'Despite his grandmother's strictures on reading, Davies read widely. His first attraction was to the penny dreadfuls of his day, which he read in secret... The school books he read contained poems that stirred him deeply. One of the school texts he used contained long passages from "The Lady of the Lake" with a prose commentary attached. And then there was a favourite schoolboy poem starting with the resounding line: "The Soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers", with a refrain that the boys loved to chant at play. There were extracts from Shakespeare, the usual lyrics, and a few heavily didactic poems intended to inculcate morality in the boyish heart'.