Children living history by Theresa Breslin

 At the beginning of April Random House will re-issue
 two of my books: 

KEZZIE and HOMECOMING FOR KEZZIE will be published
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 budgie cage!

KEZZIE AT WAR will be published by Random House on 5th April 2012

THE IRON LADY by Theresa Breslin

I went to see THAT film the other night.

I had a completely different Blogpost prepped for today but jettisoned it for this. A friend asked me to go with him to see 'The Iron Lady' and reluctantly I did, resenting handing over my hard-earned cash, and feeling I had to explain myself to the box office staff, ticket collector, popcorn / nacho / junk food seller and the person flogging the fudge, from whom I bought a bagful, thinking I might have to use it to stop my mouth in case I felt roused to hurl abuse at the screen. I wasn't as vocal as one chap who'd been dragged along by his partner and declared that as he'd watched films about Hitler and Stalin he supposed he could suffer one about 'her'.

We were a very quiet audience. The only notable reaction came when MT started to quote St Francis outside No. 10 Downing Street. Then there was a hissing sound, similar, I imagine, to the sound reputed to have been heard in movie theatres when the scene of the Yankee victory in 'Gone with the Wind' was playing in the deep South. The noise around me wasn't so loud. There were no more than twenty folk in the cinema and most were of the vintage of the main character. But it did bring it back to me like a slap on the face.

It was weird to have lived through those distressing times and revisit incidents and issues I felt passionate about. Having some knowledge of how a script works it was interesting to see what was expunged, glossed over, highlighted, and embroidered for dramatic and sympathetic effect.

By strange, but I'm glad to say, happy coincidence Random House are just about to reissue my KEZZIE books as a bind up under the title KEZZIE AT WAR. The first book is based on a mining village not far from where I live and is set in the late 1930s. I wrote it in the aftermath of the modern miners' strikes. When working as a librarian I managed a library situated near one of our more recent big pit disasters. In the book Kezzie's father states that the price of coal is paid by the miners and their families in blood.

For submitting to the make-up alone Meryl Streep deserves her Golden Globe. For an accurate portrayal of a megalomaniac drifting into dementia, I'll leave you to be the judge.

KEZZIE AT WAR will be published in Spring 2012

Theresa Breslin's latest historical novel PRISONER OF THE INQUISITION has won the Young Quill's Award and is shortlisted for the Scottish Children's Book Award. It was the favourite book of Carnegie Shadowing Groups.
DIVIDED CITY is being performed as musical theatre at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow. 2nd - 4th Feb 2012