Bonfire Night - Celia Rees

 I've been a History Girl since the very beginning and I've never landed on a really iconic date. That is about to change - I'm posting on November 5th! 

History Girls before me have pretty much covered the whole subject. You can read previous posts here, including my post on Lewes Bonfire in 2014. I confess to cheating a bit on that one because my posting date was 18th of the month but Lewes Bonfire was such a spectacle, I had to write about it.  

I was looking around, quite literally, for inspiration and found it on my kitchen wall. I have a Ravilious calendar and the illustration for this month is his painting November 5th. Painted in 1933, it is the view from the Kensington flat he shared with his wife, Tirzah. 

November 5th, Eric Ravilious, 1933

This painting immediately took me back to the garden of my parents' semi detached house in 1950's Solihull. After Christmas and my birthday, Bonfire Night, or Firework Night (the terms were interchangeable - we never called it Guy Fawkes Night) was the most important event in my calendar. Without in any way realising it, I was following the ancient festivals of the year's turning: my birthday is a few days before Midsummer, Bonfire Night is the Fire Festival that marks the start of winter and Christmas is the Winter Solstice. In those days, children seemed closer to the Old Ways. We played out all the time and were very attuned to the seasons. I would be looking forward to Bonfire Night as soon as summer was over. My friends and I would be making preparations from the beginning of September, buying fireworks as soon as they appeared in the shops. My favourite brand was Brock's. 

My favourite fireworks were Bangers,  Roman Candles, Mount Vesuvius Cones and Rockets. My brother's favourites were anything that made a very loud bang. I wasn't so keen on those, neither was the dog, but my brother was older than me and had more money, so he could afford Big Bangs. No-one liked Catherine Wheels, they were hard to light and fell off the fence. I also liked Sparklers and the strange and rather pointless Bengal Matches, does anyone remember them?

We would spend September and October collecting wood for the bonfire that my father built in the back garden. Adults would join in with this and donate any old wood that was lying about and any cuttings, clippings, pruning from the garden or the allotment. We would also collect clothes to make the Guy. An old pair of trousers and a jumper my mum stitched together and filled with newspaper, a stuffed stocking head and face and an old hat (it had to have a hat). 

 The bonfire would be constructed in the back garden, the guy perched on top. Dad would light the fire and when it was going well, all the conkers we'd collected through the Autumn would be thrown on to pop and crackle. It was a neighbourhood affair and everyone would be there. The dads let off the fireworks, we weren't allowed near them and we would wave sparklers. Last to be lit were the rockets and then we would have the sausages, baked potatoes and gingerbread that my mum had made. All over for another year. Well, not quite. We would spend the next day combing the streets for spent rockets, for some reason the sticks were highly prized. 

This year, I'll be staying in but I might make my mum's gingerbread, very dark and sticky with molasses, for old time's sake. 

Stay safe and look after the cats and dogs!

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

  

Along my book tour, a return to James Herriot Country, by Carol Drinkwater

I am in the north of England promoting my new novel, THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, which was published last week, 16th May.

Yesterday, my stop was organised by the White Rose Book shop in Thirsk. The event was held at the Rural Arts Centre, which is a rather lovely location in this fine old market town. My B & B accommodation was ten steps from the Herriot Museum. The Herriot Museum stands as a memorial to  the veterinary surgeon, Alf Wight, who practised his animal wizardry for almost his entire career here in this once-remote location. Agricultural England. Thirsk remained the home of his practice even after he had become a world-wide sensation with his series of memoirs recounting his life working in the Yorkshire Moors.

Alf was born in Sunderland in 1916. He died in Thirlby four miles outside Thirsk in 1995. By the time he passed away, Alf, whose pen name was James Herriot, was an an international sensation. Not only had his books sold by the millions in English and translation everywhere in the world, they had been the inspiration for two cinema films, ninety episodes of television plus two television 'specials', Alf brought recognition to this area of Yorkshire. Like almost no other - until perhaps The Hobbit films shot in New Zealand - Alf quite literally transformed the impact of tourism on north-east England. It is over forty years since we began shooting the TV series and The Herriot trail remains big business today.

