I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

Table of Contents

• About the Author
  
• By the Same Author
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• MY TRAVELS in LIVING HISTORY
  
• Acknowledgements
  
• Prologue
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  

I Believe in Yesterday

Tim Moore's writing has appeared in the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Times
, the
Sunday Times
and the
Observer
, on whose behalf he was voted Travel Writer of the Year at the 2004 UK Press Awards. His books include
French Revolutions
,
Do Not Pass Go
,
Spanish Steps
and
Nul Points
. He lives in West London with his wife and three children.

By the same author

Frost on My Moustache
Continental Drifter
French Revolutions
Do Not Pass Go
Spanish Steps
Nul Points

I Believe in
Yesterday

Tim Moore

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 9781407021034

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Jonathan Cape 2008

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Copyright © Tim Moore 2008

Tim Moore has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Jonathan Cape
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781407021034

Version 1.0

To my old self

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Neil Burridge, Will Marshall-Hall, the fine men of the Legio VIII Augusta, Aurificina Treverica, Mick Baker and the warriors of Tÿrsli ð, Christian Folini and the Company of Saynt George, Mistress Joan, Bella, Ed Boreham, Butch Hauri, the Douglas Texas Battery, Louisiana's war widows and refugees, and the incomparable Gerry Barker.

Oh – and Birna, for sending me off into the filth and fury with a kiss and a clean tunic, and not making me sleep in the shed when I came home.

Prologue

'Seven of us born up there.'

Sponge in hand, I looked around from the car's soapy roof and saw a venerable gentleman in a flat cap and scarf, trim and upright, nodding slowly, his gaze fixed on my bedroom window. 'Sorry,' he said, blinking himself back to focus and giving me a gentle smile. 'I'm a sparrow.'

My fingers tightened round the sponge, releasing a thick gobbet of dirty froth down the front of my trousers; then relaxed, releasing another: here was a Sparrow, scion of the fabled W.D. Sparrow. The W.D. Sparrow who had appeared on a 1923-postmarked envelope we found behind a doorframe after moving in sixty-five years later, and on the occasional utility bill that arrived in the months that followed. The man whose poignant legacy of this epic tenure, in a house stripped of all other domestic accessories, was an old red telephone and a BT directory, open at a page of Hounslow borough's residential care homes, with one such shakily circled in pencil.

In quiet suburban cockney, the son of Sparrow began to reminisce on his upbringing at number 29. The night he and a couple of brothers sneaked back in by shinning a drainpipe (one had slipped and broken a leg); the Luftwaffe bomb that had landed just behind the garden wall, entombing the Anderson shelter the family had vacated moments earlier; the bus-stop chats with Dirk Bogarde, who had learned his craft at the end of our road, in a theatre that was now an office car park; and, yes, the seven new Sparrows hatched in the nest since soiled by three fledgling Moores.

I listened enthralled, oblivious to the sponge-chilled damp in my wrinkled fingers. If his tales came embued with a special resonance, it was because the home in which they were set was in every important detail the one we acquired. W.D. Sparrow was a careful owner, whose hardcore seven-decade redecoration habit revealed itself to our blowtorches like the layers of a house-shaped gobstopper. But that telephone and a gas stove aside, he was not a man who set much store in contemporary lifestyle comforts. It was quite a thing, in 1988, to walk into a home in an affluent area of West London and find its water supply restricted to a single cold tap in the kitchen, with fresh evidence of solid-fuel heating solutions smutting the hearths of every room. There was no bathroom, indeed no interior sanitation of any sort: the council's awe-struck building inspector had congratulated us on acquiring the very last residence in London W4 serviced solely by an outhouse.

'Would you like to, um, have a look around?'

Sparrow junior's nostalgia well had run dry, and it seemed an appropriate offer. For a moment those old eyes widened in anticipation; then he forced a wistful smile, declined politely, tightened his scarf and walked away. I watched him for a while, then turned back to the house. His reluctance wasn't hard to understand. The interior that in 1988 was almost exactly as he remembered it would now, fewer than twenty years later, be entirely unfamiliar. Almost everything behind his old front door, in fact even his old front door, had long since been rent asunder with crowbar and sledgehammer, and carried away in a skip. I couldn't say I still parked my behind on alfresco porcelain, or poured pans of stove-boiled water into a tin bath, or had a hundredweight of smokeless delivered every week. These were commonplace traditions that had defined the previous occupant's existence, and that of his predecessors, yet to have continued even one of them would have marked me out as an unwholesome eccentric. One short step away from encouraging pigeons to roost in the kitchen, or storing my excretions in labelled biscuit tins. How close I was to the life and times of W.D. Sparrow, yet how very, very far.

I returned to my distracted sponge-work, pondering how abruptly we had cast aside an age-old way of life, and the universal skills associated with it. In a single generation, life-changing luxuries had become necessities: with sporadic access to electricity and running hot water, my parents had endured well-to-do upbringings that would now be decreed almost inhumane. I pondered it all again one morning shortly afterwards, reading a newspaper report on a recidivist German youth offender sent by the exasperated authorities to 'fend for himself' in a remote Russian village. 'If he doesn't chop wood, his room is cold,' said his social worker, 'and if he doesn't fetch water, he can't wash. He must cope as we all did a few decades ago. It's the last resort to re-educate him.'

What had become of the Western world, that managing without sockets and taps was now the ultimate sanction against young rule-breakers? Were the everyday challenges faced by our forefathers from the dawn of civilisation until 'a few decades ago' already so remote and alien?

The TV schedules certainly suggested a nation mourning the loss of workaday, Sparrow-pattern life skills, and nurturing a perverse fascination with its own pampered uselessness: almost every month saw a new series in which hapless volunteers relived history by failing to fasten a stiff collar or pluck a chicken or bail out a trench. Watching as an aimless throng failed to recreate the erection of Stonehenge, a reworking of Jarvis Cocker's withering dismissal of rave culture ran through my head: is this the way they say the past is meant to feel, or just 20,000 people standing in a field?

Happily, encountering history face to face was a generally more rewarding balance of education and entertainment: at sites of historical significance one would routinely encounter elaborately costumed participants proficiently going about their period business. As my children failed to churn butter in the kitchens at Hampton Court one spring afternoon, their tutors – an engaging pair of leather-aproned Tudor cooks – brought me up to speed with Britain's thriving 'living history' scene.

Until a decade or so back, re-enactment had ticked along as a regional hobby for weekend warriors – the Cavalier and Roundhead Midlanders of the Sealed Knot, the hardy Roman legions clustered around Hadrian's Wall. It's no accident that the first official definition ('any presentation or other event held for the purpose of re-enacting an event from the past or of illustrating conduct from a particular time or period in the past') appeared in a clause that exempted historical reenactment from the Violent Crime Reduction Bill, 2006.

Yet the cooks seemed refreshingly unimpressed with the pain-based end of the spectrum, and talked instead of a pastime that had developed into an erudite national sub-culture. Some of their associates were bona fide social historians, test-bedding theories on how people worked and played – it was all rather more academic these days. And significantly more diverse: 'I've heard you can go right back to the Stone Age if you want to.'