It's here at last: The Edinburgh International Book Festival's schools programme. You can download it here. You'll find a mugshot of me and Mavis's Shoe on page 9. The event is on Monday the 20th August at 12.30pm and I'm very excited about it already, as I'm sure you can imagine. Make sure you book soon or alert any teachers you might know. It's a one-off never to be repeated event.
It's great to know so many young people are reading Mavis's Shoe as well as older people who experienced the Clydebank Blitz or whose parents and grandparents did. I'm too young to have lived through it myself but my parents both talked about the war a lot when I was growing up, as did my grandparents. But no-one talked about being bombed, because no-one in my family was. But that doesn't mean they weren't hugely affected by six years of being separated from parents for lengthy periods, travelling alone on trains across country at an early age, hunger, insecurity, fear and all the other privations of wartime.
These things and worse happened here in Britain and across Europe and, sad to say, all these worse things are still happening around the world. That's why I'm so pleased so many young people are reading Mavis's Shoe and learning what war is really like for ordinary people on the ground. No-one's going to try and stop it if they don't know how bad it gets. Did I mention I'm pleased about young people reading Mavis's Shoe?
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