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.

Adventures in Portuguese

This is a picture of me NOT at a family wedding but I’m in a hat chosen by my adult daughter to wear at her friend’s forthcoming nuptials along with a 60’s psychedelic mini-dress. I wish I’d had a go with it first when I attended a family wedding in northern Portugal last weekend.


The groom was British and the bride Spanish. Coming from a family of artists in one medium or another, wedding traditions are somewhat fluid with our lot, whereas the Spanish crowd seemed to know exactly what was going on at all times. And that’s before we get started on the chaos of so many languages. In addition to the Spanish bridal party and British groom party there were the French and Swiss German contingents and a variety of British local dialects. The staff were, of course, Portuguese and one of the many lovely things about northern Portugal is the lack of English spoken by everyone here. There are no other Brits and no Americans. Everyone in Portugal seems to be almost uniformly kind, helpful and gentle, and conspicuous gentleness is a wonderful thing. Trying to understand each other has so far been fun on every occasion.
There was also a spectacular view down the Rio Minho, a large unchlorinated pool and lots to drink, all of which eased the wedding and the couple of days around it.


On top of that, post-wedding, a drive into the mountains revealed masses of purple heather Scotland would be proud of and lots of yellow broom and, not so like Scotland the two were mingled in a delicious pastiche across the hillsides.

Back at the coast, posh hotels and sensible apartment blocks mingle with private homes and gardens full of vines and large exuberant vegetables. There seems to be a great and popular habit of sitting in the shade watching the world go by. Sad to say all this outdoor malarkey has led to an invasion of ants in the laptop which crawled out at me from beneath the keys like some little horror movie when I lifted the lid. I fear I murder with every tap.

Please note, dear reader, that this wedding was arranged long before Bertrand Brasil bought the Brasilian Portuguese rights for Mavis’s Shoe (see last post). I don’t really believe in synchronicity but do feel a slight shiver up my spine and quite at home in northern Portugal.

Finally, I would like to share a Facebook post by a reader because it made my heart stop:


'I am so grateful for the writing talent, of author Sue Reid Sexton for her amazing historical fiction - Mavis's Shoe - It helped me to live a part of my mum's Margaret Donald 's history. I'm very grateful. Thank you. What a read!’ - Lesley J Vander Welle

Champagne Moment!

Mavis’s Shoe has been bought by Bertrand Brasil of, er, Brazil. I don’t like to change a country’s own spelling of itself but it seems to be the way with Brazil. Mavis’s Shoe is to be translated into Portuguese. This, by the reckoning of an online translator, would be into Brazilian Portuguese and would make it ‘O Sapato do Mavis’. To my Scottish ear this sounds kind of cute, or am I just excited at the prospect of Mavis crossing the Atlantic? This is something I have never done myself. I would of course be very pleased to follow in Mavis’s Shoe’s footsteps (if that’s not confusing metaphors and idioms and such-like) and indeed, my friend Isa MacKenzie who lived through the Clydebank Blitz informed me tonight that she travelled to Brazil with her husband a couple of decades after the war on a mission for Singers sewing machine factory. Meanwhile my own beloved is being persuaded to travel to Brazil for work and the first song I heard after getting the news was on good old Sunny Govan Radio on their world music programme and was by a Brazilian band whose name I was too excited to remember. Perhaps there is such a thing as synchronicity. Or perhaps Brazil is so much on the up just now that everyone’s talking about it.

Anyway this means Mavis’s Shoe is being launched on ‘South America’s biggest media market’ so-called by the BBC, but not in the style of an Iraqi in the company of George Bush. I’m hoping that the arrival of Mavis’s Shoe in Brazil is welcomed. Brasil does after all have a population of 196.6 million which is nearly 38 times the population of Scotland and the tune of its national anthem, although not particularly carnival is suitably jubilant. I know this because I have been playing it all morning and you can too by going here.

But what is really exciting is the translation of Mavis’s Shoe into another language and perhaps another culture. Will Lenny be given the voice of a girl in the favelas of São Paulo? What will readers who don’t know anything about Scotland never mind Clydebank or the blitz or even WW2 in Europe, make of it? Will I ever know even a fraction of what they think when I don’t speak any Portuguese? Is it time finally to learn?

A couple of weeks ago I participated in an event run by the Scottish Writers Centre at the CCA in Glasgow. Our subject was the languages of Scotland and with me on the panel were Alan Riach of Glasgow University, Catriona Lexy Campbell a Gaelic writer and translator and Kusay Hussain, my Iraqi co-writer (who always keeps his shoes when not at home) (see previous post) and we were chaired by Leela Soma, another writer. In researching for my input, I found the following statistic: In France 15.9% of new books are translated from another language. 60% of these are from English. I found no figures for Scotland but in the UK only 3% of our new books are translated. I found no figures for Brazil either. Pause for thought. Are we being insular on this ‘island’ of ours?

Meanwhile I have been congratulated on Mavis’s Shoe’s latest success by lots of kind people. Martin Stepek said, ‘Muito bem!’ which means ‘very good’ or ‘well done’. And Craig Munro said, ‘Está uma mulher,’ which means ‘Yer some woman.’

To which I reply, ‘Obrigado!’

