The strange case of the ‘alleged bonfire’

The council has told me that what I saw was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When I described flames towering into the sky and black smoke curling over the village, that was an ‘alleged bonfire’.

When the builder boyfriend was shutting the field gate and could see a bright blue explosion, what he was witnessing was the start of an ‘alleged bonfire’.

We often meet at the horses after he finishes work, then we drive home in our separate cars. He let me out the gate first and stayed behind to lock it. After he rang me and told me what he could see on the horizon, I turned round and drove back to the pub, which is just down the lane from the field.

It was now pitch dark and orange flames roared into the sky. Just behind the pub car park, in an adjoining field, was the most enormous bonfire. It was identical to the bonfire they light at this pub every year on 5 November for the Guy Fawkes celebrations. But this year the pub chain informed us, when we rang to enquire whether we would need to move our horses, that they would not be having an event, due to Covid.

So what in the name of gunpowder, treason and plot was this?

As I pulled in, the builder boyfriend was already there arguing with the man who had lit the fire, who was getting into his van. He was protesting that his boss, a demolition man well known to locals, had given him strict instructions to light the fire, then leave. The builder b was shouting at him to tell him what was in it, but he said he had been told not to say.

Clearly, whatever was in it needed burning whether or not there was a Guy Fawkes celebration, which begged the question: what the hell had they been burning last year, and the umpteen years before that? Because this demolition man always builds the bonfire at this pub, and local families always stand around it.