The Bonfires of Yesteryear

I've always liked Autumn, it's my favourite season. As a child I used to look forward to those first nights after the clocks had gone back an hour, bringing the darkness on to around the time you headed home from school. There would be an edge of frost and smoke in the air, and you would think, "Bonfire Night is coming soon!" Except now the early autumn nights are generally mild and wet – very mild and very wet lately – and nobody at all lights a bonfire in their garden on the 5th November. It's not just that a lot of the energy has been drained out of the occasion by Hallowe'en: the very idea of filling the streets with smoke from fires and fireworks belongs to a world that has now passed into history, along with the open-hearth fires in every house in every street with their sooty smoking chimneys, and a morning harvest of cold grey ash to be cleared and dumped.

In the 1950s and 60s, as they had for so many decades previously, the children of every household would have scavenged every scrap of combustible material for miles around to build a bonfire heap at the end of the garden or, where this was impractical, helped to build an enormous communal pyre on any suitable green or wasteland. By 9 o'clock at night on the 5th the smoke would be drifting in thick layers illuminated by fires, flashes, and haloed streetlamps. You could point a torch up, and its clear-cut beam was a stiff, smoky wedge, like an anti-aircraft spotlight. In our town – a New Town largely populated by people cleared from the slums of East London, devastated in the Blitz not so long before – strong memories and emotions were evoked by the sights, smells and sounds. You might say that the War was the invisible guest at everyone's firework party.

Or perhaps, the Wars. The stuffed "guy" that burned on top of everyone's bonfire was Hitler, the Kaiser, Napoleon, Guy Fawkes, the King of Spain, Harald Hardrada, and maybe even Julius Caesar: every bogeyman who had ever chanced his arm against the truculent tribes of these islands. It was a night for telling tales, as rockets crackled and popped overhead, and potatoes baked in the bonfire embers; "swinging the lamp", as my father's generation called it, a naval expression that implied such stories might have acquired a little exaggeration and polish over the years.

There are still fireworks, of course, although nowhere near as many, and there are official public bonfires, but somehow the spirit of it all has been lost, when children haven't spent the preceding weeks scouring the woods for sticks, or making a stuffed effigy with a moustachioed paper-maché mask for a face out of an old shirt and trousers, in order to squat beside it and beg small change for fireworks: "A penny for the guy!". The tribal memories are weaker, too. "How I endured the Great House Price Collapse of 1987" or "Tales from Lockdown" are hardly worth swinging a lamp for, compared to hair-raising yarns from the Somme, Dunkirk, or Monte Cassino. Our world seems that bit thinner, more disposable, slightly fake; even the weather no longer lives up to the occasion, and every year the frosts that make the moon shine and the stars glitter seem to come a little later, and the equinoctial gales that shake the sticks and conkers down from the trees a little wilder and more unpredictable.

What was originally known as "Gunpowder Treason Day" – but then successively became known as Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night, and now most generally as Fireworks Night – is supposed to be all about remembering – "Remember, remember, the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot!" – but is now almost entirely about pyrotechnic spectacle. What little we do remember of the actual causes of the commemoration has lost practically all of its historical flavour, reflected by those changes in name. I can't speak for the inhabitants of more sectarian cities like, say, Belfast, Liverpool, or Glasgow, but I don't think the original anti-Catholic and royalist element has been particularly prominent in living memory. However, you don't have to be a practising neopagan to think that a bonfire festival at this time of year does have deeper roots and resonances. It is notable that November 5th falls exactly midway between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, and thus coincides nicely with the Celtic Samhain festival (pronounced "sar-win"), generally marked on 1st November. It is also an unlikely coincidence that practically everything known about that ancient festival seems like a mash-up of Hallowe'en and Bonfire Night, if you substitute turnips for pumpkins and the ritual sacrifice of some scapegoat figure for burning a "guy".

But I should resist this slide into melancholy reflection, or I'll end up thinking about what has happened to Christmas: difficult to avoid, now that the mince pies and Christmas puddings have already been crowding the supermarket shelves since mid-October. I don't think this feeling is merely the reflex nostalgia of a man approaching old age. So many of us in the "first world"  live with the paradox that the more materially comfortable our lives have become over the years, the more widely Good Things are available to more of us, the less sweet they seem to taste. Like the very wealthy, even we ordinary folk can get bored with the uniform OK-ness of our lives, and look back with something resembling regret to a time when the Good Things were tasted just two or three times a year.

Well, OK, perhaps this is just the reflex nostalgia of a man approaching old age, remembering when simple things like oranges, nuts, and even baked potatoes were seasonal treats, and beef and chicken were luxuries, reserved for special occasions, not a cheap staple bought ready-jointed in multi-packs from the supermarket. Nobody in their right mind wants to go back to smoke-filled streets, unappetising meals, or lives shortened by endless, repetitive, unrewarding labour.

So you might justifiably say that this bitter-sweet regret is a down-market, own-brand, off-the-peg version of nostalgie de la boue, an aristocratic vice in which we can all now afford to indulge. But I prefer to think that I am remembering with pleasure a time when we in Britain were passing out of some very bad times into some very good times, with just enough of the best of the bad times still surviving to add piquancy to the transition. When, for example, for the first time a nasty accident with a bonfire or a firework, however idiotic, led straight to hospital, with all necessary treatment free of charge, and even the poorest could depend on the state for housing and financial support. How miraculous that must have seemed to the pre-War generations, how heady the transformation must have felt, and how tenaciously we must now fight to prevent this precious legacy from going the way of Bonfire Night.