Written By John Caverhill
‘Black and gold,
black and gold,
Black and gold tonight!
Yellow pumpkins,
yellow moon,
Yellow candlelight.’
When I was a young kid, Hallowe’en was one of the most exciting days in the whole year. Our school room would be decorated with drawings and cutouts of witches, cats, ghosts, owls and bats, with black and orange the predominant colours. On the day itself, classes after the last recess were happily forgotten and we had a real party with costumes and cookies and lemonade.
Supper on Hallowe’en was for me a hurried affair. At six-thirty it was already dark. A couple of jack-o-lanterns with wide-gapped toothy smiles would be strategically placed, one by the back door, the main entrance, and the other on the front steps that were never used but were clearly visible from the road. A regular white candle cut in half with a tin can lid as a base fitted inside the jack and gave around three hours of light. When lit, the jack-o-lanterns came alive. In the dark they took on a wonderfully spooky, jolly air that was enhanced if an autumn breeze made the candlelight flicker so the eyes seemed to wink at you.
I remember as a six-year-old setting out with some older school friends on my first Hallowe’en venture. Walking along the deserted country road through the murky darkness of an autumn evening with your friends, the lights of your own house growing smaller behind you and nothing but darkness in front, was different from ordinary nights. Inside you were an exhilarating blend of emotions. You told yourself the stories you had heard about ghosts and goblins weren’t true but you kept a good eye out, just in case. A puff of wind would rustle the dried leaves in the cornfield beside the road. You’d feel a cold, shivery feeling down your spine. Again, you told yourself you were not scared.
It is claimed that most animals, including humans, when suddenly confronted with an unidentified, potentially dangerous situation freeze momentarily in a ‘fight-or-flight’ mode. As a six-year-old without being aware of this theory I partially subscribe to it, but only to the ‘flight’ part. If, after hearing the corn leaves rustle, I had spotted something coming out of the field, my subconscious would have eliminated the need for decision-making by switching directly to ‘flight’ and I would have been halfway home while the other kids watched a rabbit dash across the road in front of them.
For many years, our first stop was at Campbell Caverhill’s just down the road. A hydro pole stood beside the driveway between the house and the barns and the master switch for the whole farm was in a box on this pole. The yard light on top of the pole would be shining across the yard while a cheerful glow came from the kitchen windows. Keeping in the shadows of the tall spruce trees beside the lane until the last moment, we would dash up to the pole, open the door of the service box, and flip the switch, plunging everything into darkness. Ducking back under the spruces we would wait until Campbell came out and flipped the switch to restore the yard light and the cheerful glow from the windows. The same ritual was repeated through our public-school years. Campbell always waited a few minutes to give a satisfactory sense of disruption. After he re-entered the house, we would slip on our masks (we always called them false-faces) then knock on the door and be met by Campbell and Marion. They would welcome the supposedly unidentifiable visitors and after some bantering about what kind of a gang would do such a trick and who we might be, we would remove our masks. After a few minutes of general chat, we would take a handful of Halloween candy and be on our way for further depredations on the neighbours. My favourite treat was the soft, chewy candy we called Halloween kisses that were mainly molasses and were wrapped in black and orange paper. They had a delicious flavour, and if you bit into one really hard your teeth would stick together for a second or so before you could pop your jaws apart. A second favourite were the black and orange jellybeans that only came out on Halloween.
We would make three or four more calls (on country roads that was a couple of miles or more) and be back home before nine just as the jack-o-lanterns were flickering out.
The next morning when one stepped out the back door the jack-o-lantern that had been so jolly a few hours ago had reverted to a lifeless, empty-eyed pumpkin that somehow seemed to signal the end of the colourful golden days of October.
