There is a story, "A Human Condition," in [Boy with a Trumpet] which describes the desperate search for liquor of a bereaved husband. He needs the liquor as armor against his grief and also to shield him from the disapproving eyes of his wife's relatives. Having managed, one way or another, to get enough to drink, he maintains a drunken dignity on the way to the cemetery but, on reaching the edge of the open grave, totters and falls in, thus earning a deathless reputation for passionate devotion and heroic grief.

This melange of grief, irony and humor might better have been the title story, since it is typical of most of these tales in its racy, earthy smell of thoroughly human conditions like the canvases of Brueghel and the tales of Chaucer. Because the stories are told by a sophisticated and honest writer, few of the human conditions are unnaturally simple or completely solemn—love is a negligible detail humbly trailing the hugely comic and awesome urge for procreation which dominates "Abraham's Glory"; and sometimes the grave gives out roars of laughter, as in "Mourning for Ianto."

Although Davies' mood is most often that of Olympian humor and the view that of a distant if kindly eye, there are some powerfully bitter stories….

With few exceptions, the stories treat of Welsh miners and farmers, a society of hard-working, realistic people who stubbornly cherish their earth and their eccentricities, but whose heartiness and stolidity are lightened by the engaging piquancies of their turns of mind and speech….

Not least of the charms of Boy with a Trumpet is that it belongs to the antique tradition of story-telling in which an atmosphere is swiftly evoked, a tale begins, spreads its developments and then gathers together for a clean end. We have been fed so many short stories which are little shapeless masses of rueful whispers that it is a delight to have an author boldly say, "Here. There is nothing personal in them; they are not the children of my ailing psyche; they were designed simply to be read and enjoyed. Have fun."