I was an eight year old child in a village in rural England in the later 1940s, and every year for the 5th of November (Guy Fawkes night in England) all the kids in the village would go about scrounging wood, hedge trimmings, scrap pallets from the local builders suppliers, to build a bonfire on the vast area of moorland that lay beyond the village. The fathers would club together to buy fireworks, and the mothers would make jam sandwiches and home-made juice drinks for the festivities (there was still rationing then, so the whole business was of necessity a bit low key, but it was a once a year community endeavor). Our next-door neighbor was a district nurse who lived with her mother — a dour woman who could see wrong in everything and was always complaining about something.

Then came the year when the bonfire was half-built, and the police called from the nearest town. It seemed that the miserable old bitch (I can’t think of a better term for her sadly) had complained to the police that we kids had been cutting down trees for the bonfire. Eight to ten year olds cutting down trees? FFS! Anyway, given the nature of the complaint from a pillar of the community (who should have been turned into salt!) the police decided to prosecute — every kid in the village who was deemed old enough to have been involved.

The case came before the magistrate’s court in the nearest town, and the police submitted their evidence that the bonfire did indeed contain bits of trees (odd branches etc.), supporting the accusation. My father at the time operated a one-man forestry business, so at the trial he called as a first witness the owner of the land that the village bitch had said had been robbed of his trees. He stood up before the magistrate and said “I don’t have any worthwhile trees on my land. I do have a lot of scrub that I have to clear every year, and I give it to the kids for their bonfire. If they cut some of that then they would be doing me a favour!”

Next witness dad called — the manager of the timber mill on the outskirts of the village. He said that at Dad’s request he had looked at the “timber” that the police had removed. “And was that valuable timber?” The magistrate asked.

The manager laughed. “It was all cut scrub from the farmer and a few fallen branches from the forest that we manage. It was all rubbish and no use to us!”

The magistrate retired to consider his decision, and at this point it might be worth considering who were those appointed as rural magistrates in those far-off days. Generally they were themselves pillars of the community and, often, retired Colonel Blimps who had long since served their usefulness to the British army. They to a man adhered to the conviction that given half a chance the working class would threaten the privilege that they and other pillars demanded of right.

The magistrate returned to give his verdict. Case proven! A group of ten of us kids deemed to be of the right age group were sentenced to twelve months probation and were threatened with the full might of the law if we ever tried to build a Guy Fawkes bonfire again. I was an eight-year old with a criminal conviction!

Nowadays I suppose there would be lawyers all over the place, and the local and national newspapers would be screaming “Scandal!” The dads would be launching appeals to higher courts, and some would want to go and kick the ass of the magistrate, but those were different days. Get your head down and just live with it, even though your only son now had a conviction at the criminal age of eight years!

And what of the old bitch next door? I have no idea, but my mother told me years later that no-one in the village would talk to her, and that her public health nurse daughter had to leave the service because no-one in the village would let her into their house.

Karma perhaps?