A ‘Reading for Wellbeing’ recommended read!
Mavis’s shoes by Sue Reid Sexton
The story is told in the voice of a young girl Lenny Gillespie. It starts on 13th March 1941 in Clydebank on the first night of the Clydebank Blitz. That night Lenny loses both her 4 yr old sister Mavis(who she is babysitting) her mother and all her worldly possession ,except Mavis`s shoe. The noise , the smells, the chaos of the Blitz along with the destruction of her past world are recounted by Lenny.
Lenny joins a small group including her teacher , a grumpy neighbour, and a small child Rosie, similar to Mavis, who has lost all her family. This small group walk over the Kilpatrick Hills, leaving Clydebank ablaze behind them, to a community of huts at Carbeth, on the West Highland Way. Here they are sheltered and fed, and the children sent to the local school to try and give stability to their fractured lives. At all times Lenny clings to Mavis`s shoe and when no word comes of her family, she returns to Clydebank and searches among the rubble for her sister but to no avail.
This story tells how families were fragmented and how some lucky ones found each other. Although fiction, the horror of the greatest loss of civilian life, in a Scottish town, in WW2 is described, as is the warmth and resilience of the `Bankies`. The author has brought the Blitz alive through Lenny and her war experience.
