That Fateful Night in Macbeth - 29 October 1999

Maybe we are not as blasé or naive as we used to be in the matter of parades. It used to be that when you stepped outside on 4 July in small towns, big cities, there'd be high stepping drum majorettes, troops of men in colonial uniforms with flags flying and flutes fluting, and everywhere flags slapping in the wind or hanging from the humblest cottage in a country lane.

Today you'll still see lots of flags out on the 4th, and on Memorial Day which commemorates the dead of the American wars, but very few parades and Washington and Lincoln's birthday, they're celebrated chiefly by advertisements in the newspapers - Buy a dishwasher for Lincoln's birthday - How about a mattress (Washington slept here).

And I don't believe one young or middle-aged American in a hundred can tell you that Pulaski was a Polish general who came over here to enlist in the great cause of liberty - meaning the War of Independence - and so became, for long afterwards, America's favourite Pole. And there was a day, every year, when we celebrated him with a great parade.

But today if you find yourself jostled in a street crowd and assailed by piping cornets and heavy drums on 5 May you wonder what this could possibly mean. Well you'll be told by a swarthy boy or a girl with flashing black eyes - "It is Cinco Mayo is it not?"

"How's that again?"

"The Battle of Puebla, no?"

Si, of course - it's the day of Mexico's liberation. In fact, it's got so that the only really noisy conspicuous parades are the new ones mounted by the more recent immigrant groups. We now have a Puerto Rican Day but Pulaski Day is gone and forgotten.

The most recent national holiday was Columbus Day - 12 October - but poor old Chris, he's fallen into bad times, into disgrace, thanks to the avant garde of the vast numbers of Central and South Americans who've come here in the past quarter century.

Among them are stalwart radicals who soon pointed out, quite correctly, that Columbus was an enslaving brigand. He was many other things but this exclusive view of him is now controlling.

And after some nasty riots in various cities a year or two ago the once great day is now celebrated with, shall we say, diminished enthusiasm. In some cities it has seemed best to hold no parade at all.

But there's one American festival - an annual celebration - which you would have to be blind and deaf and in a coma to miss or ignore.

You know it's on its way when you turn on the television anytime during the last week of October and see a lightning-struck castle and baying hounds and blood-stained talons and familiar actors old and new growing strange tumours and shaggy-haired hands.

You don't need more than an evening or two of this to know that the last day of October is approaching - the great American festival of Hallowe'en. Is it so widely and elaborately and overwhelmingly celebrated in any other country? Ruritania perhaps - if it exists.

Anyway to live in America during the last few days of October is to know more feelingly than ever the sense and sound of that fateful night in Macbeth -

"The night has been unruly - where we lay

Our chimneys were blown down and as they say

Lamentations heard i' the air; strange screams of death;

and prophesying with accents terrible,

Of dire combustion and confused events

New hatched to the woeful time: the obscure bird

Clamoured the livelong night; some say the earth

Was feverous and did shake."

During the last four days of October there were 82 horror movies on the tube. We yearned for Monday morning 1 November when you're almost as relieved at the thought of no more death's heads and vampires for another year as you are by nightfall of Christmas Day when you know, for sure, there'll be no more guilty moments of remembering the old aunt or the young tot you forgot to get a Christmas present for.

(And if anyone objects to that sentence ending with a preposition try and recall the last time you said to yourself - "Oh dear me there are two people for whom I forgot to get a Christmas present.")

The week before the 31st - the whole week, on two of the most nationally - internationally in fact - game shows, every other clue is about haunted houses, werewolves or stakes through the heart.

And the big prize, one night, on the Wheel of Fortune was, guess what? - a trip to Transylvania.

That pleased the host and surprised him. He was under the popular delusion that Transylvania existed only in legend. As a famous dictionary puts it - "An imaginary central European kingdom locale for court romances in a modern setting."

Imaginary, eh? Well, where do you suppose the winner on Wheel of Fortune is going? They are paying $24,000 to send him to Romania and tour Dracula's castle. He'll be one furious winner if they fly him somewhere in Central Europe and say - "Er, sorry pal, there doesn't seem to be any such place."

My favourite encyclopaedia doesn't allow the existence of Transylvania, any more than Ruritania - the stamping ground of the Prisoner of Zenda.

How about - you must be asking - how about Hallowe'en? Where did it start? This business of the last night of October when small children go from house to house begging treats or playing tricks.

I was told, when I first wondered about it, that it started in Scotland but the only Scot who responded said that when he lived in London once, next door to an American family, on October 31 he heard a knock on the door, opened it and there were the children from next door got up in comical or grotesque costumes or terrifying masks piping - "Trick or treat Mr MacTavish."

What we do now and did this time is to leave out the hall door on a tray an assortment of candies, liquorice sticks, pastilles, cookies - enough to make them tear off home and throw up. So there's no knocking on our door and no tricks with us.

We've certainly come a long, long way from the original meaning and ceremonies of All Hallows Eve - it's just about impossible today to make the connection between playful tots pretending to be dragons or witches and the time when All Saints Eve was - this is an imaginative jump of which I for one am incapable - the official date on which all land tenure - rents, property rights - were renewed.

We have to guess at why the eve of the day the rent was due should become inevitably associated with hobgoblins, ghosts, witches and demons. The best guess is that November in England is, was forever, a miserable dark month - no sun, no birds, no warmth, No-vember. And therefore gave the cue for creatures of the fog and the night to begin to roam abroad.

The most extreme connection may be the most plausible - November, we gather from contemporary diaries and verses, was the time when people began to get colds and flus and pneumonias - by the way it still is the time when the latest trio - usually trio - of influenzas strike at home and abroad, which makes me hope, if you're over 60, you've had your flu shot - it's getting late.

All the guesswork and imagination that have gone into the belief in witches, right through the 17th Century in England and America, and in ghosts - as late as 1934 in London I recall - we're left with the question how about vampires?

The legend grew up, apparently, in Eastern Europe. For centuries a strong belief among the sensible and the foolish, the educated and the illiterate, in the restless souls of dead men who left their graves at night, sucked the blood of the living and beat it back to the coffin at the first cock crow.

I gather that Western Europeans and Americans tut tutted the notion of vampires until the end of the 19th Century when the business manager of a famous English actor - the man's name was Bram Stoker - invented a bloodsucker of terrifying persistence, one Dracula. And I must say that throughout this past week he has reigned supreme in the movies, at least he shared the horrible supremacy with Mary Shelley's brilliant character Frankenstein.

One thing I have been able to confirm, in this country anyway - it was the mid-19th Century Irish, devout Catholics, who made a special night of Hallowe'en, of mocking the fake religions of witches, ghosts, demons and such.

It became, among them, as Mark Twain solemnly noted - "A very permissible occasion for hitting the bottle." Today Hallowe'en is not noticeably a boozy occasion at all.

But perhaps even the roaming tots - the children's harmless trick or treat - will vanish and before long.

This year there appeared a notice in our apartment lift. It asked parents whose children meant to visit neighbours to put down their names so the building superintendent could see that they were watched on closed circuit and protected.

Many cities now warn parents not to send their children out at all. And in other cities parents are officially warned that if they send their children out unattended they will face prosecution.

This, as you might guess, is the result all across the country of the increasing vulnerability of children to kidnapping, molestation, mugging, assault, random street crime and other nightly hazards of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

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