Trick Or Treating

All Hallows' Eve (aka Hallowe'en), a liturgical event in the Christian calendar observed on 31st October, used to be a simple act of respectful remembrance for the departed. I can remember in my own childhood the custom of burning a candle in a window on that night of the year, a light in the darkness for lost souls, or maybe a charm to ward off wandering spirits? I never really understood which and I never pressed the issue with my devout parents.

a light in the darkness

Yesterday evening as we drove through the streets of Blackpool to St Annes (to go to the cinema - Bugonia, brilliant new film from Yorgos Lanthimos), we passed lots of little groups of parents and children out trick-or treating after dark. Many of the children were decked out in costumes. The parents had torches or lanterns. There were a lot of bags and buckets being carried, full of treats that the children had collected from knocking on doors. 

Local shops and supermarkets have been full of Hallowe'en costumes, fake spiders webs, pumpkins and special packs of Hallowe'en themed chocolates, sweets and drinks for months. Somebody I know spent £35 on toffees to give to children who might come knocking on her door. (You'll note I chose to be out for the evening!) It seems as though in recent years Hallowe'en has become almost as big an event as Christmas. As a commercial bonanza, it's certainly pushed Easter into third place. 

I thought it might be interesting to delve a bit into the origins and history of trick-or-treating. I had assumed it was a US phenomenon that had made its way across the Atlantic some years before my own children were born in the late 1980s. I remember that 1978 John Carpenter movie Hallowe'en, and we certainly made pumpkin lanterns and went out door-to-door with the girls on Hallowe'en nights in the 1990s (as you can read later on).  

Trick-or-Treaters

It turns out, in fact, that it was a custom in Canada before the USA. Children in British Columbia around the start of the 20th century used to dress up in masks and disguises on 31st October and go house-to-house in their neighbourhoods collecting treats (fruit, sweets, biscuits) for their Hallowe'en night party. By the 1930s the tradition was well-established in the USA along with the spoken challenge "trick-or-treat". 

Even so, that's not the beginning of the story. Its arrival in Canada must have been as a result of emigration from Ireland and Scotland where the practice of 'guising' as it is called there dates way back to the 16th century, when children would dress in disguises on All Hallow' Eve and go collecting goodies (including special 'soul cakes' baked for the occasion) from neighbours in exchange for reciting verses of poetry or hymns - or leaving a curse if no treats were forthcoming.

And it didn't start there either. Imagine my delight when I came upon this snippet in Wikipedia:

The ancient Greek writer Athenaeus of Naucratis records in his book 'The Deipnosophists' that in ancient times the Greek island of Rhodes had a custom in which children would go from door-to-door dressed as swallows, singing a song, which demanded the owners of the house to give them food and threatened to cause mischief if the householders refused. This tradition was said to have been started by the Rhodian Cleobulus, a 6th century BC lawmaker, poet and native of Lindos, one of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece.

I don't think there's very much tricking goes on these days, certainly not from parents with young children going the rounds of their local streets. I do remember stories from twenty or so years ago of teenagers going trick-or-treating and throwing flour bombs or eggs at houses where treats were not forthcoming. Nowadays I think the teenagers just dress up, buy food and alcopops and go straight to partying without the tedious business of knocking on doors for bounty.

I said I'd relate an episode from when my daughters were young. They'd dress up, we'd paint their faces and we'd go knocking on the doors of houses in ours and adjoining streets in Hemel Hempstead old town collecting treats, for the most part fun-size chocolate bars, little cakes, tiny boxes of candy or cartons of juice. We never recited poetry and certainly never tricked anybody. The girls, however, thought that they had been tricked at one house on the corner of a street, where upon knocking on the door they were presented with a Bible each rather than anything edible. It was quite a surprise, but they were suitably gracious in their disappointment. It was a reminder, I suppose, that All Hallows' Eve is at root a Christian festival as I stated at the outset.

I haven't written a political poem for quite a while (excepting about Gaza of course), but I've been getting a bit fed up with the antics of Fuhrage and the Nasty Party in recent weeks, and after listening to a political poem on the small boat furore at an open mic night this week, I've decided it's time.

Reform have been peddling their anti-immigration line, trying to suggest that immigration is at the root of all societal ills, pushing the boundaries of  'free speech' via their party canary Sarah Pochin, and canvassing quite hard to sign up members in the jewel of the north, so I thought I'd take the opportunity of today's blog to write something about disingenuous right-wingers, grifters, guising and political trick or treating. Here's the first attempt, not 'top drawer' poetry perhaps, but something I feel needs to be said. 

Guising Grifter Alert

Fear like a fog curls round street corners

and here they come looming in the swirl, 

feeling emboldened, quite without shame

spouting their thinly disguised racist bane.

Wise up to Frog Face. He's not your friend.

They'll knock doors, ring bells, insidiously

recruiting gullible souls. Don't let them in.

We know all is not well, but they'll tell us

the lie of the land, the illegals are to blame.

Wise up to Frog Face. He's playing a game.

Suddenly you're either a patriot or a traitor,

there's nothing nuanced in between, a trick

of snake oil conmen for generations to win

feeble minds to their own egregious scheme.

Wise up to Frog Face, no Prince in disguise.

A multi-millionaire and a narcissist, watch

as he toadies up to Putin and Trump, would

probably be Hitler's poodle if he were alive

today, out of lust for leadership and power.

Wise up to Frog Face. He's not good news,

sold us the pup that was Brexit. As Reform

he's guising again to woo voters by plying

fear, sowing unrest and discord, pretending

simplistic solutions treat complex problems. 

Wise up to foggy Frog Face before it's too late.

