MORNING SERIAL

THESE were precious, since there was not a single horse chestnut tree in Aberfan, and supplies had to be imported from the neighbouring village of Troedyrhiw.

I swapped comics for a supply of half a dozen, and I spent a good deal of time admiring their silky, mahogany patina, rolling them satisfyingly between finger and thumb and polishing them on my sleeve.

My grandfather showed me how to toughen them in the oven of the kitchen stove. After that I became unbeatable, at least for a while. When I eventually saw my champion ‘forty-er’ shatter and succumb, I was devastated. So I tried too my grandfather’s alternative method of soaking them in vinegar in a jam jar, but I left them there too long and they turned soft and mushy and began to stink, floating in their fouled vinegar like anatomical specimens.

Halloween then was not the consumerist event it is today, and sometimes went unmarked altogether, but I remember that on at least one occasion, Mam laboured long and hard to make Halloween lanterns out of swedes.

No one I knew had ever seen a pumpkin; they appeared only as images on imported American TV shows, and seemed impossibly large and fanciful things. I half suspected they were not real at all, or that what we saw on TV were cartoon-like exaggerations of whatever a real pumpkin might look like.

We put burning candle stumps in our lanterns and turned off the living room light to watch them flicker in the dark. Soon the rancid smell of scorched swede filled the house. We ducked for apples in a plastic bowl placed on the middle room floor in front of the fire. Allyson won every time. She was fearless about plunging her face in the water. Gareth was almost as good as her, despite the absence of his front teeth.

In the run up to bonfire night we made a guy from an old pair of Dad’s trousers and a threadbare shirt, with an old pillowcase for a head, all stuffed with balls of crumpled newspaper.