Bonfire Night
by
Peter Knowles
Bonfire Night
Copyright © 2010 Peter Knowles
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

Fiction

Bonfire Night
It was coming up to Bonfire Night and as soon as the shops had fireworks for sale then all our money got spent on Penny Bangers, Sky Rockets, Roman Candles and Jumping Crackers and of course the obligatory penny book of matches to light them with.
No, in those days you didn’t need to be of a certain age to buy them, the shopkeeper could sell to anyone.
We didn’t get into that much trouble with the fireworks. Honest we didn’t and like all kids we never saw the danger in these things, they were just another way of having fun. 
Throwing the jumping crackers at girls feet and laughing while they screamed out loud, skipped and jumped about trying to get away from them, which was always in vain, because the cracker always seem to jump in the same direction that the girls did. How did the crackers know which way the girls were going to jump?
Now the Penny Bangers, the Sky Rockets and Roman Candles were a different matter, they were our ammunition, our way of wagering war.

Then there was the other side of Bonfire Night, ‘Bunny Wooding’, the collecting of basically anything that would burn, but to make the bonfire last longer we needed logs because everything else, rubbish, old furniture and most other things burnt too fast and the only place to get logs was by chopping down trees in Burke’s Wood which was owned by the local farmer and private land with signs that read ‘Trespassers will be shot’, but that didn’t scare us, we needed the logs.

On one of these bunny wooding expeditions, the Lad borrowed without asking, his dads axe and saw from his tool box.
He sat half way up a massive tree hacking away at one of the thickest branches; the sound could be heard for miles echoing around the wood disturbing all the wildlife.
“Timber” shouted the Lad when the branch finally plummeted to the ground.
“Burke” I shouted, noticing first his dogs then Burke himself advancing over the hill towards the wood.
“Who you calling a berk” shouted the Lad who was still up the tree.
“Not you, the farmer, he’s coming this way, quick run” I shouted back.
There was a loud bang from the farmer’s shotgun being fired into the air to scare us and we could hear the sound of his dogs barking getting closer.
“Oh! Heck” replied the Lad, falling more than climbing back down the tree then jumping the last ten feet or so and hitting the ground with one hell of a bump, he picking himself up grabbed the saw and the branch he had just chopped down he set off trying to run, struggling to drag the branch behind him, he wasn’t going to leave it for love nor money.
We managed to get away and triumphantly he dragged his trophy through the streets to the bonfire site, which was when he realised he hadn’t got his dads axe.
“Have you got the axe?” he asked.
“No you had it up the tree” I replied.
“Oh! No, I’ve left it stuck in the tree, my dad will kill me” he said.
He replaced the saw back in the tool box and decided that the best thing to do was to keep his mouth shut and if his dad asked where the axe was he would deny all knowledge of knowing anything about it.
After a while he thought he had got away with it, his dad never asked about the axe, it had been a good plan until one day his mother told him he had to stay in until his dad got home from work.
All hell broke loose when his dad arrived home and produced the axe from the cupboard under the kitchen sink where the tool box was stored.
How did the farmer know who’s axe it was, well what the Lad hadn’t noticed at the time was, It had his address burnt into the wooden handle.

When all the fuel for the fire was found, begged, stolen and borrowed it was piled up on the field near the colliery ready for the big night, once there we had to stand guard over it and a camp was always made in the middle so we could keep warm and shelter from the rain, we would stay until late at night or at least until we thought that the rival gangs in the area had gone home and wouldn’t steal our wood or even set fire to it. 
The competition was fierce and this is where the Bangers, Rockets and Roman Candles came into it.
The Bangers were thrown like hand grenades, sometimes half a dozen held together with an elastic band, this method depended on how low our stock of ammunition was, now that made one hell of a bang, the Rockets could also be thrown, though we didn’t have very much control over where they would fly and sometimes they would do a U-turn and fly back at us also you had to throw them before they started fizzing or you got burnt, the best way was to place them in a bit of old metal tubing stuck into the ground at a very low level so that when it went off in would fly about two feet off the ground straight at the enemy before exploding in a bright ball of fire, the Roman Candles were better, they could be aimed by using another piece of metal tubing with the end flattened and bent into the shape of a gun, holding the bent end and a Roman Candle was pushed into the open end of the tube, lit and pointed in the direction you wanted the fireballs to fly in.

“Enemy” shouted the Lad, letting off a rocket into the darkness which skimmed the ground and bounced at the feet of a group of lads running towards us before it burst into a ball of fire.
“Charge” shouted a voice.
“Get them, burn their bunny wood” cried out another.
With bangers being thrown and exploding in all directions and the Lad stood like a war hero, holding the bent metal tube at arm’s length, with a Roman Candle stuck in the end firing fire balls at them, sometimes hitting more than one, it was like a battle zone and a miracle that no one got seriously burned, eventually the enemy retreated and all fell silent again.
“That’ll show them” said the Lad, blowing the smoke off the end of the barrel of his gun like some Wild West cowboy.
“Anyone wounded?” I shouted like the commanding officer of some elite fighting unit.

