The boy who played with fire

They are beautiful to watch but fireworks have a dark side. Just last Friday a woman was hit and injured by a football-sized piece of burning wood as she watched the ground fireworks in Għaxaq. As the festa season peaked, Franklin Orsini told Cynthia Busuttil about the day, eight summers ago, that he almost lost his fingers in an experiment with fireworks fragments.

Nine-year-old Franklin Orsini lit the end of a homemade squib (suffarell) and held it up, waiting for the typical whistling noise. It never came. Instead, the small tube stuffed with explosives blew up.

Holding up his bleeding left hand, the boy started to run towards home, leaving a trail of blood in his wake. He did not get far.

"I could not see where I was going, I was in so much pain," Franklin, now 17, recalled.

He stumbled and fell, floating in and out of consciousness. Someone threw a white towel from a balcony but it was of little use against the blood pumping out of his haemorrhaging hand.

Franklin's mother, Michelle, had just returned to their Senglea home from work when her nephew rushed in, calling her name. "Come quickly, come quickly. Franklin has been hurt," he panted.

Mrs Orsini ran out, finding her son sprawled on the ground, squirming in pain.

"He was not crying but shouting and screaming in pain," she remembered.

It was September 2001, two days after Senglea's village festa celebrating Our Lady of Victories. Franklin had gone out looking for unexploded remnants from fireworks, something he loved doing.

"I sometimes filled a bucket with small balls of gunpowder," he said, smiling at the memories of boyish pranks that almost cost him his fingers.

He would normally line the balls of gunpowder on the pavement, sometimes writing someone's name, and set them alight, enjoying the sight of fragments lighting up in a rainbow of different colours.

But on that Monday afternoon, he was trying to do something different, something more daring.

"A friend had found a squib, which had probably fallen from someone's hands, and lit it up. I wanted to make one which stayed alight longer than his," he said.

So Franklin picked up the now empty tube and filled it with gunpowder, pressing the fragments until it was tightly packed. He believed that the more gunpowder inside the tube, the longer it would stay alight.

He was wrong. "I was holding it in my left hand and the lighter in my right. But soon after I lit the end of the squib, it simply exploded. Even the lighter blew up," he said.

Bits of flesh dangled off the bone; his thumb, index and middle fingers had been reduced to a pulp.

Ms Orsini remembers the rush to hospital. "Two policemen on motorcycles were driving in front of us to make sure that we did not get caught in traffic."

Hours of surgery later, Franklin's fingers had been sewn back together as well as possible. For three weeks, his hand was tied so it would say up - an uncomfortable position. He spent a month in hospital and for weeks afterwards his fingers were bandaged.

The telltale scars have faded as he grew older but he is still missing the tip of his index finger and his nail still grows at an awkward angle.

"I hope that it will not give me trouble when I'm older," he said pensively. He points out that his index finger has remained shorter than the one on his right hand, and he is worried that as he grows older, it will start to bend, rendering it useless.

But for now he considers his a lucky escape. "I never touched fireworks again," he said. He even severed ties with his old friends who enjoyed picking up explosives and playing with them.

"It served as a lesson. I realised that those things are too dangerous to play with," he said.

He plans to keep a hawk-like eye on his 18-month-old brother. "I will never allow him to play with fire."

His mother feels strongly about the need to clean up any unexploded fragments. "Boys are boys and they will play with fire. That is why no dangerous explosives should be left within reach," she said.

Regulations clearly state that the person licensed to let off fireworks is responsible for taking the necessary steps to recover and remove any fireworks that fail to ignite as well as any other material resulting from the discharge of fireworks from the area surrounding the place where fireworks are let off.

But just last month unexploded fireworks fragments were found at the Marsa golf course, small brown packages that could maim, if not kill, a person handling them.