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Boots of Hope
They sit quietly behind glass in Paisley Museum—two small, leather boots scuffed at the toe, the laces thin and frayed like breath on a frosted window. If you didn't know, you'd pass them by. Just another display. Just another lost pair.
But they belonged to a child who never came home from the Glen Cinema.
It was Hogmanay, 1929. The cinema had been packed with over 700 children, excited to see the afternoon matinee. Some were given the day’s fare as a treat from their parents, others had gathered coins from neighbours, eager to escape the grey drizzle of the town for the silver light of the screen. No one foresaw the horror to come. When smoke began to rise from the projection room, panic swept the theatre. The doors, in a cruel twist, opened inward. Children pushed, stumbled, fell. Seventy-one never rose again.
These boots tell none of that story outright. They do not scream or accuse. They are too small for that. But they whisper. They whisper of a child once clothed and kissed and coaxed out the door by a mother who tied those laces tight. They speak of life—unfinished, interrupted, innocent.
And yet, here they are. Still standing. Quiet testimony not only to what was lost, but to what refuses to be forgotten.
We live in a world that often feels the same, fragile, breathless, absurd. We, too, are pushed by unseen forces, unsure of the exits. But somehow, amid tragedy, the human soul clings to meaning. We keep small boots. We build museums. We write names on walls. We gather memory like firewood against the cold.
Because we believe, sometimes dimly, sometimes defiantly that life matters. That every child matters. That we are more than breath and bone.
These little boots, mute as they are, proclaim what the world so often denies: that even in horror, love survives. And that one day, perhaps beyond time itself, the lost will be found and the trampled will rise.
And the laces will be untied.
And the child will run again.