Recognise the monster in his camel hair coat.

Even Enoch Powell refused to endorse him.

I think I'll get a sign made for my garden gate:

'No grifters, no conmen, no fascists, no hate'.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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I Can't Breathe

These themes, although set six months in advance, seem to have had an uncanny knack recently of falling in step with topical news, this week's  -  oxygen  - being merely the latest to do so in the wake of the shocking killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American, by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his victim's neck until they poor guy could breathe no longer.

However, I had this one planned out in my head some time ago, so forgive my not stepping overtly into the 'Black Lives Matter' campaign at this point, beyond stating my conviction that yes they do and systemic racism needs to be opposed and rooted out wherever it is found.

I want to write instead about my mother, something that I've rarely done; more specifically about her lungs.

Everybody knows about lungs, respiratory organs whose main function is gas exchange - oxygen into the blood, carbon dioxide out - but did you know this is achieved through a membrane approximately 100-145metres squared and folded into some 300 million alveoli? That's an enormous surface area - as big as a football pitch -  compacted into a small space. It's also the case that the left lung is always slightly smaller than the right, to help make room for the heart in the thoracic cavity.

Most people have two healthy lungs and breathe in/out 12 to 20 times per minute. In a relaxed state the volume of each breath is approximately 0.5 litres in men and women. However, the total capacity of our lungs is 6.0 litres for men and 4.0 litres for women. The lungs work harder processing more litres of air in heightened states (allowing more oxygen to be passed into the blood and more carbon dioxide out) but they never empty. It is impossible to breathe more than two-thirds of the air out of our lungs. The problem for my mother is that one of her lungs didn't work properly. This is my mum.

She was born into a working-class family in Portsmouth during the first world war, the middle one of five children. She was accident-prone and suffered a number of set-backs as a youngster, including being knocked down on three occasions - first by a horse-and-cart, then by a motorbike and finally by a car - which events in themselves are an oblique commentary on the march of progress in the 20th century and form the substance of my poem later on. That last accident landed her in hospital in a coma for some considerable time and may well have been instrumental in making her prone to pneumonia, from which she suffered badly and repeatedly. It certainly impacted her education, which was patchy at best (she left school at 14 apparently). Her accidents and bouts of pneumonia also left her with scarring in her lungs and below par respiratory capacity for life.

However, she bounced back. She became a nurse at the Queen Alexandra hospital in Portsmouth, working there throughout the second world war looking after injured sailors and then qualified as a midwife, moving to the smoke and the tenements of Holloway and Islington (Call The Midwife style)  just after the war. One of the effects of those war years was to make the woman who would become my mother quite devoutly religious and aged thirty she volunteered to go as a missionary nurse to Peru only to be told she'd failed the medical on account of her lungs, which simply would not cope with either the humidity or the altitudes found in South America.

Shortly after that she met my father at an evangelical event. He was training to be a minister and a missionary with an eye on going to Africa. They fell in love, got married and set sail for West Africa together, he to run a mission, she to run its clinic in Nigeria. There was no altitude issue and the climate was dry and hot. I think the seven years they spent there were the happiest of her life (aided by the arrival of her three children).

When we returned to England at the end of the '50s I know she found it hard to readjust to the cold and the pollution. Peterborough, where we lived, was surrounded by brick factories and the sulphur used to hang in the air. There were real smogs in the winter months caused by that brickwork effluent and all the coal fires in people's homes. Although neither of my parents smoked, my poor mum frequently had a wheezy chest and bad colds from November through to March and was in hospital again with pneumonia again before I was in my teens.

Even at the best of times, excessive physical exertion or laughing a lot used to leave her short of breath. When we went out for the day into the country for a brisk walk she would elect to stay in the car and read. I can also vividly remember her on many occasions laughing so much that she ended up gasping for air and saying "I can't breathe, I can't breathe." We just accepted this as the way she was, but as she got older and put on weight I think it became more of a taxing problem for her. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm sure those decades of impaired lung capacity put extra strain on her and contributed to the massive heart attack which killed her at a relatively tender age.

This week, a poetic tribute of sorts to my dear old mum, dead this thirty years, without whom et cetera...

My Mother The Car Crash
In the flickering cinema of my imagination
she runs in newsreel across salty cobbles,
gas-lamp-lit by dim filaments battling
with the elements, hastening home as fast
as can with the family's fish and chip tea
wrapped in greasy pages of the Hampshire
gripped tight in those childish hands.

Meet my mother, a first world war baby,
and flame-haired middle sister of five,
simple working-class Portsmouth lass
about to face the rushing century head on
if legend is to be believed. She bounces,
fendered by one of the first cars yet abroad,
is rendered comatose in that crushing instant.

Her fault, it is said. Lucky not to be dead.
Didn't look right and left through the gloom
to see those headlights cresting the bridge,
didn't break her headlong run into the road.
She may have possessed an impetuous streak,
a bit of the berserker in her Viking lineage,
still, look at her, poor pale and twisted thing.

She's rehearsed this before, beneath a cartwheel;
more recently was flattened by a motorbike -
the century is speeding up, getting more lethal.
Her parents, her siblings, take turns to visit,
to sit by her bed. They think they've lost her
this time, their fiery, funny red-headed tyke.
But my mother doesn't know when she's beaten.

Immobile in the hospital that saves her life,
a debt she's destined to repay one day
on this very ward, caring for war-torn sailors,
the unconscious imperative is just to survive.
Her flickering newsreel will not finish here,
there are many more sequels in pre-production
if only she takes better care. She opens her eyes.

Thanks for reading. Be kind to your lungs and each other, Steve ;-)

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