A Bonfire in the Dark

When I was in the emergency room last year having busted my elbow, a nurse asked whether i had ever broken anything else. I expect she was probing to see whether I had acquired that oldies’ habit of throwing yourself to available floors and sidewalks.. 

I had a ready and precise answer; “Yes. I broke my arm on November 5th, 1956.” 

I knew the date because it was Bonfire Night and I remember wearing a plaster cast in Miss Snell’s class at Clarence Street Junior School.  The dreaded Miss Snell who had a habit of wandering the classroom snapping out questions at random. Failure to answer “Seven eights?” quickly enough for her satisfaction could mean a rap over the knuckles with her ruler. The Times Table was holy writ and must be memorized.  

Bonfire Night was the big event back then. Halloween had not yet been imported from America and children’s focus was entirely on the Fifth.

All day at school was a restless impatience for the bell to sound and to be released to get ready.  The getting ready had been going on for weeks. Pocket money was sped on buying and hoarding fireworks. Some parents bought boxes but the real fun was the steady accumulation of a curated collection of bangers, jumping jacks, Roman candles, Catherine wheels, volcanic cones, and rockets.

The Fireworks

Bangers, and jumping jacks were banned in the UK in 1997 due to their risks. No surprising as jumping jacks were particularly lethal with their  unpredictable trajectory. I thought they were thrilling.  I have no wish to make light of the injuries they and other fireworks caused – too many children lost fingers and eyesight. But I have to say i am glad i was allowed to buy them and light them. And no, i was not always responsible and sensible. 

The Bonfire

In those days the bonfire was the big attraction. Fireworks were fun but a bonfire at night was magical. The preceding weeks were all about collecting the material for the biggest fire possible. Most years it was a modest back-garden affair but 1956 was more of a community (or gang) effort.

We had recently moved to the brand new – still being built council house estate – and when we moved it was a vast construction site in a sea of mud. Basically it was an adventure playground for kids with scaffolding, half-built houses, and building yards to climb on, in, into, and over. 

These were John Laing Easiform houses made of concrete panels rather than traditional stone or brickwork. And they were going up  in their thousands on estates in Swindon, primarily to house what was called “London overspill” and to compensate for all the housing lost during the war and the boomer generation of children. In 1960, the Mayor of Swindon celebrated the milestone of 4,000 new postwar houses. This was growth and change on a big scale for a small industrial town.

The houses went up and eventually the finished roads, buses, and schools and shops followed.

In 1956 our house was near a large open field which was to become the playing field for Walcot East Primary School (Now Mountford Manor primary). It was ideal site for our big bonfire.

Defensive Moves

But here was the trick. if you built your bonfire too soon it would get raided and your carefully gathered branches and scavenged planks and refuse stolen.

I knew that here was a particularly vicious gang of unscrupulous enemy children in nearby Dalton Close. To wander into their territory  meant risking a stone throwing fight. It was essential to hoard the fuel off site and build the fire when you could be sure of mounting guard. So many plans, worries, and responsibilities. . 

The big day finally came. Racing home from school in a fever of anticipation. A hurried tea and then the almost darkness time to light the fire. I don’t remember too much else, but i know we had a big bonfire and when at last it had burned itself out i could see another fire still going on another part of the field. 

“Let’s go!,” i said to my brother.

“Don’t run,” he said, being older and wiser.

I ran, I fell, i broke my arm.

At home my mother wrapped a ruler to the arm. it was metal with a plastic coating and had pictures of various fruits all along its length. Lying in bed, I heard  fireworks still going off in the distance. The next day to Dr. Rees surgery on Frobisher Drive and a trip the former GWR hospital on Milton Road for an x-ray and a plaster cast  (such a distinctive smell!)

Guy Fawkes and the Plot to Blow up the King and Parliament.

Bonfire Night of course commemorates the discovery of  the 1605 plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament and the King of 1605. I’ve just read Charles Dickens’ account of it in A Child’s History of England,  the first instalment of which  appeared on January 25, 1851. I don’t know how historically accurate it is, but his account is gripping.

Dickens was clearly no fan of King James. Here’s how he describes his Royal Sowship.

‘Our cousin of Scotland’ was ugly, awkward, and shuffling both in mind and person. His tongue was much too large for his mouth, his legs were much too weak for his body, and his dull goggle-eyes stared and rolled like an idiot’s. He was cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer, and the most conceited man on earth. His figure—what is commonly called rickety from his birth—presented a most ridiculous appearance, dressed in thick padded clothes, as a safeguard against being stabbed (of which he lived in continual fear), of a grass-green colour from head to foot, with a hunting-horn dangling at his side instead of a sword, and his hat and feather sticking over one eye, or hanging on the back of his head, as he happened to toss it on. He used to loll on the necks of his favourite courtiers, and slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their cheeks; and the greatest favourite he ever had, used to sign himself in his letters to his royal master, His Majesty’s ‘dog and slave,’ and used to address his majesty as ‘his Sowship.’ His majesty was the worst rider ever seen, and thought himself the best. He was one of the most impertinent talkers (in the broadest Scotch) ever heard, and boasted of being unanswerable in all manner of argument. He wrote some of the most wearisome treatises ever read—among others, a book upon witchcraft, in which he was a devout believer—and thought himself a prodigy of authorship. He thought, and wrote, and said, that a king had a right to make and unmake what laws he pleased, and ought to be accountable to nobody on earth. This is the plain, true character of the personage whom the greatest men about the court praised and flattered to that degree, that I doubt if there be anything much more shameful in the annals of human nature.

And this is his last line:

“a creature like his Sowship set upon a throne is like the Plague, and everybody receives infection from him.”

This by Eric Ravilious 1936 is from the book High Street, a series of his lithographs with text by J.M.Richards. Newsagents stocked fireworks for the Fifth.  Note the Daily Mirror with a story on the (actual) fascist Oswald Mosley. The New Statesman wrote that the designs were “so gay and vivid…that they surprise the reader like the shops themselves when they light up on a foggy morning’”.

The featured image is a composite of an old  for Brock’s Fireworks, a yard sign I saw in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a design by Edward Bawden and Five Fireworks Flashing by Alice Patullo

Hoping for a peaceful and safe November 5th for everyone and for an election result that bears no resemblance to the Plague.