The gloomy misty evenings of Autumn remind me of those distant darkening nights before the start of Winter when I was a kid, that fuzzy foggy Autumnal month before Halloween and Bonfire Night,
Primary School was an austere sort of place back then as the days got colder and shorter, a huge glowering Victorian pile of red bricks bristling with towers and gables like the Adams Family mansion. The classroom windows were huge and it felt like being in a church, a feeling strengthened by the floating nuns who taught some of the classes.
There were no trees outside, just vast walled playgrounds made of tar, bricks and concrete, one at either end of the school for boys and girls. Yes, we were separated at break and dinner like toxic cells in a petri dish.
Home life was completely different to school. Gone were the walls and the gates. Instead there were flower beds, trees and hedges in our garden. Even in the Autumn it was always fun to be there as All Hallows Eve and November the Fifth grew nearer. Spirits were abroad and I loved it.
I get my childhood Halloweens and Bonfire Nights mixed up nowadays. Being just five days apart they have merged into one murky feast of fear and fire. Their popularity has reversed as well. Bonfire Night was far bigger than Halloween where I lived in Preston back in the Sixties.
I picture huge heaps of sticks and timbers appearing mysteriously allover the city; piles of of wooden chairs, crates and pallettes towering like jengas on wasteland everywhere. Mucky kids came along and chucked ever more armfuls of branches and planks onto them in the weeks leading up to early November, when at last on the night of the Fifth they would be finally lit.
In October floppy scarecrows called Guys popped up in prams and sat on dark street corners, all requiring a shiny penny to give to the shivering but hopeful urchins gathered round like pickets dreaming of buying more roman candles and snowstorms.
In my wispy recollections I also see red apples dunked in tubs of cold water for biting, a fun rite known as bobbing; I see bags of sticky bonfire toffee, the king of all treacles without doubt; I see plates of hot pork pie and steaming mushy peas crowned with pickled rings of raw onion: I see bowls of delicious Lancashire lamb hot-pot with its traditional roof of angled potato slices garnished with a generous dollop of chunky yellow piccalilli on the side.
To wash down this hearty Autumn fare were thick glass bottles of fizzy Dandelion and Burdock, Cream Soda and Sarsaparilla as well as the ubiquitous Tizer and Lemonade. Further back on the trestle table were regiments of Mackeson, Newcy Brown and Pale Ale for the adults running the proceedings.
Trick or Treating wasn't big back then I don't think in the UK, although I did enjoy a good mask or prop on Halloween. Perhaps a Werewolf mask or a severed rubber hand to scare my friends with or my favourite laughing rubber skull, which I still have!
Ghoulish entertainment came in the form of Warren's Creepy and Eerie comics as well as Skywald's Psycho and Nightmare. TV provided An Appointment with Fear, a run of classic monster films that appeared on late night television like Curse of the Werewolf, The Trollemberg Terror, Night Must Fall and The Gorgon.
Scary stories abounded at the time as well as is traditional during the fading days of October. My friends and I all believed that there was a vampire asleep in a coffin in the annex to an abandoned church near us. An intrepid expedition to prove it ended unsuccessfully as we bottled it before we even got through the annex door and ran screaming up the road!
This year I hope to repeat at least a few of these Autumnal customs from my youth as I have done each year since. Maybe some pie and peas, a bag of toffee and good monster flick would do the trick ... or treat! Oh yes, and babysitting for my Grandson on Halloween too!
Do you like the misty nights of Autumn readers? What were and are they like?
