Following the success of the reissue in 1999 of Golden City by James Ritchie, the Mercat Press has published Ritchies's other classic celebration of a Scottish childhood. The Singing Street is a magical collection of children's street games, rhymes and sayings. First published in the sixties, it vividly evokes the fun, fantasy, mischief and play of those long childhood days that seemed as though they would never end.James Ritchie was a teacher at Norton Park School in Edinburgh before the Second World War when he began to make a collection of the games and rhymes enjoyed by his pupils. His interest in the subject grew and led to the making of a radio programme and a film, also called The Singing Street. As he explained: ?No one before had ever thought either of recording the singing games of children or of making a film of them. A booklet of the rhymes and songs used in the film was issued, and this was the first publication in Great Britain which showed that the children of this island had made poetry out of modern life, and unlike many grown-ups were actually living in the twentieth century. The rhymes I'd been collecting (as I very soon realised) didn't belong to Edinburgh alone. They were universal, and the different cities in Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales all possessed and seemed to prefer their own variations.'A social and picturesque history of the first half of the twentieth century is sketched through the songs and sayings collected here, under chapter headings such as ?The Street in War and Peace?, ?Fireside Rhymes and Sayings?, ?The Fascination of the Pavement?, and ?Street Songs, Chants, and Recitations'. The author died in 1998 at the age of 90. For the last 18 months of his life he lived with his niece, Margaret Longstaff. She says of her uncle: ?Science is what he officially taught at Norton Park. But unofficially he taught his pupils about art and literature, and about the importance of their own playground culture, their rhymes and games and repartee.' In a new Introduction, the writer and broadcaster David Fergus remembers his friend and pays tribute to him as a ?poet, playwright, collector and connoisseur, a man of many talents'.James Ritchie's work is still well known, thanks to the republication of Golden City (a 1999 Scottish Christmas bestseller) and through daily showings of the film The Singing Street at the Museum of Scotland and the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh. John Grierson, the famous documentary film maker, wrote that it was ?the best amateur film I ever saw? The reason for it being wonderful was quite simple. Somebody loved something and conveyed it.'