Bygone bonfire nights

I mean, we make up an effigy of a man, call it a Guy, after the chap who was caught trying to blow up Parliament, and then we burn it on a bonfire. We celebrate the burning with tubes of gunpowder romantically described as Roman candles or star cascades. Well, that’s what we used to do but I guess health and safety are working on reducing the fun as we speak.

Keith often reads me newspaper articles over breakfast and recently he read me a piece about an average upstanding fellow, who in the privacies of his own back garden, let off a couple of fireworks. Next thing he knows he’s been arrested and fined because someone deemed his activity dangerous. Dangerous, is what firework night used to be when I was a child. In the weeks leading up to the occasion for sport, boys would chuck bangers at us girls to make us scream. The subway under the railway tracks was a favourite place as it exaggerated the bang. Keith said as a boy he and his friends used to see who could hold on to their banger the longest before throwing it down a quarry (the aim being a mid-air explosion). In those days your bonfire was very important and anything and everything combustible was collected over the weeks leading up to the special day. These bonfires in waiting were guarded, sometimes around the clock after all you didn’t want someone pinching your stack or setting it alight too soon. Often, fireworks were chucked into the flames and rockets could be seen whooshing around adjacent gardens while people dived for their coal sheds to get out of the way. Milk bottles were used to launch rockets and Catharine wheels where nailed to nothing more substantial then a rose trellis. I remember one year my Dad was preparing some fireworks in his shed, where he lit his taper (apparently safer than a match). Shortly afterwards the door blew off the shed, Dad emerged a bit shaken and fireworks whizzed round the garden. Those were the days.