In the fall of 2000, 12-year-old Beth Melton began "Year 7 " at a secondary school in Essex, a county in southeastern England. The following are excerpts from her journal.

Beth's Journal (November 1 - November 5, 2000)

November 1
Last night we had a Halloween party! I invited Jane and Michelle. Mimi invited a bunch of her friends, including one who was really noisy. I was a fairy and Mimi was a devil. Most of the girls were witches. Michelle was Spiderella. Jane couldn't find a costume, so wore devil horns. We ate Pizza Hut pizza – yummy! The delivery guy came on a motorcycle! We played the game where you pass around stuff, pretending it's body parts, like grapes for eyeballs. We were all blindfolded. We also played Wink Murder and Pin the Smile on the jack-o'-lantern. The party was really fun! Mimi's friend Katie won the Pin the Smile on the jack-o'-lantern. For a prize we gave her a Cricket Lickit. It's a lollipop with a real dead cricket inside, and it's edible! We got it at a museum in Washington, DC, last summer. We gave Jane and Michelle one, too. Michelle said she's going to eat hers!

November 5
November 5 is Guy Fawkes Day here. Here's the story of Guy Fawkes Day, an important holiday in England: There was a plot to blow up Parliament in 1605. A group of men, Guy Fawkes one of them, was using gunpowder to attempt that. It didn't work, though. They were caught just in time. There is a rhyme about it that all the people here know:

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot,
I see no reason why the gunpowder treason,
Should ever be forgot.

I heard another poem about it, too. Our 62-year-old friend said they used to say it at school:

Guy Guy Guy
Stick him in the eye
Tie him on a lamppost
And there let him die!

Pretty gory, isn't it? I think Guy Fawkes was executed for treason.

Anyway, people here do a lot to celebrate the holiday. A few nights before the actual Guy Fawkes Day, we went to a fireworks display at a school. Each class had made a Guy Fawkes effigy, or dummy. They were life-size, kind of like our scarecrows. But they weren't all Guy Fawkes. They had Britney Spears and Robbie Williams and other famous people as dummies! Then, the children all carried out the dummies to a huge, unlit bonfire on the field. They threw the dummies on top, and then someone lit the bonfire. It took a long time to get started. We watched it burn for way too long: 45 minutes!

Finally they started the fireworks. They were cool. There were some fireworks that I'd never seen before. One was the Catherine Wheel. It was on a stick, and whirled around like a pinwheel. There was a Guy Fawkes firework, where a Guy in pinpoints of light bobbed his head up and down and moved his arms and legs. There was one that looked like a long curtain or waterfall of silver. At the end, there was a word written in fire-dots: B–Y–E!

Today, on the real Guy Fawkes Day, we went to some friends' house for dinner. We got to do sparklers: my first ever! They even built a bonfire in their backyard – it was huge! Our friends have the most adorable puppy named Joe Cocker (he's a cocker spaniel). They shut him in the house so he wouldn't become a bar-b-qued dog. He howled at us from behind the glass door!

For dinner on Guy Fawkes Day people often eat jacket potatoes (we call them baked potatoes) and sausages and other things you can cook on a bonfire. They have special desserts, too.

Cool, huh? Well, Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Bye!

Beth's prior journal entries

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