I was born after a three-day labour on 31st October 1945, and my mother later said she had never been so pleased to see anybody. She occasionally referred to me as her ‘Halloween Baby’, and I grew up knowing that I had been born on a ‘special day’. All Hallows Eve was celebrated by the churches, but in New Zealand in the 1950s, Halloween in the American sense was no big thing.

When I was young, New Zealand looked to England, and we celebrated Guyfawkes Day on Nov 5th so Halloween was part of Guyfawkes. I was christened Gary at my mother’s insistence, but my dad, for reasons of his own that had nothing to do with Guyfawkes, called me Guy, and by the time I started school I was registered as Guy Davidson.

Some time in the 1600s, (I was never that good at history) a group of Catholic insurrectionists plotted to blow up the English Parliament, and packed the cellars under the building with barrels of gunpowder. The plotters were betrayed, civil society saved, and the principal plotter Guido Fawkes was hanged, drawn and quartered. The failure of the ‘Gunpowder Plot’ was celebrated every year in ‘English’ countries with fireworks and bonfires on which Guido (Guy) Fawkes was burned in effigy, and for the fortnight before Guyfawkes Day, children went around their neighbourhoods with their guys, reciting the traditional rhymes and asking for money to buy fireworks.

We knew about Halloween and trick or treating of course, and by the early sixties, the two traditions had started to merge. Some people cut faces on pumpkins or old paint tins and put candles inside them, some mothers ‘ran up’ costumes for their kids to wear on Oct 31st, and drapery stores sold a few masks.

‘Trick or Treaters’ only went out on Halloween proper, and would get candy (we called them ‘lollies’), but the guys, and the rhymes that went with them were the money makers in the days before and after. Lots of the adults in our neighbourhood wouldn’t come across with any money unless the kids at the door had a ‘proper guy’ (think scarecrow in a pram or stroller or propped up on a trolley), and could recite the rhymes. I was word perfect by the time I was eight

Guy Fawkes Guy
Stick him up on high
Hang him from a lamp post and there let him die!
A loaf of bread to stuff his head
A pound of cheese to choke him
A bottle of wine to wash it down
And a jolly good fire to roast him
Please to remember the fifth of November
With Gunpowder treason and plot
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot

The Lane’s owned the house two doors away from my parents. Their daughter Penny (named more than twenty years before the Beatles) was a week older than me, and we played together a lot when we were kids. That stopped pretty abruptly when puberty arrived for both of us in 1957-8, and shortly after that, the Lanes rented out their house and moved away to Australia.

Mr Lane had been offered a very high paying job in the mining industry, and despite his wife’s misgivings, had jumped at the chance. Mrs Lane had not been keen on the move, fearing the heat, the snakes and spiders, and the isolation, but had eventually been persuaded by the ridiculously high salary and benefits Mr Lane had been offered and the prospect of returning to NZ after five years ‘set up for life’. Penny had not been consulted.

I was a very shy young man and a combination of an academically demanding single sex school, and a very full schedule of sports, army cadets, and scouts ensured that I remained socially awkward around girls my own age and totally inexperienced in sexual matters. Even though Penny was three thousand miles away, she remained the only girl I had ever actually talked to with any degree of comfort at all, and she continued to feature strongly in my masturbatory fantasies for the next five years.

When the Lanes returned to NZ towards the end of 1963, I found I was able to talk to her a lot more comfortably than any other girls. Since their mere presence usually reduced me to tongue tied idiocy, that wasn’t a very high bar. Penny and me were both in our final year of High School, and often walked together until I turned off to Boys High and Penny continued on to the girl’s equivalent.

It was some time before we got comfortable enough with each other to discuss our social and sexual inexperience, but when we did, Penny confessed that she had not handled the move to the Australian outback very well. She had completed almost all her High School education by correspondence, in a place where there were very few other kids her own age, and she had also been very socially isolated. We were still a bit shy around each other, and I was certainly too embarrassed to let her know that I had thought about her a lot in the shower.

We were really too old for Guyfawkes and Halloween, so it was something of a surprise when she invited me to help her and her younger brother Michael to make a guy and wheel it round the neighbourhood to get a ‘few bob for crackers’.

I was up for that. Mum was pleased to get rid of an old pair of Dad’s trousers that had seen better days, Penny scored an old shirt, and sacrificed a stocking she had laddered badly to make a head. We ‘borrowed’ Mr Lane’s third best hat, stuffed the guy with crumpled newspaper, and propped him up in the stroller (we called them ‘pushchairs’) the Lane’s had stashed in the rafters of their garage ‘just in case’. After Penny’s birth, they had sold their ‘baby stuff’ and when Michael had unexpectedly arrived eight years later, they had had to buy more. Mr Lane had vowed that he would not be caught again, and insisted on storing their ‘baby stuff’. He had told his wife it would do for grandkids, and semi jokingly warned Penny that she was not to produce any until ‘much later’. As Penny rather acidly complained as we recovered and cleaned the dusty old pushchair – barring an indiscretion with a kangaroo - there was not much chance of that!

