What a ripping thread. Youse have all helped to trigger a million memories. Thanks OP. I'd better not burden you with all of them but here's one little gem to share.
My early childhood was always peppered with anticipation, awe and boyish excitement - every year, same night, 24th of May. Cracker Night, we all called it but officially it was called Empire Day - equivalent in many ways to Guy Fawkes Night. To us kids, none of that stuff mattered. It was time for the fireworks to come out - time for a night of complete chaos and smoldering ruin.
Thick smoke, not unlike like a London fog, would blanket the streets, dogs would disappear like ghosts, and, as I learned much later, many of our poor veterans suffered immeasurably as a relentless barrage of cacophonous crackers met their maker.
Dad was pretty cool, got into the spirit - built launching pads for our rockets and stuff and sometimes invested in all sorts of strange contraptions, Ball Shooters, Catherine Wheels, Double Parachutes, Roman Candles and more. But for a kid like me, getting a little older, it could never be enough. We were on the warpath, my generation.
One night, round my seventh year, I'd say, we had a particularly dull and uneventful Cracker Night - went off not with a bang but a proverbial whimper. I can't remember why but the time when Fireworks would be made illegal in my State, and elsewhere, was rapidly drawing nearer. My parents were sticks-in-the-mud and must've gone cold on the idea. So, after this dismally boring affair, dragging my bottom lip along, I was off to bed.
I woke up early as usual and soon hit the road, over to the park to fetch any old rockets I could find. We used to marvel at some of them. Huge things, they were. And they came from everywhere too. Sticking like arrows out of the turf. I was still dejected because Cracker Night had been such a fizzer, so I hardly noticed what it was, sitting right there in front of me. It was a big family-size plastic ice cream container. Looked like rubbish to me so I was about to kick it into next week.
All of a sudden, the penny dropped. This ice cream container was about as far from rubbish as you could ever possibly imagine. The thing was chock-a-block full of fireworks, live fireworks!
There were Tom Thumbs, Po-has, Thunders, Bungers, Penny Bungers, Throw-downs, Rockets, Parachutes, sparklers, the works! All the good ones. My little eyes popped. I instantly went insane with unbridled joy and I was off like a shot with my ballistic booty, into the backyard.
Within minutes, World War III had broken out in the sandpit. I must've blown up almost every toy I had in what was some kind of frenzied bad boy blitzkrieg, beyond reckoning. So much firestorming fun, I've never come close to having ever again - unparalleled pandemonium, it was.
I never discovered how those fireworks came to be there, all those crackers, abandoned on the footpath in the morning dew, outside our place. Someone missed out. That's certain. I fear for them, these days - likely casualties I suppose - now memory's misfits, MIA.
And so, what started out as a total let-down for a seven year old powder monkey was to become a paradise of pyrotechnic possibilities. It was a miracle. I'm probably lucky I survived it still in one piece. I did go on to have some truly frightening experiences with crackers, in the years ahead.
Not everyone came away unscathed, in my recollection, but nothing truly terrible ever happened to those I grew up with. Cracker Night did have its casualties though, and in huge numbers too, elsewhere. Blindness was commonplace and so were detonated digits. For bright-eyed kids like me, there was never a moment's thought for such things. These days though, I'm with the dogs and the Vets. Ambivalent, I understand the significance of Cracker Nights.
