PENNY FOR THE GUY
As a boy, I was always fascinated with explosives. So October/November was a good time for me but a dangerous time for my friends.
I would buy fireworks, take them apart, add a few iron-filings, copper shavings, sugar, weed-killer; and make small thermonuclear devices that could destroy rabbit hutches; or create guns that shot 6-inch nails clean through neighbours' garden sheds. My rockets were spectacular - whenever I could get them to go 'up' rather than 'along'. Other children in our back alley knew better than to hang around after Nicky had lit the blue touch paper. It is a miracle that I still have all my extremities intact.
I suppose that given the chance (as I was in Texas recently with some Vietnam War Veterans) most men will jump at the opportunity to shoot guns and blow up things. (Sadly, there's often not a lot more behind some of the atrocities that go on in our world in the name of nationalist principles…) I learnt to sew and knit in those boyhood years, but it was pyrotechnics, weapons and fighting that absorbed much of my play.
Guy Fawkes, a good Catholic boy, expressed his religious toleration by trying to blow up the House of Commons in session. His Protestant judges meted out justice by publicly burning him, and urging us all to "Remember, remember the 5th of November…" Next time you give a 'penny for the guy' shoot up a prayer for religious toleration in our deeply divided world.
Woman Alive monthly column