Neither of us was sitting Scholarship exams, and we were both cruising towards the end of our High School careers, so time wasn’t an issue. We started a week before my birthday, going out round the immediate neighbourhood for a couple of hours each evening. Michael was ten, and cute. He had got the rhymes off pretty well, so we sent him to the doors while we waited a few yards back to relieve him of the money. That gave us lots of time to hold hands and smooch a very little bit standing up when it got dark. We were very tentative with each other, kissing with our lips closed and standing in the ‘A frame’ position. There was no way I was going to get my pelvis close enough to hers to let her feel my stiffy.

Our Guyfawkes project was pretty successful. We did lots better than the kids who didn’t know the rhymes and just demanded ‘Penny for the Guy’. That was generally all they got, but we averaged sixpence (about a nickel) and once a couple of shillings – two bob!

Almost all kids spent the money on fireworks at the local greengrocer. Now it seems odd to imagine boxes of fireworks for sale beside the cabbages for more than a month, but the world was different then. You could buy skyrockets and bangers for a start. A ‘Mighty Cannon’ cost sixpence and was powerful enough to take off a couple of fingers or demolish a letterbox. Skyrockets started scores of fires throughout the country, and Emergency Departments were always busy with burns and eye injuries at that time of the year.

Our excursions with the guy were marked by bangs and the whooshes of rockets, since most kids were reluctant to wait for the bonfires on 5th November, and let off at least some of the fireworks they were able to buy as soon as they could. There were also occasional sirens in the distance. The third night out, we eventually arrived at the Melville’s. Old Mr Judd used to live there, and the Melvilles had bought the huge old house after he died. They were rich, and were also what my parents called ‘God botherers’, going round the suburb trying to ‘witness’ their beliefs about God and give people religious books and pamphlets.

They gave Michael a shilling for our guy and invited us to a party and film show for the local kids on Halloween.

From today’s perspective, some sixty years later, it may seem a bit strange that eighteen-year-olds in Year 13 should be asking parental permission to go to a kids party and film show at a neighbour’s place, but as one of the ‘set books’ I had studied had put it - ‘the past is another country’, and at that time even older teenagers who were still living at home lived by their parents rules.

I had had a Birthday Tea at Grandma’s place a few days before my actual birthday and received my main present – a top of the line Gunn & Moore cricket bat, so I wasn’t having a party on the day, but my Mum wasn’t hugely happy that I was going to the Melvilles, and the Lanes wouldn’t let Michael go but gave grudging ‘agreement’ for Penny.

I was certainly keen to sit in the dark with her, and stroked out a gallon of sperm thinking about how that might go (Mum told me a million times not to exaggerate). As things transpired, Penny was just as keen, and as she blushingly confided about three months later, she had been thinking of me with her hands between her legs ‘quite often’.

The Melvilles had been quite clear that Halloween costumes would not be welcome, so I just wore the corduroy trousers that were my standard ‘non uniform’ attire, with an open necked shirt and a light wool jersey. Penny was in a party frock and open toed sandals.

We arrived at the Melvilles in the late afternoon. They welcomed us and ushered us through to join a bunch of local kids in their very big lounge, with about twenty folding chairs lined up in three rows facing a screen hung on the velvet drapes which covered the big bay window. They had promised a ‘party’, but it soon became clear that the cokes and sausage rolls and cupcakes with hundreds and thousands on the icing would be served after the film. Mr Melville had set up a sixteen mm projector on the other side of the room. We knew most of the other kids there. They were all younger than us except Eddie Campbell. He was older, and regarded around the suburb with a mixture of pity and fear.

Eddie was different. He was nearly twenty, and what my parents called ‘a bit simple’. He had never gone to High School and couldn’t drive or get a job because he sometimes had fits. Eddie used to ride around on the footpaths most days on a bike absolutely loaded with every possible ‘add on’. He was very volatile and unpredictable, and could be violent when upset. As Dad put it later, he was a three year old in a man’s body,

Penny and me sat in the back row and inched our chairs very close together so our bodies were almost touching. Mrs Melville turned out the lights and Mr Melville started the movie. The film was titled ‘The Truth About Halloween’. From the size of the reels on the projector, it was going to be quite a long film.

The message was simple. God and/or Jesus (I wasn’t clear about the difference) was very angry about people dressing up as ghosts or goblins, and the Devil was very happy when kids were allowed to do that because it let him take their souls to hell. It went on and on.