff like that.’ Well, I’m not. But to write something sensual as a bloke, and in the context of a woman, is also very hard to do … and that’s why I thought it would work. The good news is that the feedback seems to have proved me right – which is success in itself to me.
Your novel is an intriguing mix of interests and themes, Nick. It’s introduced me to things I’ve not seen in other novels.
[Laughing] I wanted it to. I wanted to bring all those things in.Naturism, for example, is badly misunderstood. Day to day, there is little mention of the subject and, when it is, it is often scorned at in the media. Step out and find it for yourself if you want, in your own way.
Tell me a little more about the location?
Skerrid Mawr is fictional, however the village I describe really does exist. It is quite a fascinating little place with a lot of history. I won’t give the location away but it is there to find on the South Wales coast – not too far away from Porthcawl is my only hint. If you have read the book, then you could actually take a tour around the village and visit most of the places referred to. Then you could read the book again
I thoroughly enjoyed touring around the area on many occasions – usually on my mountain bike, taking photographs to help me colour in the writing when I got back home.
There is so much of beauty along that stretch of the South Wales coast, so much to enjoy.
And what about names?
I had great fun with the names and a lot of those I’ve chosen are personal. Tam’s best friend is called Michelle Devers-Lee which sounds like a posh name. My nan used to live in Micheldever Road in the Lee area of London. My brother worked it out when he was reading the book.
I called Tam’s brother Norm in honour of my dad, although the character is not based on my father in any way at all. If the novel was ever adapted into a screenplay, then Bernard Hill would have been my choice for Norm; sadly, he died last year.
If you look at the names of the kids, Kee gets a message that mentions Sparky – we call one of my sons Sparky. Then, I tweaked my other son’s name Jamie to Jem.
What did a writing day look like for you?
I was sort of disciplined, but my routine obviously changed when Karen had her eye operations. Referring to Google for research or YouTube for technical information often featured in my day.
I also created a folder called Continuity. As you know, whenever you make a change to something later in the book, you’ve got to go back and change earlier things or the continuity gets out of kilter.
Sometimes there’s a lot of work just to write a small paragraph but, as an author, you don’t want its continuity to be wrong.
Are you a pantser or a plotter?
The description I saw about different types of authors, marked me as an ‘architect’. Being somewhat pragmatic, I created ‘jigsaw pieces’ of information and ideas which I then rearranged for my first draft. Luckily, the whole process was fairly visual for me, thanks mainly to all the photos I had taken.
Did you seek advice from one of the many online writing gurus?
The trouble is that there is a surfeit of information from different advisors which only serves to create more doubt and confusion than they solve!
Luckily, I found a brilliant American editor called Ellen Brock, so subscribed to her YouTube channel. When I was writing, I’d watch her or, if I was driving, listen to her downloads. She covered all the different aspects of writing a novel that I needed.
My advice to would-be writers is to stick with one person and ignore all the driftwood on the side. Ellen Brock is very thorough and concise.
For example, she said ‘You’ve got to have a situation which couldn’t have been resolved at the start or you haven’t got a book at all.’
And she’s absolutely right. It helped me shape Skerrid Mawr’s continuity accordingly.
Tell me more about your writing process.
I knew I needed some experienced people behind me to edit and critique the book, and then guide me on how and where to market it. So, as a great believer in using local businesses wherever possible, I located Rowanvale Books in Cardiff as the ideal partner.
I had written around 55,000 words, so now was the time to submit the first draft. My appointed editor, Ellie Owen, basically told me that I’d picked some great subjects that she’d never seen featured in a novel before and that I’d helped her to understand them, including naturism.
I’d sent that first manuscript in with the maxim: rip me to shreds, don’t hold back, I want you to pull the book apart, I want to know. And she did!
It took me nine months to rewrite it but it was worth it. The word count subsequently grew to 85,000 words in spite of cutting large chunks out.
Ellie had said things like, ‘You need to describe this a bit more’ or ‘You’ve gone into too much detail on that, cut that back.’ Sometimes, she’d point out, ‘You’ve said this somewhere else.’ So, apart from the rewrites, it was just a case trying to line it all up again.
When I returned the second draft to her, her response was: ‘Wow, you’ve done a good job and I really like what you’ve done with this. I am going to refine it a bit more for you but thankfully you’ve listened to what I’ve told you and there’s not that much more to do.’
Nick, you’ve hit the nail on the head. A good editor is worth her or his weight in gold.
They’re the experts – they understood what I was driving at and they were there to help me get there. Originally, the book started on chapter three so, when I sent that manuscript back in, Ellie said, ‘You’re telling back too much.’ She said I needed to create chapters with more of a build-up and more of what Tam was going through ‘in the now’. Of course, she was right.
You’ve created a playlist for the book on your website. Why?
There are 39 tracks – the same as the number of chapters in the book.
It includes some music that helped me shape the book and others that I sought to complement the book retrospectively. This process included swopping original artists for cover versions that seemed to sit better, i.e. using a female singer or a slower version perhaps.
Going back to Love Actually, there’s always music with films, because it’s meaningful and people hook into the soundtrack. I wanted this to be the same, yet offer website visitors the opportunity to provide feedback or choices on what songs they might have included, providing invaluable feedback to me.
Is there going to be a second novel? Or even a screenplay?
A screenplay would be my dream scenario, yes.
I’ve had some great feedback. One guy wrote to me and said, ‘For a bloke that’s beautiful. My wife has body issues and she knows I’m a naturist and I’d love her to join me and it really pains me that she won’t. I’m going to get her to read your book.’
A week later he wrote back and said she’d read the book and felt inspired. And I thought, ‘That’s exactly why I wrote Skerrid Mawr.’
Since we met, I have started toying with a second novel. No promises but watch this space!
Thank you Nick for a really fascinating interview (which obviously took place in our running kits after Newport parkrun). I wish you every success with Skerrid Mawr and urge you to write that second novel as soon as possible. I, for one, will be eager to read it.
Skerrig Mawr was published on 31 August 2024 and is available on Amazon.
* The 2024 Paris Olympics was the last time the equestrian show jumping will feature in the modern pentathlon event. In 2021, a German coach punched a horse at the Tokyo Olympics, causing a furore and raising ethical and safety concerns over the random nature of the pairing of rider and horse. The equestrian event will be replaced with an obstacle race in the 2028 games.
