Of course people had brought their throw-outs: old wardrobes, hedge trimmings, even a horse hair mattress had been flung on the bonfire. They had made a guy, placed it on top, sat him on a chair.

I’d come early with the toffee apples and fudge, some parkin. I placed it on the table beside paper plates, plastic cutlery, and other produce. A group of men were bent over a barbeque, their wives gathered buttering bread rolls, slicing onions, chatting.
I waited, but no one looked up.

The stars were sharp, glittering blue. The moon rode across and behind wisp clouds carrying a faint bruise of halo and all was reflected upon the water. It was one of those still nights when you can hear the rumble of tide suck, the lone cry of a gull that’s out seeking late company, a car changing down before the long bend.

I walked the meadow’s edge. Bashed berries lay beneath Rowans, dropped by Fieldfares in the smash and grab. I’d watched them yesterday afternoon swooping in; clouds of them stripping the ripe fruit. They were later this year - slightly, and had stayed longer. Instead of a few hours binge feeding, they’d been a day sheltering up, resting - who knows?

At the gate I felt the smoothed wood, felt where each passer through had touched and burnished the rough Larch down the years. I hoisted up and sat with my side pressed against the strainer.

People came in cars and brought their noise as they opened doors, slammed them shut. Chattering kiddies carried torches, glowing sticks, some clutched sparklers. And they made their way to the trestle set with burgers, where women ladled soup into polystyrene cups.

The bonfire was lit, and belched dense reek that drifted down Dawson’s croft, but flames came eventually. The mattress fizzled sending sparks across the crowd as fireworks plumed up, showered pom-poms of neon colours across the sky. Roosting birds rose out of hedgerows chirping their panic as bangs and shrieks cut across the night.

The acrid smell of horse hair and cordite reached me and I remembered.
A shell burst overhead, rained down, it’s casing like shattered coconuts.

The guy caught alight, stumbled from his precarious chair, then sprawled head down on the pyre.

I could smell flesh roasting, that pork smell I’d forgotten until then. Then I remembered the burgers and sausages on the barbeque.
I gripped the smoothed wood and focused on a pellet that an owl had boaked up below the strainer.

A barrage of tracer fire exploded to my right, the blinding white light still visible, even behind ancient closed eyes. A volley of cracks and flashes lit up the South horizon and I leapt from the gate. I crouched on the damp grass as past and present blurred into one.

There were more owl pellets dotted about the field’s floor. I knelt teasing out the felted mass of bone, fur and feather. I found a tiny jaw bone, a shrew’s skull, miniscule feet with toes curled under. I could remember that - the curled toes.
As another bang rent the air I unfolded the next miniscule Cambodia: little limbs reaching out, backbones, some with ribs still attached, skull after skull after skull.

I used my hands: clawed at the peaty earth until my nails broke, my fingers bled. As shrapnel rained down, and Hell raged and flared across Heaven, I laid the broken bodies in the cold ground and said a prayer.