 Alf with his wife, Joan. Joan was the inspiration for the character of Helen, the wife of James Herriot in the books. The role that I had the good fortune to play.

                                 Principal cast of the TV series All Creatures Great and Small. The actors surrounding me are (anti-clockwise) Mary Hignett, Peter David, Robert Hardy and Christopher Timothy.

Our filming actually took place in the Yorkshire Dales rather than the Yorkshire Moors so I didn't have many opportunities to visit Thirsk back in the days when I was shooting. We came over to have dinner from time to time with Alf and Joan and I have been to Thirsk since the series finished. In 2016, the cast came together along with many locals and admirers from all over the world to celebrate the centenary of Alf's birth. It was a very special occasion, not least because it was the last time we all had dinner with the late Robert Hardy who died in August 2017.

This week when I stepped off the train, Thirsk was bathed in warm sunshine.  A glorious mid-May day. My event for THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF was scheduled for 7.30 pm. After signing boxes of books at the White Rose bookshop, I was free to wander the market town.
My digs for the night, Kirkgate House is a Georgian property sitting in between The World of James Herriot Museum and a magnificent privately owned home.

23 Kirkgate was the original address for the veterinary practice of James Herriot/Alf Wight, known in the books as "Skeldale House". It is packed with memorabilia and also displays a part of the set we used for the TV series of All Creatures Great and Small. I popped in to say hello to everyone but I find walking around it an emotional experience. It is rather like taking a walk through one's own past.

                                                        Memorial plaque to James Herriot.

St Mary's Church is a fifteenth century parish church just along the street. I wanted to pay a visit. I have never had an opportunity in the past. Its interior is really rather lovely. Stained glass windows depicting St George and the Dragon. It has an organ, eight bells in the tower.

Alf and Joan - James and Helen - were married in this church as was their daughter, Rosie, I read.

The next stop was York. I had forgotten how beautiful this city is. I was talking at St Peter's School, one of the oldest schools in Britain, founded by St Paulinus of York in 627 AD on the banks of the River Ouse. It is the third oldest school in the UK and the fourth in the world. A magnificent setting. It was a memorable event and I felt honoured to be invited there to talk about my books and travels.  Afterwards, I had my photograph taken with a portrait of the very handsome Guy Fawkes who was an Old Peterite, a student at the school. Fawkes was born in Stonegate, York in 1570 and executed in London in January 1606. He was, of course, involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot.

I am on the train now to Peterborough heading to the Deepings Literature Festival. Deepings is a place I had never heard of, in Lincolnshire. Two days to discover a new - to me - patch of England while I talk about and read from THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF.

As I write the novel is being offered at half price here
https://www.amazon.co.uk/House-Edge-Cliff-Carol-Drinkwater/dp/1405933348/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

And can be found in all good bookshops. I hope you will look out for it.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

London History with Grandchildren by Janie Hampton

Isambard Kingdom Brunel 

Last week I was tasked with grand-child care during the half-term holiday. Ben, 9, Desdemona, 7, my co-grandparent and I decided to go on a history outing to London. We began at Paddington station to admire the work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 –1859) and discusshis extraordinary ability to design not only innovative railway stations but also bridges, canals, viaducts, docks, steam ships and trains.
Then by double-decker bus via Marble Arch, formerly the royal entrance to Buckingham Palace, and then after it was moved next to Hyde Park, a police station until 1968. This was also the site of the Tyburn gallows where from the 12th century, public executions took place, the last one a highwayman called John Austin in 1783. Swerving round behind Buckingham Palace we peered over the wall and wondered why the Queen needed such a big garden.
Ben and Desdemona wanted to see their great x 5 grandfather, immortalized in Westminster Abbey. But entry to the 13th century abbey is expensive unless you attend a service. So during Holy Communion we admired the extraordinary Gothic architecture (‘All built without machines!’ said Ben), and whispered about the many coronations held here ever since William I on Christmas Day in 1066. We found our ancestor beside his friend the slave abolitionist, William Wilberforce (1759 –1833), watching over the audio-guide stall. Thomas Fowell Buxton MP (1786-1845) fought to abolish capital punishment (unsuccessful), reform prisons (some improvement), and founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (now the RSPCA). I hope his several hundred living descendants are still inspired by the inscription: ‘Endued with a vigorous and capacious mind, of dauntless courage and untiring energy.. he devoted his powers to the good of Man. In Parliament he laboured for the liberation of the Hottentots in southern Africa, and above all, for the emancipation of eight hundred thousand slaves in the British Dominions. The energies of his mind were afterwards concentrated on a great attempt to extinguish the slave trade in Africa…’ The white marble monument was paid for by friends, colleagues and ‘many thousands of the African race’. (see Your last paper five pound note  History Girl)

