Thermals, two pairs of socks, the big coat and a flask in each hand: that was me in the hall at 7.25pm on Wednesday 5 November, and I still wasn't sure it would be enough. Pickle was shut in the front room with the curtains drawn and the radio turned up just louder than a firework, which is the only deal she'll accept. We locked the door and headed uphill.
This is a Walkley tradition, or possibly a Sheffield one that I've only just been let in on. On 5 November, a good part of the neighbourhood walks to the Bole Hills, stands on the grass in the dark, and watches other people's fireworks go off all over the city. There's no stall and no ticket and no sound system. Somebody just has to turn up and look in the right direction.
The walk up
It takes about twenty minutes from our door, and every minute of it is uphill. Jas, Hannah and Ruby met us at the corner, with Ruby riding on Jas's shoulders in a pair of ear defenders the size of her head. Hannah had a bag of glow sticks. I had Pauline's parkin in a tin, dense and sticky and tasting of treacle, because in this part of the world you don't go to a bonfire without it. It had been handed over on Sunday with an instruction to "eat it on the night, not before", and I'd obeyed for almost three days.
The streets were quieter than usual and the pavements shone from a shower earlier in the afternoon. A thin, cold air was coming off the hill, around 7°C. The smell of woodsmoke started somewhere near the top of our road and got stronger the higher we went, with that sulphur edge underneath it.
On the hill
By 7.50 there were a couple of hundred people on the grass, in woolly hats and padded jackets, with dogs in little coats and children waving glow sticks. We found a patch near the bench at the edge and I poured the first hot chocolate before I'd even sat down. Below us the whole city was laid out in streetlights, with the towers in the centre and the dark shape of the far hills behind.
The first firework came from somewhere over Hillsborough, a single green burst with no noise at all. Then, several seconds later, the bang climbed the hill and reached us. That's the odd thing about watching from a height. Everything goes off silently and the sound straggles in behind, so the whole city seemed to be performing slightly out of time with itself. After that it was one display after another, from Malin Bridge, from gardens I couldn't place, and from a bigger one beyond the city centre that made the whole crowd go quiet and then say "ooh" together like a very polite choir.
"Somebody's paying for that," said Matt, as a rocket the size of a drainpipe went up over Hillsborough, "and it isn't us." It was a fair point. Forty minutes of fireworks cost us a tin of hot chocolate powder and a slab of someone else's parkin.
Cold hands, warm kitchen
I hate being cold, and by 8.15 I couldn't feel my fingers around the flask. It's a good test of whether a coat is a coat. Ruby fell asleep on Jas's shoulder halfway through the finale, which I thought was the correct response. Matt and I split the last of the parkin on the way down, walking with the careful shuffle you need on steep pavements in the dark.
At home we left our coats in the hall, where they smelled of smoke for two days. Pickle was sitting on the radiator shelf with her back to us, the radio still murmuring, and she wouldn't look round until I'd opened a pouch of her good food. A few late bangers were still going off in gardens down the hill. The kettle went on, and we stood in the kitchen with our hands round mugs, getting the feeling back into our fingers one at a time.
