At the beginning of April Random House will re-issue two of my books, KEZZIE and HOMECOMING FOR KEZZIE as a bind-up entitled KEZZIE AT WAR.
The middle of March is the anniversary of the Clydebank Blitz when two nights of misdirected bombing raids (only one bomb fell on the targeted shipyards) annihilated the town and part of Glasgow. Lampposts had been placed among the surrounding hills as decoys, but there was no way of disguising the silvered ribbon of the River Clyde that led the pathfinder planes to the town. Incendiary hits on the sugar refinery, the huge naval oil storage tanks and the Singer Company's lumber yard set the whole sky burning - giving plenty of illumination for the bomber squadrons to follow through. My mother told me that the sound of the planes overhead woke her up. She went to stand beside her father at the door of their house twenty miles away watching the red glow of the flames, knowing that her aunt (her father's sister) and uncle and all her cousins, with whom she played in the summer, were in their homes in Clydebank that night. Civilian casualties were very high. And because at that time there was a social pattern of close family support with relatives living next door to each other, or on different floors in the same tenement building, whole families were wiped out.
Doing a round of school talks last week I visited Bankhead Primary School and was greeted with their welcome sign and their wonderful book-loving pupils and teachers. We had a great session together and then I was told that they were having another visitor later in the week - someone who had been a boy messenger during the Blitz and had survived - and he would tell them of his childhood. Their school had been used as an ARP Station during the War and had suffered a direct hit. They allowed me to take some photographs of their display which tells their story better that I can.
Like many other rural towns an evacuee receiving unit was set up in my local church hall. One of the first groups to arrive had with them a baby girl who'd been found lying in a street with no sign of anyone around her. Lots of people volunteered to take the baby home and look after her but the senior ARP officer decided to keep her in the station for a few days so that she could be properly medically examined to ensure she had not been injured in any way. Two night later a forlorn little family came in, cut, bruised, with torn clothes. having been dug out of the rubble. The oldest child was a boy of about nine or ten. Upon hearing the baby crying in another room, he shouted out:
'That's our baby That's my little sister!'
And it was.
And yes, my mother's cousins eventually turned up, clutching a shopping bag of their possessions... and the budge cage!
KEZZIE AT WAR will be published by Random House on 5th April 2012
