Halloween 1974…

So another Halloween has come and gone. We had lots of trick or treaters this year, our road was alive with all manner of creatures. Six or seven groups came to our door – ding-dong - a trio of witches with wonderfully painted spiders webs on their faces (I probably shouldn’t have asked for a photo but they were so cool) – ding-dong - another trio, boys this time - a skeleton, a devil and a fat boy in a white tee-shirt – knock-knock - a tiny Chinese Ninja vampire and his mother – ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong - a group of six assorted pre-teen monsters – knock - a solitary goblin whose parents hid behind the hedge so that he could go it alone. The effort they had all gone to was incredible - they really deserved the sweets that we gave them. I answered the door in my Dracula cape as always. I usually wear a false hand that I allow to nonchalantly fall to the floor as the children reach out for the sweets, but after turning a three year old Spiderman into a gibbering, hysterical, blancmange last year I decided to give it a miss, perhaps another time.

Holly was off to her friend’s Halloween party dressed as a she-devil – that’s her in the middle. I remember when she would ask me to come with her as she tricked and treated along the road, too scared to go up the paths of people she didn’t know. This year she went off to her party with Superman. She still needed me to carve her out her pumpkin and make the bats for her cakes though, so I’m not completely surplus… yet.

At around the same age I was invited to the best Halloween party of my life by my friend Sacha who lived (holidays only) in a huge mansion of a place in a nearby village.

I could never really understand why Sach was at boarding school when his parents only lived about eight miles from school, after all, Sach wasn’t THAT bad.

The house was huge and quite a lot run-down. Sach and his family lived in one half of the ground floor and a couple of the bedrooms. Sach’s dad was going overseas, so it was only temporary for them. I think his parents were renting it from Sacha’s Dad’s family. It was very grand even in its faded state, no gates, the gardens so overgrown that the drive was almost hidden by massive rhododendrons, and it came with an old gamekeeper who lived in one of the cottages and used to keep the rats down with his shotgun.

There were about forty of us invited to the party. The usual crowd - Toby and Kate, the mathematician and the actor, the rags and hats and feathers and robes, Ju-Ju, Dave, Julian MS, Titania, me – we all dressed for the night.

I became the Phantom of the Opera for the evening - black cape, white mask - this was years before Lloyd Webber and it was the old Claude Raines movie that inspired me. Titania went as the Phantom’s pupil, Christine Dubois the opera singer. Titania's mum had a long cream dress and a fox stole so we went as a pair.

Ju-Ju came in his tails with a black top hat and a spade, Dave as the Jethro Tull character from the cover of Aqualung, Toby and Kate were rock vampires all black satin and red blood, and Sach - always so left field - came dressed head to toe as the Marquis de Sade - frock coat, powdered wig, buckled shoes and carrying a long glass walking cane and a tin of pins.

The party was held by candlelight in the cellars. They were huge, dusty and full of cobwebs and rat droppings – no wine though.

Sach had set up his stereo and we’d all brought bottles of cider to swig as we danced to Mott the Hoople, and Alice Cooper, and the Velvet Underground and Nico, and the Doors, and David Bowie. He’d mocked up a dungeon room and we took it in turns to be tied to the wall for fifteen minutes of fame as the ‘prisoner of the moment’ in true Warhol style.

It was all a bit wild and free, well it was 1974 - and Dave got sick from too much cider, and one of the girls started crying, and Kate’s shirt got ripped, and Sach dropped his pins on the flagstones, and the candles kept blowing out, and someone nicked Ju-Ju’s hat, and the actor and the mathematician left early, and one of the feathers started a fight with the robes, and a bottle went flying and smashed on the wall, and a girl screamed that she’d seen a rat, and we all fled out into the garden at midnight to play hide-and-seek and other games in the deep darkness of the all-enclosing undergrowth.

And we all stayed up till the early hours.

And crashed in the bare rooms of the house.

And the next day Sash’s mum cooked us all breakfast.

I drive past the house sometimes on the way to Reading. It’s been renovated, the grounds have been cleared, there’s a new drive, a new fountain, and black electrically operated iron gates instead of the open entrance. I bet the cellars are brimful of wine and there isn’t a cider bottle or a single rat in sight.

Halloween 1974 - Best party ever. Thanks Sacha.