Bonfires or is it Bone-fires?

For me winter isn’t winter without a blazing, crackling bonfire. It’s almost one of those rites of passage  in the gardening year, marking the transition from the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness to the chilly frosty days  of December, January and February. The trouble is we’ve missed the bonfire ‘window’ on the allotment , this is the few weeks in November when we are allowed  to light fires on our plots – any other time it is verboten. Strange rule, but as Tennyson wrote ‘ours is not to reason why’!

We have lots of burnable rubbish on our allotment – rotten bits of wood, canes, fallen branches etc . Yes, we can lug it all over to the city tip – oh but the hassle, not to mention the big black spiders and snails crawling over the inside of the car. I know from past experience that these critters hide in dark corners then pop up days later to give you the mother of all frights  as you navigate a tricky turning! And of course, just think of the environmental cost of the petrol to get there. Oh yes a bonfire is definitely the thing. You may have guessed it …. I’m excited  about lighting a fire outside. It’s one of gardening’s innocent pleasures – not that there are many guilty ones. But what I mean to say is that we all turn into children when we gather around a blaze watching the flames dancing and sparking. So we decide to flout the allotment  rules…

Now it is hard to be furtive about lighting a bonfire, but we do our level best. We site it well away from the communal pathway and keep glancing over our shoulders in case anybody from the allotment committee passes by. We look guilty as hell! We pile up the wood as high as we dare and light a match. It catches briefly, sizzles and then dies – it’s all a bit damp  and sad. Like good boy scouts however, we’ve come prepared…firelighters to the rescue. This is more like it! Slowly, sparks ignite splinters and shards that in turn flame up to engulf the pile. We are triumphant and vie with each other poking the fire and throwing more and more bits on. Caution is thrown to the winds. Of course this is a one person job but neither of us is going to leave the fireside and we stand around rubbing our hands in the warmth as our faces go redder and redder.  I’m suddenly a child again standing with my dad around the garden bonfire – impatient if he thought it wasn’t going properly he’d dig out the can of paraffin from the shed.  Then with gay abandon he would slosh the pink liquid around the bonfire and watch joyfully as the flames leapt dangerously near the garden fence. Inevitably, of course,  it caught alight one year – what a hoo haa …buckets of water, angry neighbours ….

Speaking of angry neighbours I spy, Mike, one of the allotment committee far too close for comfort and I rush up the path to distract him with fatuous conversation: ‘So what are you growing ?’ and ‘Got any plans for Xmas?’ Out of the corner of my eye I see my other half dampening down the fire.  ‘Can you smell smoke?’ says  Mike. ‘Uhh smoke? No,’ I point in the far distance, ‘must be people in the houses over there’. I guiltily creep back to the allotment. The bonfire has burnt down to a core of hot embers and I half wish I’d brought some chestnuts to roast. Ah well mission accomplished .

As we walk home I mull about these gardening rituals, some seem to be purely  personal – one allotment neighbour always plants his broad beans on 21^st October, others have fixed days for pruning fruit bushes  or cleaning out a greenhouse.  Other traditions are mired in history, often linked with the farming year. Apparently the lighting of bonfires at this time of year is a very old farming practice. Around the beginning of November, with the growing season coming to an end, farmers would slaughter many of their animals, preserve the meat and use the hides and then burn the carcasses to make fertiliser. So it was literally a bone fire which then became known as ‘bonfire’. Ah hah I’ll remember that when I’m standing trial in front of the allotment committee – ‘It’s traditional’ I’ll yell either that or I’ll point accusingly at my husband and shout ‘He made me …it was all his idea!