“I just don’t see the point” she said. “It’s pretty for a few seconds and then it’s gone. All that money…”
I didn’t say anything, because she was right. She didn’t see the point. The truth is you either do or you don’t. There is no logical argument to sway you from one side to the other. There is nothing logical about fireworks. There is only pretty for a few seconds. Actually, no, not just pretty, also exuberant, explosive, passionate, beauty, starlight, fountains of light, brightness against the dark.
Fireworks are joy made manifest. They are a complete waste of money, in the same way that all art and creativity is. That is almost their point. To put hard-earned pennies into a few seconds of joy.
It makes no sense.
But my parents did it every year for us as children. Back then, you could start buying fireworks earlier. You could buy them in ones and twos: a roman candle here, a catherine wheel there. You could stock-pile them against the night in question. They would undoubtedly baulk at the cost of today’s displays, but I wonder if the smaller version they brought me up on, in our back garden, was proportionately any less extravagant.
Of course, when I was a child no-one would dream of letting off fireworks in England on any other night of the year. They were inextricably associated with “bonfire night”, Guy Fawkes Night, the 5th of November. Nowadays they are available all year round from specialist suppliers (not in the shops) and are used to round off open-air rock concerts, or naval displays, or celebrate the New Year, or for all manner of other celebrations. Admitting my personal bias as a bonfire babe, I think this is a shame. We have lost the ‘once-a-year’ wonder of the whizz-bangs, and lit-up night skies.
Maybe the ubiquity is why my friend doesn't see the point anymore.
I remember the tiny bonfire in the corner of the council house garden. There was a greenhouse there later. I don’t know if that survived. Flats were built on the field beyond our fence, where the old green had provided a safe landing for our rockets. How excited we were by a single rocket, launched from a milk-bottle – in the days when milk bottles arrived on your doorstep long before the crack of dawn. Catherine Wheels were nailed to the shed wall, where they would spin round throwing their sparks in a graceful circle, which presumably did nothing to ease any lingering resentment the Saint might feel at the manner of her death, but brought smiles to our small faces.
We were awe-struck by a single Roman Candle showering its mulit-coloured fountain into the lawn. Names and messages wrote in the air with Sparklers. I remember the year I burnt my fingers on the London Lights – simple matches with a different chemical component in the head so that they flamed bright red or green. The standard treatment for minor burns back then was butter! Fat to the fire, can you believe it?
But that is what Bonfire Night was all about. Tradition. History. Old Wives’ Tales.
For a long time it was one of the few intrinsically English traditions to have survived…but it too has now gone.
To fully understand “Bonfire Night” we have to go back well before Guy Fawkes was handed to a priest in a small York Church, long before Christianity came to our shores, back to the days of the Celts and the ancient Brits. In those days the New Year fell at Samhain. This was end of Harvest – that we might call Autumn – and the onset of Winter. It might seem an odd time to celebrate a new
year – the return of the sun at the Solstice might make more sense, but that is a Viking festival – the cross-quarter days like Samhain come from older traditions in this place; they come from the Celts and Saxons, they come from being agriculturalists rather than sea-farers.
They sea-farers had more reason to watch the skies, but the common people of these islands had a greater focus on the land. As the last of their crops were stored away, and meat-stock was slaughtered and salted to see them through the hard months ahead, the farmers would then be facing a quiet time, a time of change when all was in the hands of the gods. It was a time to make peace with those gods who may have been neglected during the hard working, hard playing Summer months and ask for their help through the barren months ahead.
It was also a time of clearing the debris from the fields and a last making-good of the houses for the winter. Fires would be permanently lit in the villages and as they would also always be a threat, it would be a time of clearing away anything which might catch or carry flame. Reason enough to be lighting communal fires away in the field.
And in those dark days why would you would waste a large communal fire, when it could provide a focal point for a feast day? No-one knows how Samhain originated or when, but that it held strong sway is witnessed still in our holding to Hallowe’en. It is still a night when the doors are open between the natural and the supernatural worlds.
Lanterns are still lit to keep the ghouls at bay. Although the American pumkins are ever more prevalent, there are yet pockets where the traditional turnips or swedes are used.
