A EURO FOR THE GUY

Many moons ago, I got sent a ques­tion­naire from a sec­ondary school in Cat­alo­nia (I don’t re­mem­ber ex­actly which one: too many moons) ask­ing me about my school time ex­pe­ri­ences of Hal­loween. ’Did you enjoy Hal­loween?’ ’What kind of things were you given?’ ’How many doors did you knock on?’ Etc. And my an­swers were all in the neg­a­tive, for the sim­ple rea­son that when I was at school – and for two decades after I’d left – Hal­loween wasn’t cel­e­brated in Eng­land any­more than it was in Cat­alo­nia. In Cat­alo­nia, at least since the end of the 18th cen­tury, on the night of Oc­to­ber 31st, peo­ple had and often still have tra­di­tional fu­ne­real foods for sup­per (sweet potato, chest­nuts and pan­el­lets, washed down with sweet wine); and the fol­low­ing day they go and visit the tombs of their loved ones. In Eng­land, we waited until No­vem­ber 5th, which is when we cel­e­brated Guy Fawkes’s Night. Guy Fawkes – who, tellingly, in­sisted on being called Guido – was a died-in-the-wool Catholic born in York in 1570, the same year that his Queen, Eliz­a­beth I, was ex­com­mu­ni­cated by the Pope and started per­se­cut­ing the Catholics by ban­ning their re­li­gion and mur­der­ing dozens of priests. It was hoped that her suc­ces­sor, James I – whose mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been a Catholic until she was ex­e­cuted for being one – would go easy on the Eng­lish Pa­pists, but not a bit of it. He ex­iled all the priests and main­tained the ban on Catholic rites. There were var­i­ous failed Catholic plots to kid­nap or kill King James but they all came to nought, until Fawkes and four other co-re­li­gion­ists met up in a Lon­don pub and de­vised a plan to blow up the Houses of Par­lia­ment. On No­vem­ber 4th, 1605, Fawkes was caught lurk­ing in the base­ment of said Houses with matches in his pocket and 36 bar­rels of gun­pow­der within spit­ting dis­tance. A dead give­away. He was tor­tured and then hanged and chopped into four pieces. Since then, in the first week of No­vem­ber, Eng­lish chil­dren have sat next to home-made ef­fi­gies of Fawkes in the street, ask­ing passers-by for ’a penny for the Guy’, be­fore burn­ing the ef­figy on top of a bon­fire on the night of the fifth and let­ting off fire­works, while singing ’Re­mem­ber, re­mem­ber the fifth of No­vem­ber, gun­pow­der, trea­son and plot’ with a cer­tain ve­he­mence. I do in­deed re­mem­ber it well, as it was – for us chil­dren – one of the most ex­cit­ing days of the year. There has, of course, been the oc­ca­sional vari­a­tion on the Guy Fawkes tra­di­tion: when Mar­garet Thatcher was elected for a third term in 1987, a lot of peo­ple burnt ef­fi­gies of her in­stead. And a year later, Alan Moore and David Lloyd brought out an an­ar­chist-lean­ing comic called ’V for Vendetta’, fea­tur­ing a lib­er­tar­ian in a Guy Fawkes mask, which was made into a film in 2005 and spawned the (ap­pro­pri­ately masked) Anony­mous move­ment.

I can’t help think­ing, though, that Anony­mous might have got their sym­bols in a twist. The orig­i­nal Guy Fawkes fought for Spain in the Nether­lands for an en­tire decade, try­ing to pre­vent the Dutch from hav­ing their own coun­try. Fawkes was also famed for being prej­u­diced against the Scot­tish. In other words, he was a re­li­gious bigot and a con­firmed union­ist. I per­son­ally wouldn’t mind if Hal­loween – a fes­ti­val de­rived from Celtic herders in Britain thou­sands of years ago, for whom Oc­to­ber 31st was New Year’s Eve, when the demons and fairies came out to play – took a back seat (also in Cat­alo­nia), and let us burn Guy Fawkes – that old re­ac­tionary – to our heart’s con­tent.