Bonfire night arrives with autumn woodsmoke and a cold, clear sky. I’ve been hearing anticipatory explosions for a few days, loud poppings unaccompanied by visible fire. One end of the Midsummer Common has been transformed into an amusement park, and the other partitioned by two rings of fences around an enormous pyre of used shipping crates. All of Cambridge has come to watch—students and townsfolk press up together against the barricades (assiduously avoiding any interaction)—and the Common is soon churned to mud.
At half-past seven the fireworks begin. They are alarmingly close. Unlike in San Francisco or New York (whose shows are staged far over water to avoid setting light to dry grass or public housing) I can feel every rocket’s discharge in my sternum. The cheesy American fondness for pyrotechnic hearts and smiley-faces doesn’t seem to have carried to England, and the show maintains a kind of restrained tastefulness.
The cessation of fireworks is followed shortly by a lighting of the eponymous bonfire. The pile of crates is twice as tall as a man, and at their height the flames rise to four or five times the stature of the firefighters standing by. Even twenty feet away we feel the heat on our faces.