Before the Bonfire
By PETER FLEMING IWOKE up feeling slightly embusque, as though, given the chance to see service in some great decisive battle, I had chosen instead to take part in minor diversionary operations against negligible opposition. By this time the leading troops were already in position after a gruelling approach-march. In the stands along the route elderly people were surreptitiously taking stock of their corns, fractious children were being bribed with sweets. Thousands had spent the night in the open air; an old lady of seventy-three had spent two. And I was still in bed. " A bad Coronation record," people would say, shaking their heads. It was the sort of thing one would never quite live down. The seven o'clock news said that it was cold and wet in London, and that Everest had been climbed. I felt positively decadent.
I remembered, as I hastily dressed, a quietly horrible man whose car had drawn up next to mine at a filling-station the evening before. " What price," he had asked with a gesture towards its contents, " Operation Coronation ? " His wife and two children were scarcely visible beneath rugs, thermos- flasks, camp-stools, picnic hampers, periscopes, flags, cameras, bottled beer and a rucksack. It was at that moment, in which I apprehended all the exertions that this man had made, all the hazards and inconveniences to which he was cheerfully exposing himself and his family, that I began to feel bad about staying in the country.
The need for some form of loyal activity seemed imperative, so I got on a horse and rode up to the village to see if anyone had prematurely set light to the bonfire (though it is difficult to see what useful action 1 could have taken if they had). The bonfire had been erected, as usual, on the summit of the highest hill in the neighbourhood, only 28,302 feet lower than Everest. It was intact. In the village the floodlights illuminating some of its more notable features were still turned on, shining wanly upwards at the threatening sky. Someone said that the flood-lighting was very fine; coaches and cars had drawn up to admire it the night before. The High Street, though less impressive than the Mall, looked gay and pretty.
I somehow had not expected many people to attend the short service which marked the opening of the celebrations, but the church was full, and perhaps, as we dispersed to out television sets, the tendency to feel that, compared with the heroic spectators in London, we were being backward in our response to a great occasion had grown less marked. In respect of television we were well-found, since those who could not crowd round their own or their neighbours' sets could see a considerably larger picture on a screen in the village hall; and there can have been none who were not moved and uplifted by What they saw.
At half past one the village (so to speak) surfaced for its own celebrations. These, like all others of their kind, differed in various important respects from those held in the capital, In the first place, the organisers had no call on the services of the Earl Marshal or Mr. David Eccles, or on the support of the tax-payer. Accordingly what was done, thdugh hardly to be described as stately or sumptuous, was done on our own initiative and at our own expense. In the second place, much though we admired the hardiness with which Londoners faced the rigours of their vigil, they were, after all, only spectators,' We were that, and everything else: as well—runners in the races, marshals of the children's fancy dress procession, pot men at the issue of free beer, letters-off of the fireworks. We were also, as it were, shareholders, for we had somehoW collected from each other about £700, which is well over. £/, per head of the population, and we were keen to see some of the money spent. .
The first item had originally been planned as a Procession of Kings and Queens of England, represented by the children. This conception, almost imperceptibly, spread itself over a slightly wider canvas owing to pressure from two factors. One was the circumstance that some of the children turned out dressed as characters not easily assimilable in the retinue of any of our monarchs; the other was the natural and worthy desire to peg the whole thing as far as possible to local history. For one reason or another, all through the proud and chequered history of these islands, nothing very much seems actually to have happened in our village, and there is a strong element of doubt about the few things that are sup- posed to have occurred there. Our local history really belongs to the one-can-readily-imagine, it-is-tempting-to-suppose school. We have however got a creditable and fairly well authenticated record of contacts with transient Royalty. We do not, it is true, seem to have made much impression on the Kings and Queens who clattered periodically down the High Street on their way to more important places, though William III went on record as saying It is a nice place. I could live here three days " before leaving after a much briefer sojourn. But the children had quite enough warrant for re-enacting--with their snoods crackling like bargees, their false moustaches flattened against their faces by the wind—a number of episodes which (it was today irresistibly tempting to suppose) had taken place on or near the village green. They did it very well indeed.
In spite of the cold and the competingtlaims of television there was no shortage of competitors or spectators for the sports. Still less was there a shortage of trenchermen in the village hall, where the ladies of the village served some 600 teas.' It was by now clear that we were absorbed in our own humble junketings; the thing about them was, not that they were second best to something happening somewhere else on the same day, but that they were much better than anything that had ever been done here before. Nobody was in the least deterred when, just as the dancing was about to begin, the maypole was felled to the ground by a more than usually Powerful gust of wind. By ten o'clock the free beer had been issued on the recreation ground. On the rough, steep slopes above it, silhouetted against sulphurous clouds of smoke, the demoniac figures of the vicar and the doctor were letting off the fire- works with a wonderful disregard of their personal safety. On top of the hill, 700 feet above sea-level, people clustered round the great black mass of the bonfire, longing audibly for its warmth. Somebody brought up the paraffin. The Boy Scout and the Etonian (who , at a tender age had lit the V.E. Day bonfire) did their duty, and with a great roar the Wind drove the flames through the brushwood. " A-ah ! " said everybody, more grateful for the heat than the spectacle. But in no time at all the heat was 'too much, and they were backing away down the hill, leaving the great fire leaping and straining against the night sky. " Pity the Queen can't see it," said somebody; and you could tell from his voice that he meant it and felt really sorry that Her Majesty should be missing the finest thing in the whole day.
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