Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

When I was about four or five years old, we lived at 3 York Avenue, Culcheth. There is a whole collection of stories during our time there that you could read here. But for this entry, I’ll be focusing on these particular crimes that my parents committed during my childhood, with one that actually happened during Guy Fawkes Night.

‘Torching’ My Wooden Train

One of my favourite toys was a wooden train that I could sit in and drive around with a simple push. My father was the engineer behind this marvellous toy. It was not originally made for me; I had inherited it when the previous owners, my brothers, were too old and too big to play with it.

I had grown to have a special attachment to this wooden train which is why I was heartbroken when one day I couldn’t find it. I turned to the person who we all expected to know where our personal belongings were, my mother. All she had to say was, “Your father has thrown it on the bonfire”. The way she talked was as if this was the most normal thing in the world to do.

I was a sad little man for a while. I mean, who wouldn’t fall into depression after one day, you fell asleep as a proud train owner, only to wake up the next day with nothing but misery! This crime would be later repeated when he burnt my piano.); but strictly speaking, this belongs to ‘”Recollections 2”.

‘Guy Fawkes Night’

Protestants hate Catholics — the English and Scottish Protestants hate the Irish who are mostly Catholics. If children couldn’t enjoy shooting and killing Catholics,¹²² at least they could enjoy burning them in effigy while eating toffee apples!

Every year, the family and the neighbourhood, as do everywhere in England, would make large bonfires for ‘burning Catholics’, during Guy Fawkes Night. They celebrate the act by setting off fireworks and eating toffee apples on the 5th of November.

Unfortunately, my father thought that my train could be added to the bonfire, and didn’t give it a second thought. After all, he was the builder of the train and could build another one. I eventually accepted it and thought that at least, I got to enjoy the warmth of my train one last time and the amazing fireworks and toffee apples made by my mum.  

This celebration originates from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a failed conspiracy by a group of English Catholics to assassinate the Protestant King James I of England and VI of Scotland to replace him with a Catholic head of state.

Even children in Britain are encouraged to burn Catholics in effigy. Of course, we as children were not aware of the gruesome origins of this tradition. And some of the more entrepreneurial children would make a ‘guy’, put him in an old pram, and push it around the streets begging for ‘pennies’ (‘penny for the guy’).   

¹²²  ‘Bloody Sunday’ was a massacre on 30 January 1972 when British soldiers shot 26 Catholics during a peaceful protest march in Northern Ireland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)