More Halloween More Apples

In Place of Fear by Catriona McPherson

published 2022

The Edinburgh Murders by Catriona McPherson

published 2025

 

 

[excerpt from Edinburgh Murders] Carolyn [was] the perfect choice to help pull off a Halloween party on a few days’ notice. When Helen arrived, she had already looked out a bolt of black netting – for cobwebs – a pile of sheets – for ghosts – and a big silver tub that looked like a jeely pan but was far too fancy and had no proper handle.

[but she claims little knowledge]

‘You’re assuming I’ve ever been to a Halloween party,’ Carolyn said. ‘Wait! Yes, there was one once. We had to hang over the back of a chair with a fork in our mouths and drop it into the apple bath to try to spear one. My mother said it was more hygienic.’

‘There’ll be a riot if you try to stop the weans dooking tomorrow,’ Helen said.

[The day of the party]

‘They’re starting to gather outside,’ said Carolyn. ‘Miles before five but there’s quite a queue of little tramps and pirates on the pavement. Shall we let them in?’…

The boys charged up and down, ghostie sheets held high above their ankles, tramp coats streaming out behind them. The girls paraded more demurely, all the wee witches with grannies’ shawls and mammies’ brooms, paper hats falling over their eyes, coal dust warts smudging…

 

Helen’s hopes for this party had not been high, what with the children being two-thirds wee mice from the Tabernacle home and one third Fountainbridge tearaways. But it started to work when the turnip lanterns were lit.

Billy and Tam spread newspapers over the floor, while Helen and Carolyn rolled up their sleeves and dipped round after round of scones in a shallow basin of treacle, before threading them onto strings across the width of the hall and collapsing into giggles as they got stickier than the bairns.

 

 

comment: I love Catriona McPherson’s Dandy Gilver books – several of them have featured on the blog, see tag below, along with some of her other books. This is a new series – historical again, set in the late 1940s in Edinburgh, and couldn’t be more different from posh Dandy.

The stories are built round the founding of the NHS in 1948 – our heroine Helen comes from what would be seen as a very under-privileged background, in the tenements of a poor part of the city. Through some luck, she has trained up and become a Welfare Officer in the new service: not a doctor or nurse, but someone who tries to disseminate useful information and handle questions and queries, and negotiate with social services.

This background seems to be meticulously researched – the details of the work, the lives of the people, the geography of the city, the social details. And it’s fascinating – I certainly learned a lot about the NHS.

This new job raises Helen out of her family. She ends up living with her husband in a flat with a bathroom – a first in her family. But all is not well with her relationship, and I guess this will play its way out in what I hope will be a long series of books.

Family histories and sadnesses and joys are spelled out. And of course there are crime plots in the two books – both very typical of McPherson in that they are grounded in convincing details, and distinctly chilling, and have very surprising (and, truly, wholly unguessable) solutions. I do enjoy the crime plots, but she is also unmatchable at telling the stories of the people… This new series is highly recommended.

And now to the topical feature. In the second book, Helen’s sister has got tied up with a strange church, with considerable question marks around it. Helen and her friend Carolyn go to organize a Halloween party for the varied local children.

I thought there was a fascinating comparison with this week’s other Halloween entry – I commented then that I had never heard of the forks being used for apples. So it’s a class thing. Helen is saying above that the local children want to duck for apples, ie lean over a tub of water and try to pull them out with their teeth,

Everyone is carving turnips in to lanterns – which is what we did when I was young. The US tradition of using pumpkins is rapidly taking over in the UK. It’s essential to have changes like that, so old people can grumpily complain.

Treacle scones were a new one on me: I had seen mentions, and thought it was scones made with treacle, but no:

‘Another [Halloween] activity that sees players banned from using their hands, this messy game challenges participants to take bites out of sticky treacle-covered scones dangling from string. Messy but tasty!’

That comes from a marvellous webpage explaining all you could want to know:

6 Scottish Halloween traditions | National Trust for Scotland

Ghost is from the UK National Archives.

The children having a Halloween party are from one of my favourite resources, Florida Memories (see this post for a discussion) – just a few years later, and undoubtedly a lot posher and better-off than the children at Helen’s party.