I don’t hold to the day of the dead, or all Hallows, or all Souls. I reject the Christianisation of it, and I reject more so the Americanisation, commercialisation of it. I see both as attempts to tame the more ancient ‘new year’ fires.
It makes even less sense, then, logically, that I want to hold those bonfires to the 5th of November. Fires that root themselves in the events of 1605.
In that year a bunch of conspirators tried to blow up the House of Lords on a day when the King and the Lords and the Commons would all be gathered together, thus taking out the whole of the ruling infrastructure.
A decisive blow for independence of the subjugated minority – or a terrorist attack on the legitimate government? The only answer is to that question is ‘yes’. It was one of those, or the other, depending on which side you would have been on.
That ponderable is what has concerned the voices that continue to be raised against our November celebrations: that they are a glorification of terrorism. Those voices miss many points. Not least, that what is celebrated is that the plot failed. We burn the effigy of Guy a-top our fires at the behest of the ‘saved’ King (“let bonfires burn through-out the land”). Of course this foiling of the plot was as much a PR exercise as has been the subsequent loading of the blame onto poor Guy.
Let us back-track a second. King James I (& VI of Scotland) took the English throne upon the childless death of Elizabeth I. The country had ridden a switchback of religious acceptance and intolerance for over a century. Henry VIII had broken with Rome, his elder daughter “bloody” Mary had tried to lead the country back by murderous force, Elizabeth had lost herself, and the dynasty, in trying to play politics with faith. Whilst she kept the state vehemently Protestant, she allowed Catholics freedom of private worship, but insisted upon pain of conviction, public attendance at Protestant services. Those Catholics saw her death and unclear succession as a chance to regain their influence. James disappointed them. Within a few years there were those who saw the only way back into power as being the removal of the entire government, from the King down. The pomp and ceremony of the opening of Parliament seemed to provide a fine opportunity to get everyone in one fell swoop.
This was not one man’s bid for immortality.
Guy Fawkes takes the blame (and gets the fame), but he is just the symbol for the whole affair. He was merely the technician. Having served in the Spanish Catholic army, despite a Protestant upbringing in the north of England, he was a natural for “the cause”, but he was brought into the inner circle primarily because he was an explosives expert. The real players in the affair were Robert Catesby, Sir Everard Digsby, Ambrose Rookwood and the Wintour brothers, not to mention the Percy family, Earls of Northumberland. There were some 13 plotters in all. All rich, all influential, all wanting to become more so.
The plot remains a cause célebre, because it remains a source of mystery. Guy Fawkes' real identity is often challenged, no genuine portrait exists. No proof exists that the man captured is the babe christened in York. Even his name morphs from Guy to Guido, from Fawkes to Faulkes.
I think the reason the plot endures in the English psyche is partly because it failed, and a tad more so because it nearly worked!
The more rational amongst us don’t support terrorism, even ancient historic terrorism… but we do have a love of the under-dog. We admire the audacity of the attempt. We also have in embedded belief in the freedom of speech and the freedom of worship.
However much we condemn the action, if anyone still places an effigy of Guy upon their bonfires (does anyone still do that?) they will be celebrating justice and the continuance of our democratic and constitutional parliament…though maybe one or two might also be acknowledging that ‘just
maybe’ the plotters had a point: that democracy still continues to fail many of those it is meant to serve.
As a child I learned the verse
Remember, remember
the fifth of November
gunpowder, treason and plot
I see no reason, why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
But it has been. It has been as forgotten as the older traditions of Samhain.
I think the reason it held as long as it did was because we had a race memory of Samhain, the end of Harvest, the beginning of Winter, the communal clearing and firing. It is entirely coincidental (or synchronous) that the Plot fell close to that old 'new year', in precisely the way that All Hallows and everything around that is not. The date for All Hallows, from which we take Hallowe'en, was deliberately chosen to usurp the pre-existing fire festivals. To 'legitimise' them, which was always going to be easier than trying to eliminate them.
Now the tide sweeps in again, scouring away the memories and the meanings. Here, the local official celebrations go under the innocuous (i.e. meanignless) name of autumn lights. We are afraid to say Samhain, or Guy Fawkes, or Diwali, or whatever else might be held to be important. Yes all of those fall into this season of clearing and burning and festival – but to not allow each to name their own reason – in their own tradition – means that we all lose the purpose.
