Remember, Remember…

The fifth of November… so I have. I’ve remembered a few out of many.

For years I loved bonfire night, I still like it, always will and I still enjoy fireworks, but the excitements gone- taken away by rules, regulations, restrictions and SO many safety warnings when we are already over-cautious and afraid to let our children have fun.

Guy Fawkes Night was ONE of the big nights of the year, almost as big as Christmas, bigger than Halloween and much bigger than Easter with its chocolate eggs and daffodils - maybe even bigger than my birthday. I looked forward to the fifth of November for weeks before, collecting wood, gathering old clothes to make the guy, saving my pocket money, buying fireworks from Platers corn-merchants to store in the metal biscuit tin in my wardrobe - bangers, Catherine wheels, sparklers, rockets, jumping-jacks, and then on the night ‘Dad’s big surprise was Standard Fireworks’, a big box, a five shilling box. It was huge!

I spent days making the guy, carefully modelling a mask from papier-mâché just like John Noakes had on Monday's Blue Peter, knowing that it would burn but not minding – after all, that was what it for, and besides it was the law to celebrate Guy Fawkes night – and it really had been until the mid-1800’s. My mask of dark hooded eyes, hooked nose, pointed beard and Salvador Dali moustache was so much better than the orange egg-box cardboard masks that you could buy at Castle’s the newsagents in the high street.

Everyone built huge bonfires in their back gardens, it was almost a competition. No, it was a competition and the Bowler’s always won - building twenty feet stacks of wood in their back garden and setting fire to them. One year it got out of hand and the fire brigade had to be called to put it out with their long black hoses - but the Bowlers were back next year with an even bigger fire.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a ‘penny for the guy’ on a street corner but it was a regular sight when I was a boy and a good way to ‘earn’ money for fireworks. I was never allowed to do ‘penny for the guy’, it was too close to begging in my parents opinion, but the Braham boys did and ‘earned’ fortunes which they spent on huge ‘mortar shell’ bangers. Oddly I WAS allowed to go carol singing, I don’t know where my parents would have stood on ‘Trick or Treat’ – it just didn’t exist back then – but one year I built my guy, stuck it in an old pram and pushed it down to the bottom of North Street, standing there with my tin asking for ‘a penny for the guy’. I made seven bob in about four hours, not bad going.

Unfortunately someone must have seen me and told my dad and when I got home he made me own and confiscated my hard earned money – all three bob of it!

Every year at the end of the night at around 10.30 the whole estate would stand in their back gardens and wait for the ‘parachute’ to go over. It was the grand finale of Bonfire Night. The father of the spastic kid in the wheelchair who lived at the bottom of the road in the big houses made his own fireworks… amazing!

Each year he’d hold a big display in his garden, we were never invited of course, but we used to peer up into the sky and watch his homemade rockets and shooting stars thunder into the dark night. They were brilliant! Far better than anything that we could afford to buy – and then at the end of the night he’d set off the last firework… the parachute. A huge rocket whooshed into the sky, setting free a parachute that would unfurl high in the air and float across the darkness. Somehow it was lit from the inside so that the parachute glowed with ever changing blues, reds, yellows and greens. It mesmerised us as it passed and we held our breath as it gently floated away to disappear over the treetops of James's farm.

I lived on that road for ten years and I only saw that poor spastic kid twice. Once in his Dad’s car waving at everyone from the back seat with a huge smile on his face - I waved back, a huge smile on my face also - and one other time when his Mum wheeled him up the road and back again on a very sunny afternoon. She was crying. In those days disability was talked about only in whispers and you never saw the disabled kids - they were kept indoors like a shame. And tell me, just when did the word spastic become unnaceptable?

And then... that would be it.

Firework night over for another year. And back then it was a single night, back then we celebrated Guy Fawkes on the fifth of November, his night, and not for weeks before and weeks after. The whole country was lit up with fires and fireworks and blitzed by the boom of bangs on each November fifth… for one night only!

Please, just one more, allow me one last memory of firework night.... Years later when I was at college in Oxford - taking my BA foundation year - we would visit the Ashmoleum Museum each Tuesday to sketch and paint the exhibits. They were fantastic – insects, skeletons, costumes, paintings, furniture – you name it they had it, even Guido Fawkes lantern.

The lantern had been given to them by the son of the man who had caught Guy Fawkes back in 1605 and sat in a glass case in one of the side rooms at the museum. One Tuesday, just before Guy Fawkes Night, I decided that the lantern would be my subject and stood in front of the case drawing it.

After about ten minutes drawing one of the attendants asked me if I wouldn’t be more comfortable sitting down and I said that I would - expecting him to offer me a chair. Instead he took a ring of keys from his belt, opened the case, reached in, took out the lantern and handed it to me telling me to take it to the table in the corner by the window and to be careful not to drop it. I very carefully carried the lantern – the one that Guy Fawkes had been carrying when he was arrested - across the room, placed it carefully on the table, sat down and spent the next three hours happily drawing away with my 2b and smudge stick, the attendant occasionally popping back to make sure everything was okay. It was a pretty good drawing when it was finished – I wonder what happened to it.
Guy Fawkes lantern, a small significant piece of history - in my hands… incredible!

And like 'penny for the guy' - I don't think that would happen today either.

So that’s it:
Remember, remember the fifth of November - Gunpowder, treason and plot. - I see no reason why gunpowder, treason - Should ever be forgot...
Now, light the blue touch-paper and stand back please.