En passant: Guy Fawkes – An obituary

IT OCCURRED to me last week that I hadn’t heard a single “BANG” in celebration of Guy Fawkes night. The 5th of November was last Wednesday, and it passed with only the occasional yapping of that bored hound dog in Boeren Street, and later the moronic self-racing of most-likely inebriated drivers up and down High Street. I listen some nights to these wannabe Jody Scheckters as they roar at speed up High Street into town, and I imagine the traffic lights at Standard Bank suddenly changing, and I wait for the resounding crash as these urban cowboys smash into either Tide Foods, or spin across the road, bounce sideways up the pavement and spread their brains, like so much strawberry jam, up against the Library Hall’s west-facing wall. And I smile.

Anyway, no Guy Fawkes this year. I seem to recollect that most years up to now there has been a diehard traditionalist somewhere in town who lets off a few fireworks on Guy Fawkes night, and no doubt his kids look at him and say to each other, “What the hell is Dad doing, and who exactly was that guy’s folks that he has to let off fireworks?”

Yep, so I think we can officially declare old Guy Fawkes dead; we can officially declare him a relic of history; we can consign him from an annual celebration to a footnote in time. Guy Fawkes night will now become just another of granddad’s boring stories about when he was young.

Speaking of which, when I was young and at junior school, Guy Fawkes was a town event held on a field at the school. I don’t know who organised it but there was always a huge pile of wood for a bonfire, a huge pile, 15 feet high or more (perhaps, to a small boy, it looked bigger than it actually was), with a straw-stuffed Guy on top. The Dads would self-importantly be in charge of “lighting the blue touch” while the Mums and kids would be “standing well clear”.

Us small boys waited for the rockets. As they shot off into the night sky we’d run off, heads back, trying to judge the rocket’s trajectory.We wanted to be more or less under the point in the sky where the rocket exploded. Sometimes, as the rocket’s stick fell to the ground you could see a glow from its now empty explosives chamber, and you could follow it to the ground. I now don’t know why but us small boys really, really, really wanted those spent rocket sticks. Those spent rockets had a distinctive smell that I can smell to this day.

The Guy on top of the bonfire I suppose was like a scarecrow. Why we took such delight in the burning of this effigy I don’t now know either, but it’s the sort of thing that I imagine modern child psychologists would condemn as scarring of our tender minds. Besides, what possible relevance could Guy Fawkes, and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, have to us southern Africans in the middle of the 20th century?

None at all, as far as I can see, but let me refresh your memory. Guy Fawkes and a handful of plotters planned to blow up the English Houses of Parliament with King James I in them. The idea, as I understand it (and I don’t) was to restore a Catholic monarch to the English throne – how do you do that? you blow up the non-Catholic king. Not very subtle, but this was 1605, and choosing a king or queen was not a democratic process, there was no ballot box.

They stacked a whole lot of barrels of gunpowder under Parliament, and it was Guy who was down there with the matches when the plot was discovered on November 5.

They didn’t mess around in 1605. There was none of this modern nonsense about having the right to an attorney, and if you couldn’t afford one that one would be appointed for you, and “anything you say can and will be used in evidence against you”. Guy was hideously tortured, confessed, the other plotters were arrested, and all were slowly and painfully executed. Except Guy Fawkes. He slipped and fell from the scaffold breaking his neck.

There was actually an Act of Parliament (the English Parliament) that made November 5 a day of thanksgiving for “the joyful day of deliverance”, and launched the Guy Fawkes nights that we celebrated on the school field three and a half-centuries later. That Act of Parliament was only repealed in 1859. Fireworks began to be associated with the celebrations from the 1650s.

In Vryheid, up until fairly recently, there were fireworks displays on November 5, on the field in Landdrost Street next to the Scout Hall and opposite the entrance to Pionier High School. The idea was to centralise the “BANGS” as far away as possible from most residential areas and the resident pets.

And this year nothing. Guy Fawkes ended not with a bang, nor even with a whimper from a frightened pooch.

Thus ended popular remembrance of the man, Guy Fawkes, who it is sometimes said was “the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions”.