Bonfire memories.(THE STRAGGLER)(Guy Fawkes Night)(Column)

 
   Please to remember 
   The Fifth of November 
   Gunpowder, treason, and plot! 
 

OH, I remember. My very earliest Guy Fawkes Nights were family affairs. Dad would have made up a modest bonfire in the back yard and bought a box of assorted fireworks from our local store, the same place where we got our newspapers, candy, and soda. When darkness had fallen and we could already hear fireworks going off in the neighborhood, we'd put our winter coats on, troop out down the garden, and light the bonfire. It had a rough-made Guy on it, of course, stuffed with back copies of Dad's Daily Mirror, and it was very thrilling to watch the Guy go up in flames and to wonder darkly how things would proceed with an actual person there. You had to have a Guy on your bonfire. The only place that didn't was St. Peter's School in York, alma mater of the actual Guido Fawkes, where it was felt that burning an alumnus in effigy showed poor school spirit.

You got a good selection of fireworks in those boxes. Lamest were the volcanos, conical things that you set on the ground and lit the apex of. They sputtered out varicolored flames and sparks. A small step up on the excitement scale were Roman candles, cylindrical and held in the hand (lit end away from you, of course). The Catherine wheel was a long thin tube of paper stuffed with powder and wound in a spiral around a small wooden disk. You nailed the disk to (in our case) one of the poles that supported the family clothesline. Once lit, the thing spun round, emitting a lovely circular display of flames. Then there were bangers, of course: You lit them, threw them on the ground, put your fingers in your ears, and waited for the bang. More exciting was the jumping jack, which banged many times in quick succession, everyone knocking into each other in the semi-darkness to get out of its way. My favorites were the rockets, always on a long stick. You put the stick into an empty milk bottle, lit the taper, and stood back. My sister, in common with most girls, preferred "sparklers"--lengths of wire coated to halfway along with some hard substance that burned with a fizzing white brilliance. In the darkness of a small-town November night you could write your name in the air with a sparkler before it burned down, the light so bright it lingered on the retina. I remember, I remember.

When I was a little older, with the liberty that came to older children in that time, and in every previous time, back to Tom Sawyer and beyond, but which has since been abolished in the interest of, what? I forget--when I was a little older, I say, I joined in setting up the neighborhood boys' bonfire. It was an immense thing, twelve feet high or more, on some waste ground nearby. Scrap wood and old furniture--discarded sofas or armchairs were in great demand at this time of year--had been diligently piled up for weeks before. The great fear was that some idiot from the neighborhood, or some commando squad from a rival neighborhood, would sneak in and torch your bonfire. Sentries were posted, as best this could be managed ...