Thomas Fowell Buxton meets one of his many
great great great great great grandsons in
Westminster Abbey

Walking through Parliament Square we saw the statue of Winston Churchill (1874 –1965), recently adorned with a Mohican hair cut made from green turf. ‘Why?’ asked Ben, which prompted a discussion on dissension, demonstrations and the right to protest. The statue of Oliver Cromwell guarding the Palace of Westminster led on to republicanism, and why Britain reverted to a monarchy after his rule. Once in the Houses of Parliament, we entered the huge 11th century Westminster Hall. Here we met Andrea our tour guide who told us the hall had been improved with a timber hammer-beam roof back in 1393, and is still the largest in Northern Europe. She led us on the route that the Queen takes once a year for the State Opening of Parliament. From the Sovereign’s Entrance at the base of the Victoria Tower, we saw the scratches on the Royal Staircase where the swords and spurs of troopers of the Household Cavalry have worn holes in the stone; and the tiny lift that, now she is 90, the Queen uses (though the stairs are still freshly carpeted each time.)

Andrea and history students in Westminster Hall

Andrea kept the tone and content just right for children. Between the Queen’s Robing Room and the House of Lords, we stood on the spot under which Guy Fawkes had hidden 36 barrels of gunpowder in 1605, and almost blew up King James I, all the peers and members of parliament. We saw where Guy Fawkes was tried (roughly where Nelson Mandela, a more peaceful political opponent, gave a speech three hundred years later) but Andrea didn’t give the gory details of his execution (hanged, drawn and then quartered.) In the Members Lobby we saw the doorway damaged by a bomb during World War Two; the statues of six previous prime ministers; and the pigeon hole of Prime Minister Theresa May, arranged democratically in alphabetical order and no larger than those of the other 650 Members of Parliament. Neither the House of Commons nor Lords were sitting, so we could go inside and stand beside (but not sit on) the MPs’ and peers’ leather benches.

After lunch in the vaulted Jubilee café, we crossed over Westminster Bridge (1862) and embarked on a Thames Clipper for a 45-minute history of river-side London. As it zig-zagged back and forth across the river, the twin-hulled catamaran cut through the incoming tide. After the Tate Modern, we shot under Waterloo Bridge (1945 - mainly built by women), London Bridge (first built by the Romans), and spotted the 13th century “Entry to the Traitor’s Gate” below the 11th C Tower of London. Passing under 19th C Tower Bridge we could see the underside of people walking across the glass walkway. Desdemona watched the skyline carefully, ‘Look there’s St Paul’s Cathedral! And do you see how the old and the new buildings are all muddled up?’ We talked about the 1941 blitz, dockers and shipping. We passed wharfs and warehouses now converted into apartments, including the fascinating home of History Girl Michelle Lovric. But as the waves grew and clouds descended, I feared the next stage of our journey would be a foggy white-out.

