Rue End Street

Rue End Street, the sequel to Mavis’s Shoe, is published and out there on the shelves waiting to be picked up. It is September 1943 and Lenny Gillespie, our heroine, is 12 years old, but growing up fast. The tides of war are turning and Britain is gaining confidence as Germany weakens. But disaster strikes Lenny's life again, propelling her the length of the great Clyde estuary, to the ports of Helensburgh and Greenock.

Known as 'Port Number One' during WW2, Greenock was a hive of activity, the main assembly point for the Atlantic convoys and the re-entry point for returning convoys carrying vital goods for the survival of Britain. Over two million US servicemen and many more from other Allied countries also landed there as well as the survivors of sinkings including the Arandora Star. Many of these various groups were herded immediately onto trains at Princes Pier Station (now gone) while others were stationed in and around the Lower Clyde Basin for lengthy periods. As is only natural with so many men in one place, trouble occurred, and Rue End Street was said to be the epicentre of such trouble. Hence the title of the book.

The people of Greenock have reason to be proud of what they gave and the hard work put in for the survival of the country. Winston Churchill himself said: 'the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war' was the U-boat peril'.

Publication of Rue End Street has followed several weeks of frantic activity which culminated in two launch events, one in Waterstones Argyle Street Glasgow, the other in Clydebank Library. Both included two short dramatisations of sections of the book. Those of you who came to the launch of Mavis’s Shoe at the aye Write! book festival in Glasgow may remember the dramatisation of that came with lots of bells and whistles, or at least explosions and sirens, and actors from STaG theatre company, or Student Theatre at Glasgow under the direction of the wonderful John May. For Rue End Street we were mostly in-house:

This is Liz Small, MD of Waverley Books, as the Leeds lass manning (womanning?) the desk of the Army Office in Greenock in September 1943. Liz sported a spectacular, if slightly exaggerated Leeds accent. Oh, and a rather attractive wig. Liz is actually naturally blond.

We also had these two, Ron Grosset (left), the other MD of Waverley Books, and Drew Campbell (right), President of Scottish PEN, playing sextons. That’s sexton as in grave attendant, not as in relatives of mine.

For our second launch we had Mark Mechan, the designer of the wonderful covers of both books, as gravedigger #2, a world debut performance of the same outstanding quality as the covers. A wonderful time was had by all.

Operation Starfish

I have been very busy and very excited. One of my favourite things is research and I’ve been doing a lot of it for two reasons. One is my Mavis’s Shoe event for schools at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August, and the other is the sequel to Mavis’s Shoe, known to me as Mavis’s Other Shoe or Mavis 2 or even M2. This activity has taken me all over the central belt in cars, vans, trains and boats and has had me stumbling across a variety of fascinating facts and national secrets. Perhaps they are not actual secrets any more but are simply forgotten and undocumented.

This otherwise very boring picture, for instance, is Auchenreoch Decoy, part of Operation Starfish. It doesn’t look much but that perfectly circular pond in the lower right is in fact an old bomb crater. If you follow this link and scroll down you will find a zoomable map and if you zoom into the top orange marker you will find lines of bomb craters tracing the path of the Luftwaffe. Auchenreoch is near Dumbarton and the reason the Germans bombed the wide open countryside near Dumbarton is because Auchenreoch was actually a decoy model of Dumbarton made of wood and complete with street lights etc. And when the Germans came over there were also some very brave souls in an underground bunker (down at the bottom orange marker) setting light to their own model so that the Germans would think their raid was successful and carry on bombing there instead of going to where the real conurbations were. This seems to be the most dangerous job of them all, being the bait.

I have been told there was a similar model of Clydebank but I’m not sure where. I believe there may have been another near Greenock and more across the Central Belt and perhaps beyond. Fortunately we have no current use for such things, but still it seems strange just how undocumented this is. Perhaps, during the war, things just got done and with the prospect of invasion so real, documentation was worth avoiding.

If you’re as nosy as I am you might also want to look at the National Library of Scotland map website which has all sorts of maps of Scotland, both current and historic, all available online. But their best, for my purposes anyway, is the zoomable mosaic of photos of Scotland taken from the air between 1944 and 1950. It is in no way complete but shows a pre-motorway world with umpteen train lines criss-crossing our world, or beating a path under the hills as in the Greenock/Port Glasgow/Gourock area. I begin to see and feel what it might have been like for Lenny, heroine of Mavis’s Shoe, to arrive in Greenock from across the water.