Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Nov 5, 2007

Thinking Out Loud: Setting things on fire

Three years ago, give or take eight time zones, I set off my first ever firework.

When I was a kid, we had access to sparklers, and rockets, and sets of Standard-brand fireworks that cost a lot of money and fizzled out in seconds. I was expecting much the same, but they’d come a long time since then.

The fireworks were always tucked inside a metal box with ritual carefulness and kept well out of sight. Being a good kid, I never went a-hunting, and the waiting made Bonfire Night itself all the more special. Usually we’d borrow the farmer’s field on the edge of our home–we lived in the last duplex on the lane and beyond that was just fields–and we’d set up a bonfire and maybe burn a guy. A guy? An effigy of Guy Fawkes, the technician who was caught under the Houses of Parliament in 1605 with several barrels of gunpowder. Oops.

So there was light, and sparklers, and games of Star Wars pretending they were light sabers, all muffled up in thick heavy coats and boots and mittens and scarves (and the hated woolly hat). Our breath would condense on the cold English November air and then the parents, usually the dads, would roll out the box of fireworks and we’d set them off and ooh as if they were the most royal and magnificent of shows. As, in fact, they were.

We’d feed on food so hot that it burnt the hands and the mouth: jacket potatoes, pork pie and mushy peas (pie n peas), crunchy hard home-made toffee, parkin, and toffee apples too. More things to steam and warm us up in the winter night’s air–a veritable feast.

The catherine wheel would always fizzle out or zoom off the fence and the Roman candle would always be a disappointment and the rockets would pop up from their milk bottle launch pads (glass in those days) and vanish. We learned from an early age to drop the sparklers the moment they expired, and the next morning they’d be fetched and disposed of. It never seemed to rain, but it was always crisply and wonderfully cold.

I got those fireworks to share with my nieces, one a little too young still to enjoy them and one bursting at the seams with excitement. And especially with the elder, I could see the kid I was reflected, all bundled up with an excited gleam in both her eyes. When I stalked up to that firework with my lit taper I felt different, somehow, as though I’d crossed some unknown barrier from childhood to adulthood. Now, I was the one in charge of the fireworks, the ones I’d bought, and now I was part of the posse of adults admonishing the young’ens to stay far, far back.

It was a subtle rite of passage–and not quite without pain. It brought with it the sense that nothing would ever be quite the same again: and it isn’t, and it won’t be. I live in a country where they don’t have this celebration, and I live five thousand miles from a country where they do. There are some days of the year when that divide of distance is completely impossible to forget.

But at least the fireworks were grand: and so are the memories.