Entrance to the Tower of London 

Crossing the Greenwich Meridian Line prompted an unscientific explanation of the difference between that imaginary vertical line, and the horizontal equator. As we disembarked on the south side of the Thames, the storm departed and the skies cleared. We clambered into a glass-sided Emirates cable car which shot up from Greenwich Peninsula and crossed high above the river to the Royal Docks. The view was amazing, with a golden sunset behind Hampton Court, and opposite, a rainbow landing somewhere in the Anglo-Saxon wool depot of Woolwich. ‘Look, there’s the Thames Barrier,’ said Ben. ‘And there’s an airport,’ said Desdemona as a small plane flew over us. Grandfather pointed out the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf far below us. The cable car too, was historical, as it was paid for by the European Union in 2013 – and they won’t be doing that again in Britain any time soon. We returned from Royal Victoria on the Docklands Light Railway, which gave us a high level view of Billingsgate Market and East India docks. A walk over Tower Hill took us to the underground and back to Paddington.

Paddington Bear from Peru reminds young travellers about the importance of generosity to migrants

This grandmother was delighted when Ben told his parents it was his ‘Best ever day out in London.’ I don’t think they even noticed how much history they’d learned along the way.

Our Route:
Number 36 bus from Paddington to Buckingham Palace
Number 148 bus to Parliament Square
WestminsterAbbey
Houseof Parliament tour
ThamesClipper
Emirate Thames CableCar
DocklandsLight Railway
London Underground- Tower Hill to Charing Cross.
No 15 bus Trafalgar Square via Piccadilly and Oxford Circus, to Paddington.

Trying to Like the Fifth of November by Joan Lennon

I came to the whole 5th of November thing late, as an adult, and let's face it, I'm just not a fan.  It's just too gory and violent and religiously intolerant and, well, pants.  But, 5th of the month's my History Girl slot, so I thought I should try.  Try to find something to say about Guy Fawkes/Gunpowder Plot/Bonfire Night that was a bit more positive.  Off I wandered, from images ...

(Wikipedia)

... to poetry ...   

The Fifth of November

    Remember, remember!
    The fifth of November,
    The Gunpowder treason and plot;
    I know of no reason
    Why the Gunpowder treason
    Should ever be forgot!
    Guy Fawkes and his companions
    Did the scheme contrive,
    To blow the King and Parliament
    All up alive.
    Threescore barrels, laid below,
    To prove old England's overthrow.
    But, by God's providence, him they catch,
    With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
    A stick and a stake
    For King James's sake!
    If you won't give me one,
    I'll take two,
    The better for me,
    And the worse for you.
    A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
    A penn'orth of cheese to choke him,
    A pint of beer to wash it down,
    And a jolly good fire to burn him.
    Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
    Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
    Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!

English Folk Verse (c.1870) from Poem of the Week.  


... to North American history ...

In 1775, when the Continental Army was trying to form an alliance with Catholic French Canadians to help throw out the British, George Washington found out how his troops were planning to celebrate "Pope Night".  You can hear his exasperation in the orders that ensue:

“As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form’d for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope—He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain’d, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America:

“At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.”

(Quotation source: General orders for 5 Nov 1775, George Washington Papers, American Memory Project of the Library of Congress.

Image source: Washington portrait from the collections of The Bostonian Society/Old State Museum.)


... to cartoons ...

Punch magazine, November 1850 

a commentary on the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England

(Wikipedia)

It wasn't going well.  And then I read this, from Mary Poppins' author P. L. Travers, writing in 1943 about the ban on Guy Fawkes Day celebrations because of the blackout.

"Since 1939, however, there have been no bonfires on the village greens. No fireworks gleam in the blackened parks and the streets are dark and silent. But this darkness will not last forever. There will some day come a Fifth of November — or another date, it doesn't matter — when fires will burn in a chain of brightness from Land's End to John O' Groats. The children will dance and leap about them as they did in the times before. They will take each other by the hand and watch the rockets breaking, and afterwards they will go home singing to the houses full of light...."

Bonfire Night linked to thoughts of hope and freedom from war - at last, something I could like!  And then I realised that I had never, in fact, read a Mary Poppins book.  So I got hold of Mary Poppins Opens the Door (Chapter One:  The Fifth of November) and I read it.  And now I have a new pet hate.  That woman!  The way she mistreats those children - introducing them to wonders and then trying to make them think they hadn't seen what they'd just seen - psychological damage much?  But that's a dislike for another day.

