Now I can’t quite remember when Halloween assumed a degree of importance in our family.
It certainly wasn’t there when I was growing up in South East London.
Back then and well into the 1960s, the big event was Bonfire Night, which began in the month before with kids collecting for fireworks money on street corners and outside shops.
The amount of effort that was involved, ranged from elaborate effigies of a Guy, usually sitting in an old pram, to a handful of kids with nothing more than a hastily made sign and a cheeky smile.
How much money ever went on fireworks is debatable, and given the amount that might be collected, I suspect the sweet shop made a better choice for the money.
And mother was always most emphatic that this was just a form of begging, which while it was harsh, pretty much deterred me from engaging in the practice ……….. that and the simple fact that on the odd occasion I did try it on with friends we made nothing.
The kids were still in evidence in the late 1970s, but pretty much seem to have died out by the end of the decade, and the passing of that tradition seems to coincide with the elevation of the visitation of trick or treat at the front door.
I have to say I absorbed mother’s approach and didn’t encourage our lads from knocking on, and by and large they didn’t do much of it, judging that they had more chance of eating the sweets I left out at the front door, than braving the cold and dark and uncertain response from the people behind the doors.
But that said we did go in for the pumpkins, and at one stage had four, all artistically altered with scary faces and candles, which for a while were done by the boys, but latterly fell to me.
Putting them outside was less successful, and more than one was stolen.
All of which I reflected on this weekend in town, when along with the Halloween signs, paper pumpkins, and vendors offering up plastic skeletons which glowed in the dark, we came across the ghostly procession and the
“creepy trail across the city, [from]
the Strolling Bones and the poisonous maze”.*
I chose to decline the poisonous maze in St Ann’s Square, but took plenty of pictures of the Strolling Bones, as it wound its way through the square.
The grumpy side of me continues to wonder about both these autumnal activities which if I am being fair brighten up cold and dark nights.
But Bonfire Night, remains a celebration of when a group of 17th century conspirators, plotted an act of terrorism, justified by the increasingly harsh persecution of Catholics by successive governments during the Tudor, and early Stuart period.
The event is made all the more questionable, given the arguments of some revisionist historians that the Gunpowder Plot may well have owed much to an unpopular Government seeking to turn a vague and outlandish plan by a group of known Catholic dissidents into an act of horrific terrorism which when discovered left the authorities looking very much like the
“good guys”
As for Halloween, I have never taken to the idea of witches, dislike pumpkins, and can leave those Hollywood scary movies, which usually involve much loud noise, plenty of screams and the sacrifice of lots of innocent people.
But I concede that Halloween has a long tradition, going back beyond the Christian tradition to one rooted in folk customs and beliefs common amongst Celtic people's.
And my own family still make much of the Day of The Dead, which is celebrated in Naples, and have over the years returned to the city of their birth to take part in the event.
Leaving me to make sure we have the bags of sweets by the front door, on the night of Halloween, and try look out for the fireworks in the sky, a few days later.
As for the carved pumpkins, they have long been consigned to history, while I still wonder about the Catholic conspiracy, remembering that down the ages, Governments have fastened on groups or ideas which if exploited can be turned to the advantage of the establishment, whether it be The Protocols Of Zion, the Zinoviev letter, or the destruction of the Reichstag.
Location; Manchester
Pictures;
Halloween visitations in Manchester, 2019, from the collection of Andrew Simpson
