Four O’Clock Came, and Halloween Refused to End

In my family Halloween is a negotiation that begins in August and ends at 7.40pm on 31 October, when my husband turns off the porch light and lies down on the hall floor so nobody can see him through the glass.

At the American School of Barcelona, in 2008, it was a full working day, and two former pupils who remembered it years later made it sound like a festival with a timetable.

It began with costumes and a parade round the school, a loop of small witches, cats and things that were mainly cardboard. Then the children sat down and the show started, and the performers were the teachers. For one morning the grown-ups were the entertainment and the children were the audience, which is how every eight-year-old believes school should be run.

There were sweets. There was a film, billed as scary, which was. And then, at the hour when a reasonable parent arrives to collect a reasonable child, the day carried on without them. Halloween continued next door, at La Mallola, where the children went trick-or-treating door to door in the dusk with their bags.

I cannot fully express how this would land in my household. I have spent years training the children to believe that a school day has edges. I collect at 3.30. The day stops. Here was a school where Halloween simply went over the wall and kept going, like a party that had found a second flat.

Put together, the two memories make a single long day: the parade, the teachers on stage, the sweets, the film and then the walk round La Mallola in the half-dark, being handed things by strangers on purpose. Neither of them mentions going home.

I tried to bring a version of this home. The year we lived in Madrid I announced a Halloween with a parade, a show and trick-or-treating. The parade was three children going round the kitchen island. The show was my husband in a sheet, which he declined to remove for the photograph on the grounds of professional reputation. Trick-or-treating was the neighbours, who had not been warned, and one of whom gave the youngest a clementine and the number of the building administrator.

At 7.40 the youngest asked if it was finished.

My husband, from the hall floor, said yes. She went to check with the neighbours.