Halloween finds me swept down a time tunnel; tearing down the leaf-strewn lanes of home, haunting the old street where we played ‘nick knock’, but never Trick or Treat… kick the can and kerbsies.
We were big families when big families were normal; we ran in packs loving nothing more than the thrill of an angry neighbour chasing us for ringing a doorbell and running way.
The Americanisation of Halloween hadn’t hit my home town back then.
You could read about pumpkins in the Peanuts cartoon books but Liptons didn’t sell them.
So take your long-ago turnip bought from Hugh in the Variety Market and raid the spoon drawer to scoop out the tough flesh. That was a mighty task.
My mother would end up with more bent spoons than Uri Geller could have laid a finger on. But our turnip lantern would have whipped the leer off any pumpkin.
It sat in state with a candle glowing until it turned green and mouldy and scared the bejaysus out of us.
We had toffee apples, thank you, none of those melted chocolate apples with sweets sprinkled.
And in that long ago, there was always turnip, potatoes and bacon for tea – with the “bacon gravy” poured over for extra oomph.
I tried that our on our boy recently.
“Would you like the bacon gravy,” I said.
“That’s the fat from the pan,” he told me, like I was gifting him a heart attack on a plate.
My mother always made an apple tart with money hidden inside. It was never called an apple cake at ours.
She wrapped up the money in foil to hide inside … just as well really.
Like the bacon gravy, money in a pie has a whiff of not so very hygienic, it might be an issue for Scores on the Doors.
And it reminds me of that Yeats’ line about fumbling in a greasy till.
But I remember a long ago magical Halloween, when I was a child, visiting our cousins in a big farmhouse outside Ahoghill where the night was black velvet with pinpricks of stars where there were sausages for tea and bangers and rockets for afters.
Then came the Troubles and fireworks were not so easy to come by unless off the back of a lorry on a quiet border road.
As a student in Dublin, there was an ugly life size witch in the window of Bewleys – I thought she was a dummy til she suddenly whirled into life and waved a craggy claw.
I brought home a brack with a ring hidden inside for Halloween.
If you got the ring then marriage was on the cards and my father cut a slice and then came in crying “ Bite there, bite there” and I did and I got the ring.
We danced round the kitchen laughing at my impending nuptials that turned out not to be so impending.
He never made it to the real ring bit.
And then came our children and Halloween parties were about capturing our own childhood magic – the thrill of the dark night and the excitement of fireworks.
It meant getting a gunpowder licence – ever the convent girl, rules are rules – and ordering up a pile of fireworks from town.
The year the daddies nailed the Catherine Wheels to the fence and set it on fire has gone down in family history.
The kids said the chips I served up alongside the sausages were legendary – no matter that they came from the Chinese takeaway round the corner.
The apple dipping gifted us a temporary swimming pool and the ghost stories brought the same screams of shock and horror every year .. even though our children knew every line off by heart; the joy was in the retelling.
Now, Halloween and All Saints and All Souls find us lighting the fire, drawing the blanket of night around our shoulders and raising a toast to memories of times past.
There is something pagan about it… the old druid emerging from his cave to light a fire on the Hill of Tara.
The faces of the ghosts I see in the firelight are old and very dear.
They say the veil between the living and dead is stretched thinnest at this time of year.
The ring on my finger is not the one from the Halloween brack but I twist it gently and remember my father holding me close as we waltz in the kitchen.
