10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
New book confirms Maureen Cullen's status as a significant new voice
Havoc Shore contains 21 short stories, the majority set in or around 1963, nearly all of which were shortlisted or longlisted in literary competitions, a reflection of their consistently high quality. Cullen made quite an impression with her debut novel, Kitten Heels, last year and Havoc Shore is, if anything, even more impressive for its range and variety.
Nineteen-sixties Clydeside is lovingly and vividly recreated here. Men working at shipyards hand their wage packets over to their wives on pay day, after extracting money for drink. Mothers with seven kids enquire at the clinic about the miraculous new contraceptive pill only to be fobbed off by the staff. A housewife works secretly as a cleaner so that her family won't know she's supplementing their income. Glaswegians migrate to Corby for work, or weigh up the advantages of emigrating and becoming 'Ten Pound Poms'.
(Image: Jim Altgens)
It's a fictional town constructed from very real memories, the remnants of a childhood that no generation will experience again. For those old enough, there are little bursts of nostalgia in every story. But Cullen is equally drawn to the darker, heavier undertones of the time, dealing with issues like alcoholism, misogyny and violence, things it wasn't done to talk about openly but were implicitly acknowledged by the whole community. Domestic violence looms particularly large, with several interconnected stories referencing a son's murder of his abusive father which was made to look like an accident. And in the opening story, 'The Cailleach of Redgauntlet Close', two mismatched neighbours bond over their shared concern over the alarming noises coming from another flat in their stair.
But Cullen always looks for the warmth, empathy and strength of character that persists in tough times, such as the young Englishwoman in a maternity hospital finding a welcoming atmosphere among the new mothers entirely absent from her husband's Scottish family. Or in Isa, the formidable mother of seven who single-handedly takes on the local council over facilities for the neighbourhood kids.
The span of the book roughly equates to a lifetime, and it's not hard to notice, as they inch closer to the present day, that the stories become more sparsely populated and elegiac, the bustling throng of Havoc's strong community having dissipated long ago. Her latter-day characters are facing bereavement, having to fill in 28-page forms to apply for PIP or scattering their grandmother's ashes on Skye (even though Grannie never went there and all her stories of the island were just handed-down family memories).
(Image: Ringwood)
Cullen has a natural gift for the short story. Each is concise, feeling neither rushed nor drawn out – at around ten pages each, none outstay their welcome – and they have a feeling of place and community that rings true, as well as the sense of lives that have been observed with a compassionate, understanding eye. They're so consistent that it's hard to pick highlights, but the trio of stories set around the weekend of JFK's assassination, giving different perspectives on the same events, particularly stands out on a first read.
