…..the 5th of November
I believe this isn’t a tradition that’s particularly well known in the US, but over here we remember the Gunpowder Plot by running around and setting things on fire or blowing stuff up, once a year. Cool huh?
The above reminded me of the cylinder on Horsell Common
When I was a child, we used to stuff flammable materials into clothes and create an effigy of Guy Fawkes, trollying around the local estates raising money with cries of “Penny for the Guy!”. In the weeks preceding this particular brand of juvenile extortion the process of building the local bonfire would begin, each estate trying to outdo the other. Why I don’t know, it’s not as if we ran from one to the other checking to see who had the most impressive pyrotechnics. One of the fun parts would be watching the local adults piling out to the estate ‘parks’ (and I use that in the loosest term), trying to get rid of all their household detritus by sneaking it onto the ever growing pile of kindling that would be lit on the evening of Nov 5th. It wasn’t unusual to find car parts, bits of refridgerators and the odd testy neighbour’s garden fence cropping up on the pile. There was always one constant though, there was always a mattress. Always.
Come the evening of Nov 5th the kids would be playing cheerfully, someone would invariably get stuck halfway up with the Guy and the local hospital would be overrun with burns accidents and the many and varied results of arsing about with sparklers. At some point the Guy would burn, and I doubt many kids actually thought of what they were doing there burning an effigy of a man who’s been dead for a few hudred years.
But it’s all good fun.
But the bonfires now seem to be a thing of the past. All anyone seems to want is “Firework Night” , which is a little saddening.. it was always great to go to a big massive bonfire and have your back freeze like a block of ice while your front slowly cooked and soaked up the sweet smell of damp wood, grass clippings and mattresses. Maybe it’s a safety issue, who knows. But if safety was that much of a concern they wouldn’t let people buy the fireworks and set them off in their gardens every year.
Tell you what though, I bloody love fireworks me. And if it’s one thing MK does do well it’s November 5th.
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