Glorious cushions of colour; sparkling explosions of rainbow light; fleeting spectacular multi-hued showers lighting the black November sky...
I’ve been obsessed with the beauty and mystery of fireworks for as long as I can remember.
As a child, living in a row of post-war prefabs in a small village in rural Berkshire, Guy Fawkes Night was on a par with Christmas in our social calendar. We all gathered together to celebrate firework night in our next door neighbour’s garden. Back then, before fireworks became loathed and despised by the Health and Safety fanatics, we’d buy our fireworks, one at a time, over about three weeks from a huge counter display in the corner shop. There were no massive boxes of fireworks then, or multi-shot quasi-display fireworks – you picked your Mount Etnas, Snowstorms, Jumping Jacks, Rockets, Roman Candles, and Emerald Dragons individually, in the same way as you picked your pocket money sweets.
Then they’d be carefully stored in our next-door neighbour’s coal shed – in a tin box, under a tarpaulin – until November the Fifth, while we constructed our Guy Fawkes: a mish-mash of unwanted clothing, a body stuffed with straw, a ghastly face painted on a white cloth, with a hat (usually someone’s Nan’s discarded church-going bonnet) plonked rakishly on his head. And we’d wheel him round the village in an old pram, begging for “a penny for the Guy” while hoping to be given at least a shilling simply to go away.
On The Night, all the children in the street (suitably dressed in about eight layers of gabardines, balaclavas, boots, scarves and mittens) would gather in the garden, sweating buckets from the furnace-heat of the communal bonfire, which was about eight feet high, made up of the entire village’s unwanted rubbish and a few purloined trees, bushes and packing cases but without the Guy Fawkes effigy. Other bonfires might burn Guys – ours didn’t. Because I cried when I knew he was going to he burned. No, our Guy used to sit in his pram and watch the celebrations with everyone else, and lasted until he rotted away sometime in the New Year.
As soon as it was dark, my dad, and all the other dads, became happy pyromaniacs and ran about, faces glowing, igniting the fireworks one after the other, while all the mums dished out jacket potatoes and sausages and soup. And we, the children of the village, simply oohed and aahed and marvelled at the colour and the smell and the noise – and the sheer magic of it all.
Which is why it was truly a labour of love to write Heaven Sent, my romantic comedy novel about – yes, that’s right – fireworks. And firework makers, and firework displays, and – um – magical fireworks, and everything else about fireworks known to man...
It’s also why November the Fifth is my wedding anniversary.
Fifteen years ago, on November the fifth, I married the Toyboy Trucker in a swirl of sparklers.
As we both love fireworks, it was a heaven sent date for our wedding. I’d love to say we planned it with military precision and a limitless budget, but as this isn’t fiction, sadly I can’t...
We got a special licence, with five days notice, to marry at our local 12th century Guildhall – and this bit was quite romantic. The Guildhall is spectacularly mellow, with gilded ceilings, stained glass windows, uneven stone floors, and glorious panelled walls. It’s also swathed in autumnal-hued Virginia creeper – so it looked perfect for a firework wedding.
As soon as we had the date, the Toyboy Trucker and I, with our love of all things colourful, rushed out and bought our wedding outfits. His was green and gold. Mine was red. As most people with any sense of style were going to be wearing black, grey and brown that particular autumn, we managed to get our wedding finery cheaply. Very cheaply. Very cheaply indeed.
Then there were the wedding rings: on November 3rd we managed to snaffle the last two rings in a cut-price jewellers closing down sale.
My future father-in-law made the cake; ma-in-law, a whiz with dried flowers, made our buttonholes and my bouquet. Our reception, after the late-afternoon wedding, was going to be at home – a party on the village green outside our house. A firework party – with fish and chips and champagne. We didn’t want presents – we had everything we could possibly need – we simply asked our guests to bring fireworks or fizz.
Of course, being real life, things didn’t run exactly to plan. The Toyboy Trucker had to work the day before the wedding – driving a forty-two ton lorry to Warrington. He’d be back before midnight. Then two things put a bit of a dampener on the whole shebang.
First, he was told, as he set off on November the fourth, that his company was closing down and he was being made redundant. Twenty fours hours before our wedding this was not the best news for a prospective bridegroom... and secondly, the lorry broke down in Warrington.
By two a.m. on our wedding morning, my husband-to-be was still several hundred miles away and waiting for the breakdown fixers to arrive...
Pre-mobile phone days, the Toyboy Trucker was fortunate enough to have a cab phone in his lorry, so he was able to keep me abreast of developments – or lack of them. And I didn’t panic. Well, not much... But neither did I sleep. I couldn’t. Was there even going to be a wedding?
Once the breakdown was repaired and he was back on the road, the Toyboy Trucker phoned Radio One and told the all-night DJs about our wedding plight. As I listened, they rallied round and spent the entire night broadcasting details of his progress, playing suitable tunes like “I Drove All Night” to spur him on and cheer me up.
As in all good romantic stories, he arrived home with two hours to spare. Nether of us had slept. We looked pretty haggard, but after several cups of black coffee, a hot shower, and a rapid transformation into our wedding regalia – we set off with our nearest and dearest for The Guildhall.
It was a gorgeous crisp frosty afternoon, and in a swirl of autumn leaves and sparklers, looking rather dazed and confused, we finally said ‘I do’. Then we came home and had a spectacularly wonderful firework wedding reception on the village green.
And this year, on November the fifth – a Heaven Sent date for us – fifteen years on and still madly in love, we’ll be doing it all over again...