Bonfire Night, Bradford 1930
My youth was grim but it would have been brutally cruel were it not for the fact that the misery of those days was shared by many other kids who befriended me in this former slum.
It’s why when darkness came and my work for the off licence was done I never returned straight away to the savagery of my doss house. Instead, I’d take to the narrow, dark streets of my warren because in the darkness you felt you could escape despair by playing rough games with fellow chums.
Under evenings’ black canvass just before bonfire night, the children of this neighbourhood set their misery aside and abandoned their pain in the pursuit of wild, games that could be as violent as skirmishes in a guerrilla war. In late and early November days, we invaded derelict buildings that had been shuttered by the economic catastrophe. In the glomming we’d scavenged for wood for the fires we’d light to remember the 5th of November. But also we foraged for old factory pulley ropes that were greased with oil and took them outside. On those narrow cobbled streets with captain Webb matches we lit their ends, until they smouldered and glowed bright red like the tip of a cigarette in the dark night air. We’d sing childish rhymes about monkeys shitting limes. Then intoxicated by the ecstasy of play we’d spin the hemp tapers around in the air until the frayed bits sparked against the blackness that encased our joy in a thick blanket of desolation. Emboldened like Prometheus bringing fire to mankind, we’d run through the streets hollering our delight. In those moments of play we forgot hunger, loneliness and sadness. But the joy was as brief as a warm summer’s day in Bradford because misery in our neighbourhood was always just around the corner.
At times, as we traipsed across our patch in the pitch of night, our merriment was stopped in its tracks by inhuman noises. Sounds tumbled out from nearby open windows as if they were heavy objects falling to the hard ground below. But the sounds we heard in the darkness from these neighbourhood windows weren’t ever inanimate. No, they were cries of pain and of torment. Sometimes they came from women being beaten senseless by their husbands or in other instances children suffering the wrath of their fathers, who in unemployed angst had taken both to drink and blind fury. Other times, the cries that came from open windows sounded like howls from a circle of hell that even my parish priest would have been reluctant to admit existed. But they were not the growls of the damned just the screams from people who were too poor to pay for morphine to ease their pain from cancer and make their passage to the next world gentle rather than grotesque.
From Harry Leslie Smith’s Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future