And my friend becomes right: that there is no point. Only a few seconds' prettiness.
I hold to a deepness. I hold to meaning.
I choose to remember those nights of my childhood. The bonfire in the corner, before the greenhouse was built there. The Catherine Wheels nailed to the shed. The Roman candles inthe yard. Rockets launched from milk bottles. I choose to remember being entranced by writing my name in the air with a sparkler. I remember burning my fingers. I remember the faces of my parents lit by firelight and overspill kitchen-light. I remember the cold and the smoke. I remember family.
I remember them because they were intrinsic to my birthday, and so fireworks still are. They are as much a part of my birthday as cake and candles. More so. Because in the years without cake I have still contrived – or others have for me – that there shall be fireworks in the sky.
I try not to resent the British politicians and economists who push every celebration or commemoration to the nearest weekend, so as not to disrupt production, rather than holding to the tradition. I want bonfires and fireworks to be on the 5th November – Remember, Remember - but we don’t. Not anymore. I doubt any of today’s young people could tell you who Guido Faulkes was, never mind Catesby and all the rest, or what it was all about.
To be honest, when I watch the bonfires I am not thinking about the Plot either. When I look into the bonfires, when I smell the woodsmoke, I am taken much further back in time, to the Samhain festivals. The clearing out of the deadwood, the burning of the old year, the welcoming of the new. The Celtic / Saxon versions of day of the dead. The end of harvest. The clearing out before the new planting. The salute to what has passed. And the welcome in fire of the year to come.
It is an accident of birth that I came in so close to Samhain. Or perhaps a choosing, if you’re of another way of looking at it.
In the Chinese way of thinking I am wood-water, so it is a kind of balancing that my Celtic / Saxon roots should grant me fire. Fire the element that feeds on wood, that is quenched by water.
We can over-think these things.
What I can tell you without thinking is that I love the scent of woodsmoke out in the open, that autumnal burning of the deadwood, the communal fires, the harking bark to story-telling and myth-making.
What I can tell you, without logical argument, is that I love fireworks now as much as I did decades ago.
I remember a year when Clive and I were driving back from my parents, and he slowed every time we caught sight of them way over across the Fens.
So here’s a thing: even though the spiritual meaning may have been subtracted from these traditions, even if no-one thinks about the history or the pre-history or any other why, even allowing for all the health & safety concerns, and how you may need to hold your pets indoors and comfort them against the noise, for all of that, I am not sorry: I love fireworks. Maybe I love them for the very short-lived-ness of them.
A few days after my birthday, I sat in my bedroom, with the blinds pulled up high so I could watch the sky beyond the rooftop over the road. It was a duel of fire and star-light. From left and right there rose up shimmering fountains of white falling starlets, there exploded bursts of red and green and white and azure and gold, all the chemical chimerical colours, explosions for no harmful purpose, gunpowder not intended to harm. Star-bursts. Memories of the big bang. Memories of my childhood. Flares like distress signals that then felling laughing in sprinkles back to earth. Shooting stars becoming entire galaxies of expanding light points.
Sheer joy.
Beauty for the sake of it.
Pretty for a few seconds.
Or in this case, for the best part of an hour. With sporadic bursts continuing later.
You either get it or you don’t.
If you don’t, I hope you have something else – something as equally pointless that brings you joy, because you see Joy wants to exist in the meaningless. Joy gives meaning to that which might otherwise have none. Finding joy and her cousins in the depths of the woods and the awe of the ocean and the full moon on a snow night is the easy part. Creating joy out of nothing more than saltpetre and fire-sparks that takes the kind of mind that knows we not only have to look for beauty, we also have to set about making it…even for a few seconds.
I wasn’t expecting a firework display that night. In fact I was in my bedroom early intending to sleep. Cracks and crinkles took me to the window, made me smile, kept me watching. Sprouted memories of other displays in other years, and of the years without them. This year has been an extended celebration of my birthday that started early, purely because it was when the group could all get together and continued through events and meetings and gigs and dancing and walks and all the things that bring me pleasure. It had ended, I thought, with a day of calm and quiet but I was wrong…this was the encore. Because my birthday isn’t really complete without fireworks.
A picture only of fire, because I was too enchanted to reach for my camera.
