Books and Beds.

This is the view which doesn’t distract me at all but quietly comforts me through the rigours of novel-writing. It is the view from my bed.

I think beds and books are a combination made in heaven. After all, most people, including myself, probably do most of their reading in bed. It’s warm, no heating is required, it’s forgivingly squishy and is often in the quietest part of the house. There’s usually a decent lamp strategically positioned (unless you’re in a hotel where it’ll be pointing in the wrong direction and have a 10 watt bulb) and usually everyone else is asleep or nearly or doing the same as you and the rules of bedtime privacy apply.

But I have discovered that certain other people, myself included, have been using their beds for the same and other purposes DURING THE DAY and I don’t just mean the weekends either. And by the way I’m not talking about S*X in case you’re dirty little minds were travelling in that direction, although extreme pleasure may be experienced.

This is how I spent my day: Woke at 6.30am. Husband away working. Rolled over. Went back to sleep. Woke 8.30am. Rose. Slippers, woolly jumper, a rub of the eyes and I’m off to the kitchen. One lemon squeezed into a pint of spring water is enough to waken the arm muscles with the effort and the rest of me with the zing. Knock it all back then make the Oolong tea. Take said tea back to bed. Fetch mobile, laptop and large bag containing notebook, pen, best glasses and tissues. Write.

Keep writing, no matter what.

Interruptions include various phone calls, some answered, some not, and toilet breaks which usually involve tea breaks during which oatcakes and various types of fruit may be foraged for in the kitchen. Spider solitaire, emails, Facebook, Twitter etc, are lightly dispersed throughout the day when the tension of creative sideways thinking starts to hurt.

Suddenly the last line of the chapter appears. I make a space, then another, then I type: Chapter 21.

The phone rings right on cue. I feel inordinately happy and gracious. These are the moments to ask to borrow my most precious earrings, my car, my husband. Fortunately the call is none of these. I emerge blinking into the human world as family members return and I catch sight of myself as I pass the mirror in the hall en route to the front door. My hair has three opposing kinds of clip and looks sticky. My jumper is on inside out and my jammie bottoms clash horribly with my slippers. I have been tousled by my own book.

What would you do?

I have three treats for you today.

When Mavis's Shoe was at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, I asked the kids who came to imagine what would happen if some bombs came down at just after 9pm that night. I asked them to think specifically about what they would do. And I asked them to write something and send it to me. These are the results.

This was a very difficult task for me because nearly all the pieces were very very good. I therefore chose three winners, first, second and third. Their stories are below. I hope you enjoy them.

1st

The Bombing Begins
by Caitlin Paterson, p.7, Broomhouse Primary

I was in my house with mum and dad. I was in my room sitting on my giant bed texting my best friend. I was feeling fantastic, happy, cheerful and great. I never saw my best friend for a year and she was coming back to visit for a week. I was excited to see her.

She was coming to my house to visit. She reached the doorstep and the ground started to shake madly. I told her to come in. We looked out the window there were bomber planes
everywhere and me, mum, dad and Sarah ran outside to the bomb shelter. Just when we got in the bomb shelter, the bombs started going off. I smelt the disgraceful smoke and heard loud crashing sounds we could smell the burning metal. We were petrified.

My mum and dad ran out of the shelter and then I went out to look for them. I could not find them. I looked everywhere for them. I tried shouting “Mum! Dad! Where are you? You need to comeback!”
I saw them walking.
Cabang !
A bomb went straight through them. My eyes filled with tears and the street was filled with flames.

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2nd

World War
by Ali Eltom, P7, Broomhouse Primary
“Oh no,” I said to my friend Lewis. He was beating me at my own video games again. We were playing Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3. All of a sudden I heard a giant roar in the sky but I ignored it…

Bombs started falling. People were screaming. Men were shouting “Someone help my family”. The only thing going through my mind was “What’s going on out there?” I ran to my window and could hear the rubber of my shoes thudding on the ground with humungous bangs. Me and Lewis ran outside and explored. I worriedly walked across the street. My brain was filled with different emotions, fear, anger and worry.

I thought I should go looking for my mum. Lewis asked “How are you going to find her with all this bombing?” I ignored him. We were walking and I heard a faint scream. I ran to see what was happening. I saw my mum sitting there she never opened her eyes I thought she was dead. I screamed “Wake up, Mum, wake up !!!!!!!” People in military suits came and took me away. I was screaming and shouting. They stuck a needle into my skin and I fell asleep.

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3rd

Bombing in Denny
by Brandon Wilson, 15, Hillside School

One morning I woke up in a nice, wet and windy Scottish summers day. I went down the stairs to the kitchen to make a greasy squared sausage roll with fried onions and a bit of HP brown sauce. After finishing my breakfast I headed to catch the post office at 9am to get my mum’s money for the tea that night.

I took my dog Lehgend. He is a German Shepherd, only 7 months old. I was walking casually down to the town. I was only two minutes from the post office and my dog was going mad. He was barking, jumping, and staring up into the sky. The sky was still and very grey. I shouted, “Shut up” to my dog, and suddenly I heard in the distance a roar of engines. All around me there was a deathly silence.

The Post Office shutters went down and everyone ran for shelter. All of a sudden these planes were surrounding the buildings in the town centre. Bang, crash - the sound of concrete and glass smashing and falling all over them. I heard the screams of panic. Children crying. Dogs barking. Everyone ran for their lives, with their hands over their heads. Fear on their faces, as they saw the flashing lights in the sky. The smoke and dust was up into my nose, burning and choking me and the people around me. All I felt was dust, tiny, sharp bits of debris. Suddenly, all I heard again was silence. The buildings stopped moving. All I could hear now were sobs and crying and dogs whimpering. People were helping each other to safety.
I started to make my way back to my family to see if they were safe and well. But I struggled to find my way back home because all the paths and roads had burned out cars. It was all smokey in the air around the streets. Finally, me and my dog were back in my house. My family were glad to see us. They thought I was hurt, but I only had a cut arm and a bruised leg. My house was not too badly damage but next door’s had crumbled down. It was just a big pile of rubble. We were extremely lucky that we were not hurt and our house was still standing. We all sat down and stood in the one room, waiting for everything to blow over (said my mum).

Lenny Lives

This is exciting. I’ve just spent another day with the human embodiment of my fictional character, Lenny Gillespie. This is the actor Lisa Farren who will be joining me on Monday 20th August at the Edinburgh International Book Festival for a schools event in the Peppers Tent for Mavis's Shoe. Can’t wait. We will have action and noise, including some especially loud explosions. There will be an ARP helmet to try on and some very interesting slides (in my opinion).

Lisa makes an excellent Lenny. She seems to catch what Lenny is going through with extraordinary sensitivity. It’s the most peculiar thing hearing someone you made up saying the words you made up for them. Last year at the time of the launch we did a grander version using five actors and a sound technician. Lisa was part of that too. It worked well. This year we are just me and Lisa and it feels tight and fluent.

The picture above is last year’s cast in WH Smith in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, where we did a three person version. That's Lisa/Lenny on the right with all the scars. The people of WH Smith were lovely and so no doubt were the pipe band playing outside the door, but the two in such close proximity were unusual and difficult. But as you can see we survived and conquered.

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/