Bump in the Night 2- This Time It’s Personal

I have been becoming more and more aware of the looming end of October and I had no idea of a subject for my October blog, and then this afternoon, I realised that I had been a berk and there was a subject staring me in the face: Halloween. Smart boy wanted.

In the south and east of England, we often hear the remark that Halloween is an import from America. That’s not strictly accurate. Halloween has been celebrated as long in the UK as in the US. Trick or treating is an import to England from the USA, but trick or treating is itself an evolution of guising, a Scottish and Irish tradition. When I was a child, we would wear fancy dress, and usually a mask, and would go from house to house in our neighbourhood. When the door was answered, rather than saying ‘Trick or treat?’ we would ask, ‘Wantin’ ony guisers?’ If the answer was yes, the guisers would have to perform in some respect, usually singing a song or telling a joke. Girls would almost invariably sing ‘Queen Mary, Queen Mary, my age is sixteen…’ (https://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/Queen_Mary.htm). Boys would be more likely to tell a joke. Then the householder would reward the performers with sweets, fruit or money.

One of the most popular costumes was that of a witch. We were a Roman Catholic family and I and my brothers were all altar boys at one time or another (before you ask, we were none of us abused- we all got off lightly). I think one of my brothers went out guising one Halloween with his altar boy’s soutane (the long black garment) serving as the witch’s robe.

Presumably, the term guiser comes from the same root as the word disguise. In the North-West of England, a Guizer is an actor in a mummer play, a jester or fool. The tradition of dressing up in Scotland and Ireland does relate to the legends of wicked spirits being abroad on Halloween, the night before All Saints Day. That said, like many festivals in western culture, its origins are pre-Christian. One thinks of the Celtic Samhain. Anyway, being in disguise was a protection against the evil spirits recognising the children and harming them in some way.

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This reminds me of a darker phenomenon, sudden unexplained death syndrome. Sometimes, a young, healthy person, usually male, dies in his sleep. No pathological cause can be found for the death. When I worked in Singapore in the 1980’s this was relatively common among migrant construction workers. In those days, Singaporeans all wanted to be managers, and the feverish spread of skyscrapers relied on migrant manual workers from Thailand, Laos and neighbouring  countries, who would live in wooden huts on the building site. It was not unusual for only eight out of the nine guys in the hut to wake up in the morning. There has never been a completely satisfactory explanation for these deaths. There was a theory that the stress of being away from home and working devilishly hard for long hours was something to do with it, although this was actually a long shot. As my then boss Jacques Éstève said, there was no documentation of it happening in the Nazi concentration camps. A more plausible explanation is thiamine deficiency (beriberi) which is a major cause of infant mortality in South-East Asia.

You will be wondering what the link is to guising. Well, among the Thai migrant workers there was a legend of a lustful and insatiable goddess who was always on the lookout for young men, and the sudden deaths in sleep were sometimes attributed to her taking these young men for her pleasure. This may have been related to the fact that the death was sometimes accompanied by what appeared to the other workers in the dormitory as a violent nightmare. As a result, there was a tradition of putting on women’s clothing before retiring at night, to fool the rapacious deity and thus escape her deadly attentions. At least that was their story.

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All over the UK, there have been Halloween party traditions, many of them involving being blindfolded and getting in a mess, occasioning considerable merriment in the spectators, usually as a result of trying to secure and eat some dainty without using your hands. Ducking for apples is the most obvious example, but I am told that trying to eat sticky buns hanging from a string without using either your eyes or your hands is another. One Scottish tradition is the Halloween Cake, a big sponge cake with a jolly round face iced on it, and a threepenny bit (generation thing, look it up) hidden inside it.

One American import of which I am all in favour is the pumpkin lantern. A pumpkin is soft and easy to scoop out. When I was a child, we used to make turnip lanterns, which seemed to me to be an ordeal akin to picking oakum, as Oliver Twist and his fellow workhouse inmates were forced to do. A turnip’s flesh (so to speak) is as hard as a brick. Once you had made the turnip lantern, after hours of attacking it with spoons, breadknife, meat cleaver and so on, you were tearfully nursing blisters from the effort and self-inflicted wounds from the dangerous utensils you had used for the vegetable surgery. And the finished product looked stupid. A pumpkin is much easier to deal with.

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I was an MSc student in London from October 1978 to September 1979. During this period, I and my pal David Walker saw the John Carpenter film Halloween in the cinema. This is a brilliant piece of cinema. I don’t need to tell most of you that it is about a completely dispassionate killer coming back to his home town after escaping from a secure psychiatric hospital. It is way above the standard of the usual slasher movie. There are some brilliantly crafted chilling moments and some major events which my son Tom refers to as ‘jump scares’.  I can honestly say that on several occasions during that screening, the whole audience jumped out of their seats. There were also moments of black humour, such as when Donald Pleasance, as the psychiatrist pursuing the killer, produces an enormous handgun and says apologetically to the policeman, ‘You must think me rather a strange doctor, officer.’ I have seen the movie many times since then and it has never lost its power, mainly because in terms of timing and atmosphere it never puts a foot wrong.

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If kids call on you this Halloween, be kind and understanding. You never know what the trick might be.