“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
C.S. Lewis
As kids who grew up in the 1970s the end of summer was a depressing time. Having played out seemingly forever, the twin realities of school and winter played havoc with our morale. However, as the days continued to shorten, we always had the final “event” of the year – Bonfire Night – starting almost as soon as the summer ended with our proggin nights.
This was the term we preferred – as opposed to chumping, arson or plain stealing – to describe the collective efforts to obtain enough wood to build the biggest bonfire for miles. We collected this by various means; begging, more often stealing and borrowing although it was seldom returned for obvious reasons.
One year, we “acquired” a huge number of planks courtesy of the local gas board – small wonder they use plastic nowadays – which were embossed with their distinctive livery like rock from Blackpool. To cover our tracks and suggest an early career in organised crime, we stole a can of white paint from the cricket club garage as the new season was many months off to paint the planks and disguise our haul. Unfortunately, we forgot about the logo down the sides of each plank.
The following day an irate local builder turned up accusing us of nicking his planks, indicating the freshly painted ones as his own. He hauled them onto his van, simultaneously threatening our human rights with “a right good towelling” as we realised protesting our “innocence” was a double-edged sword. We hoped he would enjoy his spell in the nick.
Empire Building
Local gangs competed to build the biggest fire and competitive spirits would overflow. Close to the site of our bonfire at the cricket club was a farmyard and our main competition for the superstructure of the year.
One night we undertook a midnight raid. Aiming to just send a “message” – why I cannot recall as they would surely kick our heads in – soon the rival fire took hold and burnt for days. It went up like a funeral pyre and soon we were contemplating our own.
As the night sky burned brighter than London in the Blitz we prayed for a quick boat to Spain along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal before the local clan found us. They did not need Interpol to figure out the culprits and arrived the following day, marching down the driveway at the cricket club like a marauding Viking army. We shat our pants.
The Art of Negotiation
Somewhat hopefully, we had locked the club gates but they just climbed over. We had no boiling tar or cross-bows to fight back plus they were miles bigger. We were going to get pulverised unless a treaty could be negotiated.
So we brokered a peace where they got our wood and we avoided getting our heads kicked in. The main culprit promptly vanished – rumoured to be floating in the canal – only to emerge many years later as a tax exile in Ilkley with re-constructive surgery.
I met the head of the clan decades later in a local sandwich shop and offered, as one last gesture of peace, to buy him a vanilla. We both smiled at daft memories of distant days and went our separate ways knowing life was rarely as innocent again.
Long Gone Days
Proggin was so much fun because it gave us a reason to endure October’s plummeting temperatures with a shared purpose. We would retrieve wood from all manner of places as we built our temple to Guy Fawkes staying out later and later in the pretence of guarding our fire as the main night approached.
Before that we had the annual extortion racket of Halloween Night where, for a modest 10p (or a few toffee apples) we would move on next door. And then there was Mischief Night where mischief was simply that, allowing us to launch harmless, fizzy fireworks with abandon, nothing like the Howitzers we suffer all year around these days.
When did proggin end? Who knows, but what brilliant times we had; how could an X-Box provide that?
Footnote
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