Fireworks
Peter, the Palmerston North City Library heard that I had more of your stories, as yet unpublished. They want to get hold of them. If I wrote them up, would you agree to gift them to the library?
I’m happy to go along with it, to give them away, so long as it doesn’t involve me in any effort. Time is catching up with me and I get a bit tired, but it’s still all amusing. It was all just part of life, and all the family groups around town were doing much the same kinds of things in those days, and all us kids had similar inclinations.
There’s talk of the library establishing ‘The Peter Leyland Archives’, so your stories can be freely available.
And I’ve no problem with that. I suppose some stories may be of general interest. Others are mainly of family interest, or just little comments and observations — not really ‘stories’.
Lots of old yarns are fascinating, like Tony Sinclair’s comments about his brother chopping the ends off .303 calibre bullets to get the cordite to make fireworks.
Well, we also discovered you could do that, and as kids we did chop the bullet-head end off, just to see what was inside. We discovered it was cordite, and it’s not a exactly a powder, it’s more like small vermicelli — thin, fine rods which can make a very powerful explosion, but we found out that if you put a match to it, set it alight, it wouldn’t explode, it just burns, but if it’s confined, well packed, and activated by a percussion cap it’ll explode. So we were a bit disappointed with cordite, we just got a flare-up, a bit of a fizzer as far as we were concerned. Not worth the effort.
So you never really got into home-made fireworks?
Never. But we got to enjoy them once a year, at Guy Fawkes, and one memory I have is how the city fathers used to put on a big fireworks display, at night, up at the showgrounds if I remember correctly. They knew how to get their hands on the big ones, the sensational rockets and the like, and that event was one of the highlights of life for us kids. Sometimes it was put on once a year, but during the hard times it may have been only every two or three years. It was always on about 8 or 9 o’clock at night, when it was really dark, and it was a really happy time, but it was all over so quickly, too quickly. But it was one of the benefits of city living, but not every year.
Did your family buy fireworks?
A few got purchased, but although fireworks were expensive we’d get a few, but we all knew that it was just burning money, an absolute waste, we got the message. But, even though it was a waste, we loved the Jumping Jacks. That was a cracker that was one of the best tricks. It was a series of little fireworks, all tied together in a string, and the first one in the string would explode and the whole shebang would jump and leap about, then the fuse, the fire, would travel on to the next cracker in the chain and it would explode and jump around, and each one would set the neighbour alight. That was great fun, watching the aunties leaping out of the way. Great fun.
Tell me, boy, what memories of fireworks do you have?
I have one distinct childhood memory of fireworks in Palmerston North, late 1940s. We used to stand on the verandah and watch all the rockets and fountains and Roman Candles going off from the neighbours in Dahlia Street and over in Ferguson Street. Then one year I had enough money to buy a ‘real’ cracker — not just the usual cheap packet of sparklers — so I ‘invested’ it in one skyrocket. The instructions said: Push the end of the stick into the ground, light the taper, and stand well clear. So I did. What excitement! My very first rocket. And I lit it, and stood clear, and it fizzed, and sparked, and blasted out sparkles and then fizzed out. It didn’t fly. I’d jammed it into the ground so firmly it couldn’t get airborne. Talk about burning money!
So you learned something from that experience?
I sure did. When I’d matured a bit, and got to be about 50, I tried launching skyrockets using a length of drainpipe as a bazooka. This proved to be very good for stirring up the neighbours who had a tin garage. Very noisy, very exciting.
Of course that puts me in mind of when Bernie Walker and I went fishing. We started off using flounder nets at Foxton Heads, and rowing about in my home-made dinghy, but after a while this mad-keen fisherman friend got the idea we should fish for bigger catches out in the surf. Now, you fired your rockets at a tin shed for fun, for a display, for entertainment, but Bernie was seriously crazy for a way of going after the bigger fish. So we had a problem, or should I say, I had a problem? Boats, the sea, and Peter Leyland don’t mix. I get motion sickness. Sure, I’d rowed my dinghy out to sea once or twice, but only when it was flat as a millpond. But Bernie wanted to fish out in the sea, where the bigger fish were, so we needed another method apart from the rowboat. So we developed a system, or picked it up from somewhere. We’d send the fishing-line out with some kind of rocket. I think the idea was fairly common, to launch a line with a rocket — after all there were sky-rockets, distress rockets, all sorts, so we must have used something like that. I can’t recall the details.
What I can remember is that we had a coil of fishing-line on the ground, and it had to be arranged so the line would peel off the top of the coil really smoothly, so it would leap up and fly out.
So I guess we had some sort of homemade rocket launcher, or tube gun, and we somehow attached a line and fired it out, with a big BANG.
It’s all a bit hazy. 1930s. I don’t think I developed the idea, can’t remember, but it’ll come to me.
Were your fishing rockets homemade, or bought?
Can’t recall. Give me time. The big thing I remember was that you had to coil the line carefully so it would leap up off the top of the coil.
What I can remember is that we had a coil of fishing-line on the ground, and it had to be arranged so the line would peel off the top of the coil really smoothly, so it would leap up and fly out.
So I guess we had some sort of homemade rocket launcher, or tube gun, and we somehow attached a line and fired it out, with a big BANG.
It’s all a bit hazy. 1930s. I don’t think I developed the idea, can’t remember, but it’ll come to me.
Were your fishing rockets homemade, or bought?
Can’t recall. Give me time. The big thing I remember was that you had to coil the line carefully so it would leap up off the top of the coil.