Shoes Were for Sunday

Molly Weir, who later became a relatively known TV actress, chronicles her childhood, growing up between the wars in Springburn, a Glasgow slum that's still notorious for being the poorest parliamentary constituency in the United Kingdom. She was the youngest in a large family, born in 1910; her father was killed in War War I. Weir does nothing to romanticize her surroundings and makes it clear just how poor everyone was, and how hard life was, how there was no extra money for anything, but this book cannot be described as sad or depressing. She came from a warm, loving family that lived in an overcrowded apartment in a close-knit neighborhood where everyone looked out for each other, and she has a knack for describing the details of show more her life: the way her mother was able to hunt out bargains and using a bit of sewing magic to turn an adult's dress into a child's school uniform, for example.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who's interest in the lives of the poor and working-class in the UK and Scotland in particular during this period. I'd be interested in checking out the other two books in the trilogy Weir wrote about her childhood. show less

George Bernard Shaw once wrote that poverty was the greatest evil in the world, but somehow no one every told Molly Weir that. The daughter of a working widow living in a Glasgow tenement between The Wars, Weir grew up in a loving environment with two women, her mother and her grandmother, who taught her responsibility at an early age. This book covers her earliest years and depicts slum life in Glasgow with a light hand. I sometimes learned more about the details of life with the Weir family than I wanted to know, but this is a charming story. It's evident from the first that Molly had character and drive. Continued by Best Foot Forward.