Guy Fawkes Days and Nights to Remember

We had firework days every year, so important to the family. Granddad and Nan always there with jacket potatoes and butter. Always a Guy with a papier maché mask, made from my old pyjamas, gone too small, stuffed with News of The Worlds, Mirrors and Pictorials collected and hidden from the dustbin lorries through September and October. Old wood and Privet cuttings, dried since the summer, piled in a heap over the dugout potato patch.

Weekly payments into the corner newsagent's (I forget his name) firework club. Two-bob a week? I never knew how much: five pounds the target. An evening audience with Brocks and Standard when all was quiet, to choose the size of rockets; Catherine wheels; Roman candles (some held by hand on a wooden stick) and (not too many!) penny bangers. For a treat, aeroplanes with RAF roundels that made a noise and spun out of control.

Creep in visits to the cool front-room to survey the bright coloured tubes promising more than they ever delivered. A quick check that no one would hear while I stroked and shook the most mysterious to see how they rattled.

Hoping for a dry night – and there weren’t many. ‘If it rains we’ll do it on Saturday’. It didn’t last long, the bonfire still burnt after the show; a glowing reminder till well after midnight. Granddad lit rockets. Dad kept Catherine wheels spinning with a gloved hand and made sure the box was closed when the Jacks Jumped, dramatically scaring Mum – I didn’t like Roman candles, but they were Nan’s favourite – sometimes we had really big Vesuviases.

Misty smoke-filled mornings on the sixth, searching streets that smelled of gunpowder for trophies of fallen rockets, cold and dead with blackened sticks. Sometimes rare finds: red plastic caps blown off by aerial stars of red, white and green. The bigger the better for playground boasting.

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Forgotten memories that never fail to rise each time we AAAH and OOOH – with the hands of the grandkids in mine – at clinically safe Lakeside displays.