My wife and I were on a train a few years ago; it must have been towards the end of January. And, looking out of the window, a few miles outside London, we saw a burst of fireworks.
Not the mithering streak-and-pop of a useless bottle rocket, such as your dad would light in the garden before retreating to the designated safe distance (the family huddled, backs against the house; a sad puttering rocket in the distance, just visible in the flowerbed). But a proper, organised thing with the great starburst mortars and a crowd going “ooh”.
What the hell is that, I asked. It’s not November. It’s not even New Year. We spent some time working it out; it wasn’t the Fourth of July, obviously. Chinese New Year was still a way off. “Maybe Australia Day?” my wife hazarded. We never did find out.
As you read this, across the nation, preparations for firework parties will be under way. Serious-faced men and women will be building bonfires and programming the order of fire into the computer and stuffing plastic tubes full of explosives. But nowadays, I think, that’s probably true whatever day of the year it is: fireworks have spread like a disease across the calendar, spilling out from their neat quarantine in the first week of November, metastasising across the seasons.
The first major outbreak, in Britain at least, was on December 31, 1999: it was felt that the only suitable way to mark the turning of the millennium was to blow up several thousand pounds’ worth of gunpowder over the river. New Year had never been a firework occasion in this country before, but once it had happened once, it was suddenly a tradition; by December 2013, it had spiralled out of control into a “multi-sensory display” including scratch ’n’ sniff cards.
I like to imagine that it wasn’t always like this. Pancakes should be for Shrove Tuesday, Brussels sprouts should be for Christmas, and fireworks, I feel, should be for Guy Fawkes Night.
The Gunpowder Treason plot of 1605 really isn’t suitable for a fun family holiday, seeing as it combines in its story a murderous terrorist conspiracy, torture and gruesome executions, and centuries of religious bigotry. The first records of fireworks marking the day are from 1607, when 106lb of gunpowder was detonated in Canterbury; these early celebrations were notable, according to Antonia Fraser’s book The Gunpowder Plot, for anti-Catholic sentiment “mystical in its fervour”.
But despite, or perhaps because of, its unsavoury connotations, it caught on as a celebration. “This 5th day of November is observed exceeding well in the City; and at night great bonfires and fireworks,” wrote Samuel Pepys in 1660. And slowly, the anti-papist sentiment and the connotations of treason and limb-breaking were sort of rubbed away, like sharp edges, leaving the inoffensive “Fireworks Night”. Nowadays, even the Guy on the bonfire is a rare sight.
We stole fireworks, as we stole so many ideas, from China. There are records of gunpowder-based explosives being used there to scare off evil spirits as early as the 7th century; a monk named Li Tian is (probably apocryphally) credited with their invention, a combination of saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur in a bamboo tube, which would explode when thrown into a fire. Later, more complicated versions than these simple firecrackers were made – rockets and candles and wheels. And then, in the 19th century, another great innovation, made possible by the birth of modern chemistry: colour. In the years after the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier isolated the first 33 chemical elements in 1789, it was noticed that the salts of some metals burn with pure colours: barium for green, strontium for red, copper for blue. Suddenly bursts of dramatic colour were possible, as well as the simple yellows and oranges of a gunpowder explosion.
And they are dramatic. There’s a reason crowds make the ooh, aah noises as the shells explode in the sky above them: they’re beautiful, and unlike anything else we see in our everyday life. Which is, presumably, why they’re spreading: not just to New Year, but to any piddling little celebration – even to weddings, which is silly because weddings tend to be in summer, so you can’t set them off until it’s 10pm and everyone’s too drunk to remember them anyway. (This is one reason why the Americans have got it so wrong having their firework event in July.)
But when you take something special and have it all the time, it’s not special any more. The spread of fireworks across the year has devalued the currency. Of course there was never a golden age when fireworks were only used on November 5 – Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks was written for a celebration in April 1749. But if we can stop letting them off for the opening of every envelope, it’d be a start.
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