When I were a young lad in Radcliffe, we had little gangs whose peak activity came in October and early November, when we collected anything that would burn for our bonfire night. There was quite a lot of nastiness involved in this, as we used go sneaking around stealing the "bonfire stock" from other gangs' stacks of burnables when they weren't looking, and we'd quite often find that our stack had been "raided" too. There was a very definite pecking order in each gang, the head poncho generally being the biggest or oldest lad, especially if he had a backup big brother. Fights could ensue between gangs, often involving stone-throwing battles. We always got there in the end. Our Green Street bonfire would never have got past elfansafety regs today, being just yards away from about twenty back-to-back terraced houses. All the dads would supervise the bonfire and we'd set off our fireworks around it (though I'd always save a goodly bundle of penny bangers which came in handy for terrorising the local neighbours and dogs). The dads would throw big potatoes into the fire which always seemed to emerge as inedible burnt offerings. My mum ran the local chippy, and the big treat was when she turned up at the bonfire with huge pans of black peas. Everyone had to come with a mug and a spoon, and as soon as my mum appeared with the pans we'd all ceremonially rattle our spoons loudly in our mugs in hungry anticipation. We always had a guy on top of the fire, but we didn't use him to beg for pennies. Missed a trick there, in hindsight!

One big difference from today is that the bonfire would always be held strictly on November 5, the one exception being if that date fell on a Sunday, in which case we'd have it the night before. None of today's nonsense when we seem to have a bonfire somewhere or other every night for a week or more. I think we had it better!