Other History Girls musings on this particular day can be found from Gillian Polack here, Celia Rees here, and Sue Purkiss here - they do a much better job of making it interesting, but that's me done with it, till 5th November next year ...

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.

Remember, Remember... Celia Rees

I apologise for writing about an event that has passed but History Girls can't choose their dates. On November 5th, I was in Lewes, staying with my old school friend Charmian, invited to witness the phenomenon  that is Bonfire. Not Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes night. Just Bonfire. 

When I was a child, Bonfire Night was one of the highlights of my year. Preparations began in September, collecting wood for the bonfire, rummaging through the rag bag for bits of clothes to make the guy.  We lived in a far less controlled and PC world back then, when children could build bonfires and buy fireworks and we would go round for weeks before the great day, letting off bangers and arguing about which ones made the best bangs. The bonfire would be constructed in the back garden, the guy perched on top. Dads would light the fire and when it was going well, all the conkers we'd collected would be thrown on to fizz and pop. Then the fireworks would be let off as we waved sparklers and munched on sausages, baked potatoes and parkin. Fire and feasting. As a child, I had no idea that I was taking part in a tradition that went back and back, before the Gunpowder Plot and Guy Fawkes failed attempt to blow up Parliament, before All Hallows Eve, to the Celtic Festival of Samhain and probably before that to some ancient time when people first built fires to drive back the encroaching darkness of the waning year.  I did not know about any of that then but I knew it felt special.

This year, at Lewes Bonfire, I had that feeling again, of excitement, of  spectacle, of the wonder and terror of fire. Bonfire is always held on November 5th, unless that date falls on a Sunday, not the nearest convenient weekend. Always the date itself. Lewes is divided into a number of Bonfire Societies: Cliffe (who do things with burning tar barrels and still burn effigies of the Pope), Commercial Square, Borough, Southover, South Street, Waterloo. The names refer to areas in the town and each Society has its own bonfire site where they have built a huge bonfire and will eventually let off spectacular fireworks. The territorial  nature, the year round preparation, the fierce pride and competition, the level of obsession, the feeling that this is only for Lewes people, that the 40,000 visitors are interlopers, reminded me of Siena's Palio.

 Before the bonfires are lit, the Societies, joined by societies from outlying towns and villages, parade through the streets bearing lighted torches and towing effigies which will be burnt. Many of the marchers wear smuggler uniforms, each Society sporting different coloured stripes. They are led by 'pioneers'  in fancy dress: monks, buccaneers, Civil War soldiers, Mongols, Ancient Greeks and Romans depending on the Society.  The differences and rituals are impenetrable to all but locals. The only thing that a visitor can do is stand back- well back - some of the marchers drop bangers and set off strings fire crackers while spent torches are thrown down to gutter at the spectators' feet - and enjoy the spectacle.

There is something wonderfully anarchic and atavistic about the parade, feet marching, torches flaring, the air thick with tarry smoke. Apart from Guy Fawkes, there are burning crosses for 17 Marian Martyrs, Cliffe still marches under a No Popery banner, effigies of Pope Paul V (Pope at the time of the Gunpowder Plot) are burnt. Not all the effigies are five hundred years old.  There are more topical targets. Vladimir Putin in a mankini was paraded this year and the Bonfire Societies still court controversy. An effigy of Alex Salmond caused a storm of protest on twitter. I saw this one being trundled into position earlier in the day. There were two apparently, one of them was blown up anyway, despite official assurances to the contrary. 

Once the parade is over, each of the Societies heads off for its bonfire site. The bonfires are lit one at a time until it looks as though the whole town is on fire. Then there are the fireworks, the societies competing with each other to light up the sky. 

As I watched it all, I felt as though I'd stepped back in to a different age, into a time of barely restrained wildness and excitement, a time lit by fire. Lewes Bonfire has had a chequered history, with a reputation for being riotous and unruly. The riots have been tamed into processions but there is still an edge of danger about it. Tom Paine lived and worked in Lewes and the county of Sussex has a long history of independence of spirit, of defiance and difference, going back to the Peasants' Revolt and Jack Cade. This spirit, still alive in Lewes at Bonfire, is best summed up by the Sussex watch words...

