Please to remember the 5th of November

Red and green and silver like the scattered beads of a broken necklace are the multi coloured starburst followed closely by the retort of their launching explosion.

Definitely sounds like Guy Fawkes Night doesn’t it? 

Please to remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
We see no reason
why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot! 

When I was a kid the fireworks were less impressive than today’s expensive and spectacular offerings. But we thought they were great. Sparklers and Catherine wheels, and rockets that went off with a satisfying whoosh.

But along with the smell of gunpowder and singed fingers came fear, and bad dreams.

We’d make a ‘guy’ and trundle it around calling 

Guy guy guy,

Penny for the guy, Hang him on a lamp post
And leave him there to die.

One year the ‘guy’ we tossed onto or back yard bonfire was made of granddad’s old clothes.  I had nightmares for weeks after. It was much to real and similar the old man that I loved.

Year after year a huge bonfire was built on Petone beach and fired into life on Guy Fawkes Night. That is until one year the surrounding crowed surged forward and a child was pushed into the fire. 

Mum told me that we were celebrating someone’s gruesome death, a man called Guy Fawkes. He was Hung drawn and quartered, not a nice way to die. Caught in the act of trying to blow up the houses of parliament in 1605 the gunpowder plot players, betrayed by one of their own, were found guilty of treason and sentenced to a horrible death.

 So here were all these hundreds of years later still setting off fireworks but I wonder how many of the kids today, or even the adults really know why.