© The Sirens Call
Halloween is nearly upon us and, currently, I’m indulging in one of my traditional Halloween activities. That activity is getting cranky at British, or more accurately, English journalists, columnists and commentators who are doing their usual thing at this time of year and complaining about British people being too enthusiastic about Halloween. This shouldn’t be happening, say those journos, because Halloween isn’t a ‘British’ festival. Rather, it’s something that’s been ‘imported’ from America during the past couple of decades.
That’s right. Supposedly, there was no Halloween in Britain, ever, until British kids saw Hollywood movies like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) and decided that American trick-or-treating looked such good fun that they wanted to try it too. Here’s the latest of these ‘Halloween-is-American-not-British!’ moan-a-thons, published the other day in the Guardian.
Complete piffle, of course. Maybe the south of England, where Britain’s mainstream media and its scribblers are based, didn’t pay much attention to Halloween until recently, but it was always a thing elsewhere in Britain. After all, the concept of Halloween was originally brought to the USA by Scottish and Irish immigrants. All right, Ireland is not part of Britain, but technically Northern Ireland is part of the ‘United Kingdom’.
Way, way back in the 1970s, when I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I remember doing such Halloween-y things on October 31st as dunking for apples, trying to take bites out of other apples hanging on strings, and carving Halloween lanterns out of turnips. (I don’t think I laid eyes on a pumpkin until the late 1980s.) Also, I recall the local Young Farmers club using Halloween as an excuse to run amok – seemingly appropriating the customs of Mischief Night, which in many places had traditionally taken place the previous evening, on October 30th – uprooting signposts, stealing people’s gates and generally making arseholes of themselves.
And a little later, my family moved to Scotland, where…
But here I have to change the topic slightly. Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has just had a short story published in issue 59 – the Halloween 2022 edition – of a dark fiction and poetry magazine called The Sirens Call. The story is entitled Guising and is set at Halloween in Scotland in the early 1970s. Here’s what the story has to say about the venerable Scottish custom of guising:
“Scottish people will tell you that guising isn’t the same as trick-or-treating, though it involves children dressed as ghosts, witches and monsters going to front doors and receiving confectionary or small sums of cash from householders. The Scottish custom is transactional. The children have to earn their rewards. This means putting on a show for whoever they’re visiting. A brief show, admittedly, like telling a story or singing a song. Guising has its roots in the activities long ago of mummers who’d turn up at houses and taverns on special days such as Christmas, Easter, Plough Monday and All Souls’ Day, stage short plays, and afterwards collect money from their audiences…”
Obviously, because Guising is a horror story, the kids who go out guising in it get rather more than they bargained for.
287 pages along, crammed with macabre goodies, and free to download, issue 59 of The Siren’s Call is available here.