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

'Christmas - Ritual and Remembrance' by A L Berridge

We used to have my grandparents over for Christmas Day. I didn’t realize my grandfather was nearly blind or that his deafness dated from the Somme, and can only remember the frustration of watching ‘The Towering Inferno’ while he sat four inches from the screen and turned round after an hour to ask in a hoarse whisper, ‘Is there a fire?’

Yes, I hate myself now. But it wasn’t only my grandparents’ own history that I missed, and I was always puzzled when at the end of the meal my grandfather would raise his glass and make a solemn toast to ‘Absent Friends.’ The gravity whizzed straight over my childish head, and it was many years before I realized we weren’t just drinking to family in Canada for Christmas, but to people who were actually dead.

It seemed a strange way to celebrate what should be a happy occasion, but Christmas is a time of ritual togetherness, and when everything else is the same we feel more acutely the sense of what is lost. The first Christmas after bereavement is terrible, with every little treat an aching reminder of those no longer there to enjoy it, but as time goes on the season becomes a pleasure rather than a pain, a way of keeping our loved ones alive and with us in memory. This year (as every year) I’ll be preparing sprouts and stuffing to the sound of 'Carols from Kings’, and smiling at the memory of my father.

But there's more to this than any one individual's recollections. Ritual is a repetition of acts performed in the same way over the long parade of years, and in its performance we are opening the door to history. That the Commons doors should be slammed in Black Rod’s face at the opening of Parliament derives from the 17th century, that the Lord Chancellor should sit on the ‘Woolsack’ goes back to the 14th, and when we see these things done then we’re watching history.

We saw it in July when the board at Buckingham Palace announced the birth of Prince George. We can see it every day – in the lowering of a flag, the wearing of a Judge’s wig, the Changing of the Guard. When a Latin Grace is recited at High Table, when monks chant Plainsong, when a bugler plays the Last Post, then we are hearing it too. And when we take communion, or drop a penny in wishing well, or even say ‘Bless you’ to someone who sneezes, then we’re not re-enacting history, we’re living it for real.

Popular wishing well in Kyoto

It’s perhaps this last which matters most to historical novelists. It’s true we spend our time recreating worlds profoundly different from our own, but when we want to engage our readers’ emotions then we concentrate most on those things that are the same. Love, death, friendship, betrayal – everyone can identify with these, and empathize with those characters who experience them. I would argue that the same is true of ritual.

Obviously it’s harder in some periods than others. Not many of us have actually poked about in an animal’s entrails as a means of foretelling the future, and I can’t say I’ve ever made an offering to Athene, but even in the classical civilizations we can still recognize the familiar seeds of actions we perform today.

When someone ‘tempts fate’ by a careless remark I may not say ‘Absit omen!’ and ‘spit in my bosom’, but I might well cry ‘Don’t say that!’ and jump to touch wood. Different actions, but when Robert Graves described a character doing this in ‘I, Claudius’ then the jolt of recognition was just the same.

And as the centuries roll on it gets easier and easier. There are Christian churches where the readings still come from the King James Bible (1611) and the communion service is conducted by the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. There are (secret) places in England where Morris Dancing isn’t a re-enactment, but continuation of a tradition handed down from generation to generation to keep alive the pagan ritual. My own favourite annual Fair is the one at Bampton in Devon, which has been going on even before Henry III granted its Charter in 1258. It’s not a quaint re-enactment like a Victorian ‘Christmas Fayre’, it’s a real county trade-meet which has quite simply never stopped. 

The Bampton Mummers at this year's Charter Fair

Ritual has a way of surviving, particularly when it’s fun. I doubt we’d really bother to ‘Remember, remember the 5th of November’ if it didn’t have fireworks and a bonfire thrown in – but we do, and it’s one of our strongest links to the past. In the Sussex village of Lindfield they even have a Guy dressed like Fawkes himself and the Lindfield Bonfire Society lead it to its doom with 17th century speeches and cries from the crowd of ‘Down with Popery!’

