Text 1: The woman who never watches the fireworks, by Kerry Cudlipp

An original contemporary magazine interview.

On the fifth of November, while forty thousand people stand on the riverbank gazing upwards, Sam Huddleston will be crouched in a portable cabin on a barge, staring at a laptop. ‘People always ask what the display looks like from where I am,’ she says. ‘The honest answer is: I’ve no idea. I’m watching numbers.’

Huddleston, 41, has been a professional pyrotechnician for eighteen years, and her company fires around two hundred displays a year, from weddings to city celebrations. This one, the biggest of her calendar, has taken four months to design. Every one of its 6,000 shells is wired to a computer and timed to the music to within a tenth of a second.

Building it takes a crew of nine three days. They load mortar tubes in racks along the deck, check every connection twice, and wrap the whole lot in plastic sheeting in case of rain. ‘Rain we can cope with,’ she says. ‘Wind is the enemy. If it blows towards the crowd, we stop. I don’t care how many people are disappointed. I’ve never had anyone hurt and I don’t intend to start.’

The night itself, she says, is ‘ninety minutes of terror followed by twelve minutes of terror’. At eight o’clock exactly she presses the button. The barge shudders. The air fills with smoke and the sharp smell of gunpowder, and the noise is so loud that her crew communicate by hand signals. Somewhere above them, gold willows and crimson chrysanthemums are blooming over the river, but she does not look up once.

Then it is over, and the cheering rolls across the water. ‘That’s the moment,’ Huddleston says, and for the first time in our conversation she smiles properly. ‘Not the fireworks. The sound of all those people. That’s when I know they’ve had a good night, and I can go and have a cup of tea.’

Text 2: A night at the gardens, by Jasper Larkham

An original diary written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this diary entry, written in 1838, a young clerk describes a grand firework display at a London pleasure garden.

June 21st. To the gardens this evening with Harris and his sisters, at a cost of three shillings and sixpence each, which I could ill afford, but which I do not regret. The walks were hung with coloured lamps in their thousands, and the crowd was so great that we were carried along by it rather than walking, and Miss Harris lost a shoe and recovered it again only by a miracle.

At eleven o’clock a bell was rung, and the whole multitude streamed towards the firework ground, where we found a place near the rope. For some minutes nothing happened, and then, with a rush and a roar, a dozen rockets went up together and burst into stars of red and green and silver that hung above us and fell slowly, like a shower of jewels, into the dark. A great ‘Ah!’ went up from ten thousand throats.

There followed wheels of fire that spun and hissed and changed their colours, fountains of golden sparks, and loud reports that made the ladies cover their ears and the children shriek with delight. Through the smoke I could see the artificer himself, a little man in a leather apron, running from one frame to the next with a lighted match, as unconcerned as a lamplighter upon his round.

The grand finale was a representation of a ship at sea, outlined entirely in fire, which, at a signal, appeared to be attacked and blown to pieces with a tremendous explosion. It was magnificent. But it was not without its dangers, for one rocket, flying low, came down among the crowd not ten yards from us and set a gentleman’s hat alight. He beat it out upon his knee, and the people about him laughed, and so, I am ashamed to say, did I.

We walked home at two in the morning, our ears ringing. I can still smell the smoke upon my coat.

Both of these texts are about firework displays.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the excitement and the dangers of firework displays
• how the writers present the displays to readers

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