Authors Interviewing Characters: Kate Thompson

February 21, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Bestselling author Kate Thompson returns with The Little Wartime Library, a novel based on the true story of a forgotten little library in WW2. When German bombs crashed through its roof, Bethnal Green library moved underground, providing books – and escapism – for children during air raids. Kate brings the story to life by reimagining life in the underground library. Here she interviews two of her central protagonists’, Chief Librarian Clara Button and Library Assistant Ruby Munroe.

Kate: Clara and Ruby, what a war you’ve had. Can you tell me what happened the night the library was bombed?

Clara: I remember shelving books in the historical fiction stacks. It was after closing on a Saturday, we’d been fearfully busy, and I was savouring the quiet. The library was filled with a lovely drowsy, late-summer sunshine, when suddenly we were plunged into darkness. I saw Peter’s face falling away into the dust, books exploding up into the air… Then I came to in hospital. I don’t know what I’d have done without Ruby. (Reaches over and holds her hand) I wouldn’t have survived losing Peter and…and everything else

Ruby: Poppycock. You’re stronger than you think are. Don’t forget what you pulled off in the months after and all while we was undergoing the heaviest bombardment London has ever seen. She won’t blow her own trumpet so I will. (Leans forward) She persuaded the powers that be to give us a grant of fifty bob so we could build a library 78-feet underground over the boarded up tracks of the Central Line. 4,000 volumes we managed to rescue from the ruins and take down the tunnels! 4000! Clara also had a hand in helping set up the underground theatre, the creche and the doctors quarters too. You wouldn’t believe the social welfare we had down at Bethnal Underground. It was a self-contained subterranean village and this woman’s a pioneer!

Clara: I don’t know about that. I just felt passionately that if our patrons couldn’t come to the books, we should take the books to them.

Kate: I found it interesting how you said that sometimes, you need to go underground in order to see. What did you mean by that?

Clara: I suppose that it was only once we reopened the library underground and we got to really know our patrons, did I begin to see the way a library could truly empower women and children. We taught many of our young patrons to read, who through no fault of their own were illiterate due to the closures of their school. We put books into the hands of women who in ordinary life might have been forbidden from reading them. A library should be a sanctuary and a support, a safe non-judgemental space. I was – and remain – passionate that women have the right to read whatever they need in order to escape. People come into the library for an experience, who are we to judge what that experience is?

Ruby: Don’t forget ‘Birth Control for the Married Woman’. We had to keep that hidden under the counter. Risky, but worth it. Let’s be honest, most young women round our way are clueless when it comes to their own bodies. And half of London was at it during the blackout hours. Men who ought to know better, packing their wives off to the countryside, liberating them to indulge in affairs. Every dark alley was a soft bed! We just did our bit to keep women safe and clued up.

Kate: I believe you encountered some, er, resistance from the Chair of the Library Committee.

Ruby: Pinkerton-Smythe you mean? What a toerag. That bloke couldn’t leave us alone. He had to know the ins and outs of a cats arsehole that one, and a crooked bastard so it transpired…

Clara: Excuse the language (stares pointedly at Ruby) EastEnders have a rich and spirited vocabulary. But yes, it’s true, Mr Pinkerton-Smythe was somewhat opposed to our underground library and very nearly shut us down. We fought a long, hard battle to keep that library open.

Kate: What kept you going in the face of such disapproval?

Clara: An absolute belief that libraries should be warm and welcoming places to ALL. A library is more than its books, it’s a place where women’s lives have the potential to be transformed. Don’t you think? I encouraged everyone through the doors of our underground library, from vagrants to the illiterate, I never wanted to simply preach to the converted.

Ruby: (Laughing) Don’t get her started on the role of libraries.

Clara: Sorry, I don’t mean to bore, but it’s a subject close to my heart. People without books are like houses without windows, don’t you think?’

Ruby: Don’t ask me. I’m just the library assistant.

Clara. Never just a library assistant. I might select the books, oversee the cataloguing and Browne Issue System and do bibliographic searches. But it’s Ruby who has the social intelligence to be able to connect with the vast spectrum of life we see in our library. I couldn’t have done any of it without you, Rubes.

Kate: You are clearly very good friends, as well as colleagues. Talking of which, I believe you have formed some friendships across the pond?

Clara: Oh yes, we are so proud of our Books from Canada scheme, to say nothing of enormously grateful. I realised towards the end of the war that we had lost a great deal of our precious children’s books. A whole generation of children were growing up without access to great books of the past. We made an urgent appeal to our friends across the pond for children’s classics and did they ever respond!

Ruby. It’s true. Canadians donated thousands of wonderful books, from Treasure Island to Secret Garden. We couldn’t believe it when they started arriving could we Cla!

Clara. Canada opened their arms to us and expressed their love through literature.

Kate: What’s the legacy of the Little Wartime Library?

Clara. We helped people to escape the war, if only for a few chapters.

Ruby: Helped a fair few people fall in love with reading too.

Kate: You should write about it. You know, document it for future generations.

Clara. Laughing. Who would believe we ran a library in a Tube tunnel?

The Little Wartime Library

An uplifting and inspiring novel based on the true story of a librarian who created an underground shelter during World War II, perfect for readers of The Paris Library or The Last Bookshop in London.

London, 1944: Clara Button is no ordinary librarian. While war ravages the city above her, Clara has risked everything she holds dear to turn the Bethnal Green tube station into the country’s only underground library. Down here, a secret community thrives with thousands of bunk beds, a nursery, a café, and a theater—offering shelter, solace, and escape from the bombs that fall upon their city.

Along with her glamorous best friend and assistant Ruby Munroe, Clara ensures the library is the beating heart of life underground. But as the war drags on, the women’s determination to remain strong in the face of adversity is tested to the limits when it may come at the price of keeping those closest to them alive.

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Kate Thompson was born in London in 1974, and worked as a journalist for twenty years on women’s magazines and national newspapers. She now lives in Sunbury with her husband, two sons and a Lurcher called Ted. After ghost writing five memoirs, Kate moved into fiction. Kate’s first non-fiction social history documenting the forgotten histories of East End matriarchy, The Stepney Doorstep Society, was published in 2018 by Penguin.. The Little Wartime Library is her seventh novel.