But it’s not just Guy Fawkes we remember now, any more than it’s only Christ we think of at Christmas. The ritual has entered history in its own right, and ‘Bonfire Night’ links us to other centuries simply on the grounds that we have all celebrated the same thing. I remember experiencing a moment’s ‘double-take’ when Sergeant Timothy Gowing in the Crimea wrote of the Battle of Inkerman (5th November 1854) ‘That was keeping up Gunpowder Plot with a vengeance!’

It can even apply beyond the specific event being commemorated. Bonfires and fireworks were around long before Guy Fawkes, but it was my experience of November 5th that made it easy for me to write about them. Describing a display in 1640’s Paris for ‘In the Name of the King’ I had to remember that the fireworks were white rather than coloured, and arranged mainly in static set pieces, but the effect on the crowd was one with which we’re all familiar. They made the same noises of ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’, and my rustic narrator noted with wonder how ‘men with hardened faces and swords on their hips turned suddenly into children.’ 

From Claude Lorrain's Firework Series (1637)

But in Europe at least, the biggest ritualized event has got to be Christmas. Traditions vary between countries, and some have faded altogether, but the ritual is still so powerfully laden with memory that for many people it’s become something to avoid. Divorce, bereavement, a reaction against an oppressive religion – hotels do a roaring trade on December 25th as customers flee the haunting shade of Christmas.

It has the power to touch us like nothing else. This little video of Christmas in 1914 is only two minutes long, but it contains one image that hits me like a kick in the stomach.

For me it’s the hats. The tins of pudding are unfamiliar to me, as alien as the trenches themselves, but those hats are identical to the ones that fall out of crackers at every Christmas table in Britain. Their remembered flimsiness is suddenly so vivid that the jollity becomes unbearable, everything so real and immediate that I want to reach into the screen and grab the men out of it, anything to save them from the horrors that only we know lie ahead.

And Christmas is full of such ambushes, each a little sensory pool of memory to trap the unwary. The glittering decorations, the trees and fluttering candles, the taste of turkey and mulled wine, the smell of cinnamon and mince pies, the tearing of paper, the sound of carol singers, a Salvation Army band, the snap of crackers and the laughter of children. Even (heaven help us) bloody Slade. Memory catches in every particle of it, and the older we get the more we find nothing has been lost. If ritual is the doorway to the past, then on Christmas Day it’s gaping wide open.

And to history too. Mince pies may no longer contain meat – but a recent culinary experiment proved that few could tell the difference between the modern pie and those created by Mrs Rundle 160 years ago. Health-and-safety may have killed the idea of charms in the Christmas pudding, but crackers still contain their substitutes – just as they in turn are the modern equivalent of ‘pulling the wishbone’. It’s true that many of our Christmas traditions date back only as far as the 19th century and Dickens, but some are far, far older, and carols like ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ are mediaeval in origin. The sole surviving manuscript of ‘Adam lay ybounden’ is dated to the fifteen century, and the song itself is believed to be even older. Listen to such things, and you won’t be going back just to your own youth – but to the childhood of Henry Tudor.

Fragment of the surviving MS of 'Adam Lay Ybounden'

That doesn’t always help when we’re writing about places with their own traditions, but my own favourite Christmas ‘ingredient’ is universal to all the so-called ‘Christian countries’. It’s rarer now, and whether we personally experience it depends entirely on the town or village in which we live, but to me it’s the most magical of sounds, and one that spans the years like no other. In 17th century Paris it would have been uttered most dominantly by the voices of Marie, Jacqueline, Gabrielle, Guillaume, Pasquier, Thibaud and the Sparrows, but the same kind of sound rang out from besieged Sevastopol in 1854, and can be heard today in every city in Europe. 

This sound. This. You don’t need to be Christian to appreciate the gladness of this, or to share in the experience that’s been enjoyed across the centuries by rich and poor alike. This is the very sound of history, and if December 25th takes us back down the tide of memory, then in my mind it does so to the sound of Christmas bells. 

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A L Berridge's much less sentimental website is here.

Her shameless appeal to Christmas charity for soldiers without graves is here.

The rest of her is probably somewhere else scoffing mince pies.