A Somerset Lad

At the end of the evening of 5th November, there was always a certain note of melancholy.

In the morning, the bonfire that had burned brilliantly the night before would be no more than a pile of grey ashes.  If the night had been dry, a few embers might remain that would glow orange if you blew on them.  It being November, there had probably been rain, or at least a heavy dewfall, and the powdery wood ash would stick to your shoes if you trod on it.    The odd remnant of the Standard Fireworks would be found in the garden. The bright colours that had filled the box that had been bought in a Somerton newsagent’s would have been scorched black.

Bonfire Night was never a big deal. The fire was built from the dead cuttings from trimmed hedges and the pyrotechnics came one item at a time: one Roman candle, one Catherine wheel, one rocket, each of them was savoured.

However ordinary in retrospect, the occasion was special at the time.  Perhaps we were easily pleased.

Special moments in the year weren’t too frequent – Christmas; the annual village outing to Weymouth; going camping in Devon, the next county.  But every one of them was remembered and pondered for long afterwards.

Perhaps the inflationary principles that apply to money, apply also to experiences.  The more the money supply is increased, the less worth each banknote has.  In a similar way, perhaps the more the supply of experiences is increased, the less memorable each of those experiences has.

On the other hand, perhaps the passing of the years has magnified memories, perhaps they did not occupy then the place they now occupy in the landscape of reminiscence.  Maybe the memories remain clearly, but the moments themselves – with the exception of Christmas – were approached without a great sense of anticipation and were marked without a significant awareness they might be of the stuff that would be recalled decades later.

There would have been no consciousness that the bonfires and fireworks might ever be worth being recalled. If an onlooker had to discern what it was that would be remembered, could they have done so?

As there are moments in those distant decades that remain as vivid as a rocket bursting in the night sky, so there will be moments as significant and intense for children today as were the special moments of the past. Perhaps the landscapes of their memories are dotted with many more moments than enjoyed by schoolboys fifty years ago, but in fifty years’ time, there will be someone remembering vividly Bonfire Night of 2021.

It is fifty-five years since I won the prize.

31st October 1966 was Punkie Night at Long Sutton Primary School, not that many of us would have had pumpkins with which to make Hallowe’en lanterns.  For most of us, it would have been more appropriate to have called it mangold wurzel night.

Mangold wurzels were grown on the local farms as winter fodder for cattle and were usually pink or purple or orange on the outside.  In the absence of the exotic pumpkin, they did the job perfectly.

There was a competition for the best punkie, but when you are six years old competitions don’t mean very much.  It was the occasion that mattered.  We all walked around the village green with our punkies lit before going into the village school for our Hallowe’en party.

My Dad had made my punkie. It was a longish mangold that had been hollowed out and had narrow, evil looking eyes.  The mouth was wide with matchsticks at odd angles for jagged teeth.  The hair was the best bit.  He had combed out lengths of coarse twine to give the punkie a full head of hair, but had plaited this on either side to give it pig tails.

After the party in the main room of the school we were all made to sit on chairs set out in rows.  I was in the second row, watching the proceedings over someone’s shoulder.  Various announcements were made and then the prize for the best punkie was announced.

I was so surprised that when I went forward for the prize I felt more bemused than excited.  I was even more bemused when I got the prize.  I walked back to my seat and was asked what it was by the children around – I didn’t know.

I looked at it.  It was a booklet with pale blue pages, pages that were wider than they were long.  Each page had lines of darker blue squares, two rows of four squares across each page.  The only time I had seen squares of colour on a page was on a card my Nan had got from the paint shop, but those squares were different colours, these squares were all blue.  My moment of glory had ended in confusion.

My Dad explained afterwards to me that it was a National Savings book.  You bought savings stamps and stuck them onto the pages, over the darker blue squares.  The stamps were half a crown and the first stamp had been stuck into the book for me.

Half a crown?  Couldn’t they have just given me the money? The sense of losing out remains!

My sister’s Chihuahua and Maltese were ready for their evening walk. They barked impatiently waiting for their leads.

Only as we stepped out of the door did I remember how dark nights in rural Somerset could be. No light from the sky broke through the thick cloud cover. Once we would have stepped back inside the door to find a flashlight. Instead, smartphone torches provided the illumination that would once have depended on Ever Ready.

The dog end of October always seemed a time when the year was dying. days and months were in double figures and the disappearance of the daylight was always accentuated by the turning back of the clocks. The deep gloom of the road toward the windmill captured the mood of the season.

“Less than eight weeks to the solstice,” I said to the night air.

The mild breeze grew into a blustery wind of a force that would make sea travel unpleasant, its presence audible in a deep moan from the overhead electricity power lines.

The sound brought a momentary recall of a day in childhood.

The road is a place where the wind blows steadily and consistently, as one might expect of a place where a windmill was built two hundred years ago, but there would be moments each winter when the steady wind would grow to gale force and there would be a threat of damage.

The day was one when my father was away, probably working at Lossiemouth or at Kinloss, air stations in Scotland where the air came down from the Arctic, places that made Somerset seem a year round summer land.

Perhaps the weather forecast had been severe for it was with a sense of urgency that my mother gave instructions to “batten down the hatches.” Anything that could be stored away was moved, covers were weighted down, doors and windows were secured. It seemed activity more appropriate to the high seas than to a council house garden distant from the coast.

The storm arrived with a wail of the wind through the wires, the sound a lament, a Banshee cry, a mourning for the loss of the summer and the daylight.

Since then it has been a mournful sound, a sound of the restriction, the isolation brought by the dark months of the year.  The wind blows in mocking tones, aware of its power to bring confinement, to intimidate, to spoil. On a late October evening, it was an anticipation of winter.