Ex-English nationals plan childhood celebration

Laura Hiatt summed it up nicely:

“The English people sure know how to hold a grudge,” she said.

Hiatt spoke this week from her Waynesboro porch, next to a scarecrow fashioned in the likeness of Guy Fawkes, a 1600s English Catholic with a vendetta against his own government.

Perched atop a chair with a satisfying view of Hiatt’s front yard, Fawkes seemed oblivious to his fate.

“I thought, you know, why don’t I do a Guy Fawkes night,” Hiatt said cheerily.

Tonight, in conjunction with their autumn festival, a group of English-born Valley residents plan to toss the paper-filled effigy into a roaring bonfire, all the while chanting the infamous childhood rhyme they remember:

“Remember, remember the Fifth of November. Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.”

The group calls itself the Trans-Atlantic Brides and Parents Association, and offers a place for English-born transplants to spend time with each other.

“It’s a very nice little group to get together,” said Pat Grabowski, of Waynesboro. “Once a month, it’s like you get to go back to England and everyone’s a very good tea maker. So we can sit around kind of chatting.”

Grabowski admits Guy Fawkes night might seem morbid and unusual, but she said she remembers it as a fun event to celebrate in her youth.

“For me, as a child, we would build bonfires in the garden,” she said. “I don’t know whether they can still do that in London – but I made a Guy Fawkes and we put him in a push chair and we wheeled him up to a bus stop.”

Grabowski said she and her friends would then ask passersby for pennies to go buy fireworks.

Their nighttime celebration would include setting off the fireworks before tossing poor Guy into the flames.

The 400-year-old tradition started when Fawkes and a small group of Catholics packed the cellars of Parliament with gunpowder in an attempt to blow the building to bits, effectively destroying the anti-Catholic government.

Fawkes was caught, though, and paid the ultimate price. The English government had him hanged, drawn and quartered, Hiatt said.

“We never forget,” Grabowski said. “It was treason.”

Grabowski read through the lines, again.

“And that’s what we used to chant,” she said, laughing. “And it’s only now, later in life, that I realize how weird it all was.”