Mischief Night – a Northern Tradition or a British One?

4th of November
One of my favourite nights of the year when I was a child was ‘Mischief Night’ – the night before Plot (or bonfire) night so 4th November. I’m not sure whether this was a Northern thing or a British thing so please feel free to leave comments about what you got up to if you had a mischief night when you were kids…

I’ve a feeling that Mischief Night no longer exists amongst modern generations anyway. When I mentioned it to my much younger colleague today at work, she thought (perhaps predictably) that I meant Halloween. We actually didn’t really do anything much for Halloween back in my day. All the ‘trick or treating’ is an American import and a fairly recent one at that.

Anyway… to get onto what went on on Mischief Night…

The main and favourite pastime was ‘knocking on doors’. We used to make this a lot more interesting in our ‘gang’ by taking a length of rope and tying two neighbouring houses’ doors together and then knocking (we would leave around a couple of feet spare in the rope).

This was absolutely hilarious to watch. The first person to answer the door would open it, quickly followed by the second person who, in opening their door, would slam the other person’s door shut. They would furiously yank it open again as we were generally stood not far away laughing. This would then slam their neighbour’s door and so on ad infinitum (until they gave up and we would retrieve our rope). The beauty of this one was that you could openly stand laughing at them and they couldn’t get out to get you! 😉

We also used to pour golden syrup all over the telephone box phone and receiver (a bit anti-social and vandalistic that one) so that people would end up getting all sticky and horrid when they went to make a call. This, of course, was in the wonderful days before mobiles and even before most people had phones in their house. It was also in the days where you took a stack of 2 pence pieces with you to make your call – costs a bit more nowadays!

We always used to remove as many garden gates as possible and hide them. The farmers of the area probably used to scratch their heads in a morning when going into their fields and finding a row of gates along the other side of their wall! Actually, a google search reveals that, due to others doing this, some areas call mischief night ‘gate night’!

Also, as ‘plot night’ (bonfire night) was the next night, we also used to naughtily steal the best bits of other bonfires for our own. I got a rusty nail through my hand one dark night doing that – I suppose tetanus would’ve served me right!

One particular mischief night, we decided to raid the village bonfire which was on the recreation ground. This was the vicar’s baby – he was organising it all. We actually stole a door, a sofa and a piano off this bonfire and, for some reason, decided to take the route round the village past the vicarage.

We were just wheeling the piano and sofa and carting the door towards his house when he appeared walking towards us. We promptly dropped our loads and turned round, making it look like we were taking them TO his plot rather than pinching them. He was fooled and thanked us for our efforts…

An interesting point about pianos here… most houses in Britain had a piano at one time back then (40s, 50s, 60s). They went out of fashion in the 1970s and we broke up many a piano on the green outside our houses with a sledgehammer. It was a test of strength whether you could swing the sledgehammer hard enough to break the thick metalled backplate in those days. I feel terrible that I destroyed so many upright pianos now but, back then, it was normal and acceptable. How times change…

Another thing we particularly did around mischief night but also year-round really was ‘hedge-diving’. This completely wrecked people’s garden hedges but was excellent fun. You basically took a good run at the hedge, dived onto the top of it and it pinged you into the air and into their garden. We would then scarper after we’d done it a few times and they came out to chase us.

Strangely, we were friends with the two children of the ‘big house’ in the village for a while and they used to join us in wrecking their own laurel hedge!

I also used to (not just on mischief night though) go around the village barking and setting all the dogs in the houses off barking. There were a couple of yappy little dogs which I got barking madly in a car once by hammering on the windows and barking at them. They were completely hysterical after a minute or so. Strangely though, so was my mate – she was on the floor and speechless with laughter.

“It’s not THAT funny is it?” I thought to myself. Then I looked in the car and saw a very astonished looking old lady was sat with the dogs.

So… what did you guys get up to? anything? nothing? or you just haven’t heard of ‘mischief night’?

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