The next night we attacked them and successfully managed to set fire to their bunny wood with a well aimed rocket, victorious we returned to our own camp to find that someone had nicked two of our best logs, we had left Peapod on guard to defend it while we were away but there was no sign of him, he must have run off, when we did meet up with him the next day he said we were taking too long and thought we weren’t coming back so he went home, no one believed him, we would have been better off leaving Rita to defend the camp but she was our best grenade thrower and was needed for the battle, well at least we were the winners, two logs versus a whole bonfire, no contest.

The night before Bonfire night was another great occasion ‘mischievous night’ where we would roam around playing pranks on everyone and anyone. We didn’t cause any damage, well at least I don’t think we did and we didn’t hurt any animals, unlike two lads we came across who were trying to tie a jumping cracker to a cat’s tail. 
The Lad grabbed the front of each of their jackets one in each hand and threatened what he would do to them if they didn’t let the cat go, they started to argue with him so he let him go of them, I was thinking he was going to fight them but instead he lit a banger telling one of them he would shoved it up his arse and see how he liked it, they soon let the cat go, throwing the banger to one side just before it went off we watched the two lads run away.

After raiding our mothers sewing baskets for bobbins of cotton preferable black or dark coloured so it couldn’t be seen in the dark we would go and play ‘Knock Knock’ where one of us would sneak into someone’s garden and tie one end of the cotton to the door knocker, we would then hide behind the wall or hedge and gently pull on the cotton making the door knocker bang against the door, someone would then answer the door but there was no one there, the secret behind this was to know just when to let out more cotton from the bobbin to compensate for when the door was opened or the cotton would break, we could do this over and over again until the person realised what was happening or the cotton broke.
Another thing we did with the cotton was make a spider’s web along the footpath that ran down the side of the local pub, most people used this for a short cut to get to and from the pub, on each side of the pathway was a tall chain link fence and we would weave the cotton from side to side at head height crossing the footpath until most of it was covered from end to end, when people walked along the path they would walk into the cotton, which would break, they would then wave their arms about like mad trying to find out what was in the way. This game got a bit boring after awhile because the cotton had to be replaced every time someone walked through it and more often than not we would run out of cotton and no one would dare venture home to try and get more.

Other pranks were ‘Making the Lion Roar’ this was done by stuffing newspaper into the bottom of the drainpipe outside someone’s house and lighting it. This was supposed to make a roaring sound inside the house and scare the occupants, I’m not sure it really worked because no one ever came outside to see what the noise was.

Setting fire to the contents of dustbins and leaving a couple of unlit bangers laying on the lid, when the bin got hot enough it would ignite the blue touch paper and the bangers would go off though not always at the same time and sometimes they didn’t go off at all it depended on how quickly the fire was discovered, in those days the dustbins were short stubby metal bins not the plastic wheelie bins of today, the amusing part of this was watching the lady of the house running out with a washing up bowl full of water to extinguish the flames, in their haste most of the water usually ended up spilt down themselves.
The Lad set fire to his own bin, then set the bangers on the lid and we hid behind the wall as usual, even after the bangers had gone off no one came out of the house, so disappointed we went off to do other things leaving the fire in the bin to burn its self out.
The next morning the Lad was sent to put some rubbish in the bin and picking up the lid which was still hot from the fire the night before he burnt his hand quite badly and had to go to hospital to have it seen to, his reward for this was another clip around the ear when his mother found out he was the one who had set the bin on fire in the first place, saying something about ‘Poetic Justice’, we didn’t understand what she meant at the time, what did poetry have to do with it, anyway the best thing of all according to him was the big bandage he had to show off to the rest of us with some fanciful tale about how he had saved an old lady from getting hit by a firework that someone had thrown and how he had caught it in mid air and how it had gone off in his hand, in a way he was quite proud of his bandage.
No one believed him about the old lady until later that day when an old lady and a younger man stopped us in the street and asked the Lad if he was the one who had saved her from the firework the night before. Thinking he was in trouble again he was a bit reluctant to admit it.
“Are you sure it’s him mother?” asked the younger man.
“Aye I am sure, I would know that Davy Crocket hat anywhere” replied the woman.
“Here and thank you very much for helping her, she’s eighty six you know, and the firework could have killed her” said the man pushing Half a Crown into the Lad’s hand.
“Aye God bless you lad” said the old lady patting him in the head and walking away linking her son’s arm.
“Thanks” replied the Lad waving goodbye to them.
“So you really did save an old lady?” I asked still not really believing it was true.
“Told you I did but you all called me a liar but I’ve now got Half a Dollar to prove it” he replied.
Bonfire night duly arrived, which meant the war was over for another year,  a good time was had by all, baked potatoes, pie and peas, parkin cake, bonfire toffee, toffee apples and a proper fireworks display, everyone was there, all our parents and neighbours.