Coventry Bonfire
PHOTOGRAPHIC QUIZ.
Photograph no 2011
Why was this club so important to the Ladies of Coventry Godiva Harriers?
Hi Blog,
Talking to an old lady yesterday after I had watched my daughter run in a 5 mile race promoted by Centurions Athletic Club, reminded me of my childhood. She remarked that she was poor and had an outside loo, gas mantles and the like. She said that she was going to run the London Marathon for the Salvation Army as they used to provided the family with Christmas presents. I told her that it was the TOC H. who made our Christmas barrable with presents. I remembered my blackboard and chalks when I was about 8 years old.....
I soon put her in her place about what it was like to be poor.
She remarked for some reason possibly because it was bonfire night in a couple of days, but more probably attempting to out-poverty me, that they could only afford a few bangers and a couple of those jumpy banger things ….. this reminded me of the first fireworks me and my sister had as kids.
My aunt, mum's youngest sister had just landed a good job as the manageress of an exclusive Furriers in the town centre. She must have felt generous and had a desire to treat us. She arranged to catch the 6:30 Haworth bus out of town, we would catch that same bus at Ingrow, which was a mile out of town, and we would all travel together to the pictures in Haworth to watch 'Calamity Jane' - a title which turned out to be so ironic.
She also bought me and my sister a box of fireworks. We thought we were in heaven. We had never had fireworks before.
When Dad came home from the mill about 6 o'clock, we rushed to tell him of the present of fireworks. We opened the box to show dad the various brightly coloured fireworks among which was a box of coloured matches. As an eight year old, I was a grown up lad, or so I thought. I had learned to strike real matches, not these kiddies things. My mum consented to my request that I be allowed to strike one of the coloured matches to show dad. The OK was given, so I reached inside the box full of fireworks, took out the box of coloured matches, and took out a match and struck it. I was unaware that these types of matches spit out small red hot particles which caused the colouring of the flame, so I was taken completely by surprise when a split from the match I had struck landed on my hand holding the match.
YES. I dropped the flaming match. I dropped the flaming match into the open box of fireworks ….. bangers, volcanoes, roman candles, rockets ….. all of which started to ignite in extra quick succession in our one downstairs room which in an instant was filled with thick clouds of smoke, highlighted by a cacophony of bangs, whizzes, cracks and hisses accompanied by all the pretty colours associated with a couple of dozen different crackers going off simultaneously.
All I remember then, was my desperate attempt to run up the Lane to the railway bridge to escape my pursuing mother wielding a rather large kitchen knife describing how in some detail she was going to kill me. And any one who knew my mother would not question the validity of that statement. Protected by the safety of the railway bridge wall which in my terror I had scale without difficulty, I saw the firework smoke billowing out of the doorway highlighted by the yellow glow from our gas mantle light streaming out of the door in the evening gloom with my poor dad desperately throwing fireworks out into the street. The screaming dervish who 5 minutes before had been my mother, still tried to climb the embankment wall still clutching the kitchen knife, still offering variations on the theme of imminent death ……
Time stood still. But somehow we did catch the local bus which my aunt had caught in town; I sat upstairs as far away from my mother as possible. In the picture house, I was at one end of a row while my mother was at the other. Dad lost the use of three fingers, our first ever carpet was still smouldering when we got back home in a room still filled with acrid smoke … and amazingly, Billy the budgie, was still chirping away … or he might have been just coughing. Unbelievable that the carpet had not burst into flames, presumably because the room was sealed and lacked enough oxygen for ignition. And incredible that dad had managed to sit through the film in so much pain.
Of course no one remembered the film.
About two months later the film 'Calamity Jane' came to one of the town's cinemas, so we all went along to see it - my aunt, bless her, paid for the second viewing as well. Altering fur stoles for the local ladies of fashion must have been lucrative?
The moral Blog is clear, If you are going to a bonfire with fireworks, DON'T ON ANY ACCOUNT ARRANGE TO GO TO THE CINEMA AFTERWARDS.
