Rue End Street

Set in Greenock, Helensburgh and Clydebank, this sequel to Mavis's Shoe is a wartime family story. Lenny Gillespie sets off in search of her father in Greenock, west of Scotland, which is the No 1 Port for the UK for the movement of troops. Lenny is threatened once again with trouble when all she seeks is her family to be united. It is September 1943, more than two years since Lenny's world was devastated by the Clydebank Blitz and she and her family are safe in the beautiful green hut community of Carbeth, Scotland. But as the tides of war turn and Italy joins the Allies to fight the Nazis, the fists of war and fear are set to grab Lenny once more. Adversity threatens each moment, and Lenny is about to lose her closest ally. Told the family must move back to Clydebank with its smoke and factories and now overcrowded, teeming dwellings, Lenny refuses to give up her rural sanctuary. When her mother Peggy returns to Clydebank for a job, leaving Lenny to become a little mother to her siblings, Lenny lies about her age to look for work locally. But this new turn is bewildering. Exhausted, Lenny seizes on news of her father, convinced that if only she can discover the truth about where he is, if only she can find him, she can make their family complete again. But no-one will meet her eye.Desperate, and in need of a happy ending, Lenny sets out, but all is not as she hopes - Her steps take her the length of the great Clyde estuary, and into new dangers in the vast, dark, threatening and adult war-time ports of Helensburgh and Greenock...Enjoy this new book, the sequel to Mavis's Shoe , a harrowing account of the bombing of Clydebank in March 1941.