‘OK everyone,’ said Nev, sparking the wick of the Flying Pigeon with a disposable lighter. ‘Here we go …’
The wick fizzed and sparked. People cheered. There was a high-pitched squeal, like it really was a pigeon whose tail had just been set on fire. A shower of sparks burst out. The pigeon took flight, zipping along the rope, spinning around and sending multicoloured rays of exploding gunpowder out into the night sky … and then it stopped. It fizzled out. Only one of the sticks of gunpowder had been used up.
Nev went to examine his prize item, poking around it to discover that the connection between the first stick and the rest had been broken. ‘Well, I’m not going to see that go to waste,’ he said, and before anyone could tell him not to he ripped the Flying Pigeon off the rope and chucked it onto the bonfire.
It sat there for a few seconds, before blasting into the air in a flash of colour. Then it turned and headed down, straight towards me. There were screams. Nev was running towards it, pipe-cleaner legs leaping forward. It looked like it was going to come down right on top of me – and then it was gone. But I could still hear it fizzing away. Where did it go? It all happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to get up and run before I realized.
From the open-mouthed faces of the people all staring at me, it looked like they had realized too. It was in the box of fireworks.
‘Will, get out of the way!’ shouted Nev. He almost made it over, but it was too late: the chaos began. A rocket screamed its way out of the box and headed straight towards Pete’s admirer, who displayed a nimbleness her curves belied and leapt into a rhododendron bush. A Catherine Wheel span wildly and helicoptered along the ground towards John Chubb’s titled ankles. A psychedelic Mount Vesuvius of dynamite exploded everywhere. I put my hands over my head and crouched as World War III broke out on a suburban lawn. Every time I peeked through my fingers, another firework had escaped. People were running, shouting useless warnings to each other and generally dissolving into panic. There was a red roar behind me for what seemed like ages (actually about a minute). Then it stopped.
I poked my head out. John Chubb and Pete were standing alert and looking up as if defending the party from an airborne invasion. People emerged from behind trees. There were groans but no injuries. I didn’t appear to be hurt.
There was one more explosion, followed by a whizzing sound and the sight of a single white light, floating silently in the night sky, mingling with the stars. It was a parachute firework. I looked up, and then looked at Nev, who was staring at this peaceful, brilliant light in contemplative wonder. He wore an expression I hadn’t seen before: transported and spiritual. He was motionless.
Then he shook himself into action and ran and picked me up from the ground.
‘Sturch! Are you all right?’
‘All right? That was the best fireworks display ever!’
What a dad. Who else could cause a grown-up party to descend into such anarchy? Unfortunately other guests, particularly the women, did not share my enthusiasm. They rounded on Nev as one, screaming at him for almost committing them to a lifetime of blindness and singed hair. And why was his poor son lying there next to an arsenal of lethal fireworks? To see Nev, perspiration clouding up his metal-framed glasses, twitching at his tank top as an army of harridans led by his wife accused him of something approaching child murder was far more disturbing than anything that had happened before.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ shrieked Mum, the ferocity of her coal-black eyes made a little less scary by the fragment of Roman Candle jutting from her bouffant, ‘Will could have been killed.’
‘But I’m fine,’ I shouted.
‘You keep out of this,’ she shouted back. ‘Honestly, Nev, sometimes I think you must have gone round the bend.’
Mum and Pete’s wife Annie went back into the house, arms linked, shooting Nev freezing glances over their shoulders. Pete and John Chubb told Nev not to worry, that nobody was hurt, and that women were mad anyway. Tom stood up, brushed down his velvet jacket, and walked towards the house with his hands clasped behind his back, kicking up dust with his shoes as he resumed his soliloquy on Dr Johnson.
‘Don’t listen to them, Nev,’ I said, as we stood next to each other by the bonfire and watched the flames dance. ‘You did them all a favour. That’s going to be the fireworks night everyone remembers for the rest of their life.’
He smiled. ‘The Flying Pigeon certainly livened things up, didn’t it?’
‘It’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.’
And it was. It was even better than the time Nev got us stuck on a cliff on the Cornish coast. We had to be rescued by helicopter, which dropped us down onto a golf course while Mum watched the whole thing from a sun lounger by the pool of the hotel. In my school essay on the subject I added that there was a terrible storm and several people died.
The guests seemed to forgive Nev for his reckless behaviour quite quickly, as it was only an hour or so later that everyone piled into our drawing room with glasses of red wine or champagne and chatted, laughed and made flirtatious gestures towards one another. I used the opportunity to discard the evidence of my Flumps-related gluttony and chuck the empty jar in the dustbin. Nev looked a little flustered as not one but two women purred around him, while Mum held court as she regaled tales of constant harassment by the men of Fleet Street to a group of men who appeared to have somehow found it within their power to not harass her. I had learned that on these occasions it was easy to stay up late if you amused the adults, so I decided the time was right to try out a few of my favourite jokes on them. Before long I was sitting on the lap of the woman with the large cleavage, who kept calling me a gorgeous lad while intermittently pressing me to her bosom and glugging from a glass of champagne.
‘Here’s another one,’ I said, once I had the attention of most of the people in the room. ‘There was an old lady who bought a very large house. It was such a nice house that she felt she should give it a name, so, after thinking about it for at least a minute, she decided to call it Hairy Bum.’
I had them laughing and I hadn’t even got to the punch line.
‘After living in Hairy Bum for a year she started to feel rather lonely in that big house all by herself, so she got a little dog. She called the dog Willy. Willy and the old lady were very happy until one day Willy went missing. The old lady was terribly worried. She searched everywhere but she couldn’t find him. Eventually she went to the police station and she told them …’
I had to stifle a few giggles here.
‘“I’ve looked all over my Hairy Bum, but I can’t find my Willy!”’
They roared. The woman with the cleavage bounced me up and down. Somebody decided I deserved to taste champagne for the first time. Tom might impress them with his erudition and his little velvet jackets and bow ties, but I was knocking them dead with my ribald gags. Sandy sashayed towards the record player and put the David Bowie album on. I think the quarter of a glass of champagne I was allowed to drink may have gone to my head in a not unpleasant manner because I definitely felt a little unsteady as I went to the toilet. The other children who had been there for the fireworks had long gone, but they were a glum lot anyway and talking to strange kids was never easy. Adults could be very entertaining with a few drinks inside them.
Eventually, Mum told me I really should be getting to bed. It must have been around midnight. The Flumps-induced stomach ache returning might have been why, at an hour when I imagine the party was winding down, I was still lying