Recollections - November 5th

RECOLLECTIONS: NOVEMBER 5th 1966

It was just the other day.
Bonfire night the fifth of November.
I went down myself
to where the suburb children
had built their bonfire
and as I watched the effigy
slowly being burnt,
I thought to myself I ought not to be here -
it is a Yorkshireman whom they burn.

My thoughts floated back
to the little close in Petergate
where in 1570
in the Church of St. Michael-le-Belfry
behind the great Minster of York,
Guy Fawkes was baptised.
And as a rocket shot out of a one-pint milk-bottle,
shooting high over tenement roofs,
I thought I ought not to be here -
it is a Yorkshireman whom they burn.

My thoughts escaped
to the Old Hall at Scotton
where Guy's childhood was spent.
There, in those rooms, did he plot
with the Brothers Wright?
And I thought of their home,
Ploughland, on the Spurn Road
where Holderness cocks a snoot at the sea.
Just then they lit some Roman candles
and the explosion of a banger
woke me and arrested my thoughts.
Then I remembered, I ought not to be here -
it is a Yorkshireman whom they burn.

My thoughts escaped once more;
down South to Kettering and Newton Hall
where met the unlucky thirteen,
six Yorkshiremen and seven others,
to plan the annihilation of King and Parliament for ever,
with thirty-two hundredweight of powder.
And as the bonfire cast shadows on the ground
I remembered I ought not to be here -
it is a Yorkshireman whom they burn.

Oh how I pictured,
as the body on the fire
began to disintegrate in the flames,
the sufferings felt by Guy
as he neither lay nor sat nor stood
in the Cell of Little Ease until,
on the 31st day of January
in the year sixteen hundred and six,
he was executed,
hung, drawn and quartered.
I knew  as I watched the dying embers of the fire,
I ought not to be here -
it is a Yorkshireman whom they burn.

© GERALD ENGLAND

Composed, Glasgow, 6th November 1966

Publications
1967 Pontefract & Castleford Express (UK)
2006 Ackworth born, gone West (Internet)
2008 York Daily Photo (Internet)