Last updated 13:13, Thursday, 06 November 2008

WHAT A desperately dull affair Bonfire Night has become in these Nanny State times.

I could hardly believe my eyes when I received a press release the other week announcing that not only were the fire brigade sticking their hoses into this most cherished of childhood traditions, but the police were to be involved as well.

Risk assessments, home visits, checks with neighbours, no building bonfires without consent, removal of bonfires built before November 5 – is nothing sacred?

A dedicated team of council killjoys was even set up to root out anyone with a spark of individuality and social responsibility, and doubtless take them away to the County Hall dungeons for “retraining.”

I find it hard to imagine what sort of reception the dead hand of officialdom would have had if it had stretched out to encompass the bonfires of my childhood.

Virtually every home had its own bonfire – Bonfire Night was a time for families, not for crowd control and the Anti-Roman Candle SWAT team.

It was second only to Christmas, when four or five generations would gather to eat burnt and blackened raw potatoes, which had been dug out of the fire, to munch parkin, and to pull out all their fillings with super-strength treacle toffee.

Bonfire Night then was not the sanitised, supervised and squeaky clean spectacle we have to put up with today.

It actually started in August, when boredom set in after the first couple weeks of the school summer holidays, and the decision was taken to start collecting bonfire wood.

Every field for miles around was combed for fallen branches, or indeed, anything that would burn, and was then carefully transported to the back garden to be stacked.

There was also the annual trawl round the neighbourhood, politely inquiring whether there was any old furniture being disposed of, which would give bulk to the coming conflagration.

Three-piece suites were accepted with relish, because everyone knew that once you slashed open the hessian backing, there would be a fortune in small change in the bowels of every armchair and settee.

They would frequently disgorge enough half crowns and three penny bits to purchase additional fireworks to augment the already impressive purchases that had been made over the preceding weeks.

The display was made up of small, individual fireworks, costing a couple of pennies a time, with names like Golden Rain, Fairy Snow or Vesuvius, which were actually very tame, but amused the old ladies and small children.

We always bought catherine wheels, which were attached to a fence post with a pin, and spun with well-oiled precision – until the blue touch paper was lit, when they immediately fell to the ground and fizzled into disappointing oblivion.

Then there were the rockets, launched from a million milk bottles to blaze across the star-spangled sky – it never rained on Bonfire Night.

The main attractions, though, were bangers, which came in various strengths.

You could hold a Penny Banger in your mouth, without any risk of your hat being blown off, but a Threepenny Cannon was a different prospect altogether.

This short and stubby piece of pyrotechnics looked like a Wile E Coyote stick of dynamite, and was just as lethal.

My brother once tried to put one out by dropping it in a galvanised bucket of water – it blew the bottom out of the bucket.

He also fashioned his own home-made firearm, which would almost certainly have him locked up today. It involved a sawn-off dropped handlebar from an ancient racing bicycle, one end of which had been hammered flat.

The idea was to drop a lit Threepenny Cannon in the other end, and then drop in a handful of gravel, which would then come out like a hail of grapeshot.

The prototype misfired badly, and his cryptic diary entry read: “Tested banger gun – joined the Black Hand Gang – got the belt.”

Bonfire Night was always on November 5 – none of this dragging out the event over a week or more.

This was because November 6 was spent combing the fields once more, and finding as many as possible of the spent rockets that had illuminated the skies the night before.

They, along with all the other dead fireworks, were then all piled on to the remains of the bonfire, which was blown back to life again, and there was always enough powder left to create another display.