Date for the Diary

Date for your diaries: week on Thursday, 17th May at 7pm in Clydebank Library. I'll be there as part of Booked, the book festival of West Dumbartonshire. This is very exciting because I’m part of the heritage section so I’ll be talking about my research, which is kind of fun for me because they were happy heady days as an unpublished writer phoning people up and saying “Say, I’m a writer and I want to ask you questions about your speciality/obsession/terrible life-threatening experience.” Nerve-wracking and exciting and often upsetting, and frequently a strangely intimate process, it will also be nice for me to revisit those days. I may even talk about when it went wrong and also some of the fascinating side issues that held my attention and used up some of my valuable writing time. But mostly about how I wrote Mavis's Shoe. Find out more at: http://www.bookedfestival.info/adult-events/

Things to do with Mavis's Shoe once you've read it

This is a picture of one of the many things you can do with your copy of Mavis's Shoe once you've finished reading it. This was made by my beautiful daughter (biased mum, I admit it) out of hers. Some may feel this has all the sacrilege of smashing pianos at the shows, a practice now all but extinct, but this right to destruction has been earned. Firstly this copy has been read by her from cover to cover. Secondly this daughter read Mavis's Shoe in one of its earliest drafts and gave me some very helpful advice, but perhaps more importantly, encouragement. Thirdly, it's hers to do with what she will. Fourthly, I have a few more copies in a box under my desk. Fifthly, it's very beautiful, like her.

The lovely thing about this is that when I light the fire which is directly underneath it, I know the little hearts will dance.

This is something else, rather similar, you can do with the pages of Mavis's Shoe, although do make sure you read the whole book first otherwise you may miss out on various important events therein. These are not Mavis's Shoe pages but print-outs of various bits of writing by me, poems, short-stories and other general nonsense which were then folded origami-style into swans by my other beautiful daughter. (Lucky me, I have two.) They were hung from threads in large numbers from the lights at a certain important birthday a couple of years ago and completely took my breath away. They moved to a fireplace without a fire (as in this picture) and then back home over the little stove in the room where I work. Being hung on thread they eventually succumbed to human clumsiness and now live in a box. This is why I know the love-hearts will dance; because the swans already flew.

I'm told they're quite simple to make and were certainly a good alternative for some of those pieces to never being published.

This is what Alicia Martin might have done with Mavis's Shoe if she had enough copies. This is one of her book sculptures in Madrid. 5000 books were used for 3 sculptures. This seems a tiny bit excessive and very like burning money. Can she honestly say 'no books were harmed in the making of this work'? But it is also books in an irresistible form somehow. I have no idea what point she's making. Perhaps her aim is simply to make us stand and gape at the size and madness of the thing. Apparently the pages are loose and whisper in the wind, perhaps reciting their contents.

Here's a Utube video of something else you could do if you had lots of books and lots of time. This one will re-acquaint you with all those books you search the shelves for but somehow just can't find. I do sometimes think it might be fun to colour code my books, a red shelf, a purple one, blue etc rainbow style and then I think it might be more useful to have them in alphabetic order, but probably those two options would ruin the prevailing library technique I already operate, namely books arrive here and find a semi-logical place and it becomes theirs. I usually know roughly where they are.

Edinburgh Book Festival for Schools

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?

Avast, Me Hearties

After the delights of Chagall last week, my brain still being weary due to the bug and not capable of words in the way I’d want it to be, I moved on to various other visual delights to occupy my time and prevent the rising boredom of the sick bed. The first was the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof the reason being the recently acquired knowledge that said fiddler is based on Chagall’s many fiddlers on roofs, in the sky, on donkey back and hidden in vases of flowers etc. This was a very nice circle to round, linking ten year old me to my somewhat older self now. Ten year old me adored it and played the record over and over.(Sorry Mum.) But this is hardly surprising as the music is spectacular and the story moving and epic. Certain songs have been playing on a loop in my head all week and occasionally I break into song.

Next I found two photo books on my shelves, the first being Century, by Phaidon, and is a series of important photos of the last century. The main disadvantage of this book is that it is necessarily heavy to hold for a poor sickie like myself, the other being it makes rather depressing viewing.

This was followed by the smaller and much more exciting ‘The Photo Book’ also by Phaidon and is a collection of fantastic images by some of the most important photographers of recent years. Many of these photos are very strange indeed and therefore appeal to my internal storyteller.

After struggling to find anything interesting at all on the TV I joined Love Film and watched Source Code which I can recommend highly for its constant twists and surprises, most especially the very smily last ‘8 minute journey’. Watch it and you’ll know what I mean. Clever plot.

Then my dearly beloved, going a little stir crazy himself, took me on a couple of drives out to favourite places, like a proper old invalid, the last one finishing in Waterstones where I purchased a journal for recording the strange events of my life (still untouched - journalling just doesn’t come naturally to me) and a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island complete with a very pretty parrot on the front. (A few years ago I inherited the family library. Sadly it had been badly plundered before its arrival and most of the best had been taken, including Treasure Island.) To my shame, I don’t think I ever read Treasure Island as a child, being pointed by well-meaning parents in the direction of What Katy did, What Katy Did Next and Anne of Green Gables. Better late than never however and, like Source Code, it is a tale of endless twists and excitement and, as it turns out, the perfect anecdote to gastro-enteritis. Don’t tell me the end! It’s all I can do to get back to work and not finish reading it this morning.

However, in a fit of pirate allegiance, in fact a long and heart-felt loyalty, beloved and I went to the flicks last night and watched, in the company of only five other viewers, two ice creams and a packet of mint aero musket balls, The Pirates! – In An Adventure With Scientists. This has to be the least promising of titles to have been around in a while, and it must be said we were disappointed on the pirate front, there being very little real pirating going on, not much swashbuckling, no blood, no full-on genuine nastiness, but in its place lots of wit and fun and a great deal of rather sweet gentleness. This too was healing. Aaah. And plenty of fun to be had in the detail.

But Avast, me hearties, I have chapters to read, or is it write?