I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (16 page)

Orc strode towards us, cloak flowing, a Valhalla-despatched angel of death. 'Right, you and you are fighting on Dagmar's side, and . . . let's see . . .' His long, outstretched finger moved towards me; I felt my entire frame stiffen. 'Er . . . Hrothgar with Rodstaff . . . and . . . ah . . .' In the end I could stand it no more. Abruptly determined to jump before I was pushed, I breathed hard and shot up a hand. So be it; the runes were cast; it was my fate to be put to the sword, here in this boy-scout training ground, wearing a dress.

Orc wrinkled his long, freckly nose. 'You? Er, sorry, mate – that's a non-starter.' I felt my pale cheeks redden. And this only days after my youngest daughter withdrew a bottle of chilli sauce from our supermarket trolley, with a look of genuine concern and the words, 'But, Daddy – on the label it says "Not for wimps".'

The shame of rejection eased slightly when Orc hastily explained that a minimum of two training sessions were a prerequisite for 'Martini' combat – the
thralls
, he said, had earlier that week undertaken their third. Insane these Vikings might be, but they were never irresponsible. No matter that their expressions of shellshocked exhaustion – and indeed my own subsequent conversations with them – suggested the newcomers wouldn't be back for a fourth. 'Most of our new recruits last a month,' said Hrothgar later, which was some comfort to those of us who wouldn't have lasted an hour.

For the balance of the morning I squatted on my mossy tree-stump, watching my Vikings, as Flosi had promised, go right at it. Clack, yell, thunk, crunk-thunk, squelch, howl, swish-smash, clack, shriek . . . As the clearing rang with angry blows and cries of rage and pain, my humiliation receded ever further.

Scrish, whomp, thwack . . . I thought of Hrothgar's revelation that Tÿrslið had been blacklisted by English Heritage, organisers of the multi-period Festival of History at Kentmarsh Hall, the country's largest re-enactment event: highlights of the sniffy letter he'd been sent included the phrases 'excessively wild and reckless' and 'insufficient emphasis on reality'. But the Nescafé and fags didn't really seem to matter any more: here before me, now that I could appreciate the scene through the curious eyes of a bystander rather than the tear-filled equivalents of a prospective participant, was the very essence of that brutal, fearless determination which had defined the Vikings, no matter what my in-laws and the po-faced revisionists had to say about advanced naval construction techniques or the runic alphabet.

At length the warriors were all fought out, and I followed as they shuffled wearily back to camp, grumbling over hits and kills and wiping sweat from their hairy red faces. A swishing thwick-thunk lured me round the back of the kitchen tent: there the non-combatant women were launching metal-tipped, feather-flighted arrows at an archery target, and most particularly at the apple wedged on a stick in front of the bull's-eye. Other than being made of wood the bows they were using hardly looked overwhelmingly authentic, but if I'd imagined this might make for a more forgiving introduction to the sport of pointy-stick stretch-twangery, I was soon to be proven wrong. From a range of perhaps twenty feet, in a dozen attempts I grazed the target's outer ring only once, and – despite accepting the optional gauntlet – really, really hurt my hand. In fairness, it was almost dark when a yelp from behind the kitchens informed us that someone had finally enjoyed a William Tell moment.

By then the
thralls
, Hoketil and a few others had packed up and gone; our after-stew campfire congregation proved rather less uproarious, in volume if not content. I now learned of the secret scoring system that kept Tÿrslið on its toes at events: a point for every member of the audience you made cry, faint or vomit, with double marks for having the St John Ambulance called on to the battlefield. A failsafe way to rack up a big score, I gathered, was covertly tying a blood bag round a willing Vike child's neck, then extravagantly biting its throat out before the crowd. Hrothgar hoped this might be trumped by a scenario the Cornishman had recently suggested – after succumbing to a 'leg wound' on the battlefield, he'd be visited by a Viking 'surgeon', who'd surreptitiously replace his carbon-fibre attachment with a joint of pork and a blood bag, then treat the crowd to a graphic amputation. 'Imagine the smell when we cauterise it,' our leader murmured, smiling dreamily.

This imaginatively ruthless determination to distress the spectating public was, I concluded, at least partly incited by the witless enquiries the warriors of Tÿrslið had to endure between battles. A MOP would ask if that fire was real, or this baby, or those horses, then seek confirmation of the supplied answer by jabbing the relevant entities with a stick or finger; an apology for the pain or alarm this caused them was invariably demanded. We chortled at the gormless confusion with which spectators learned that a wooden bowl of stew was indeed to be eaten or a sheepskin to be slept upon. But even as I chortled, I accepted that this ignorance underpinned the whole re-enactment movement: a stew-pot bubbling over a fire was now an exotic spectacle, one worth giving up your money to behold, or giving up your weekends to recreate.

When raindrops began to hiss on the brazier, Orc and Flosi dragged the whole thing under the awning of my open-fronted tent. How particularly grateful I now found myself that, perhaps out of chivalrous respect to the women, the men of Tÿrslið had deemed flatulence less integral to the historical experience than the Legio VIII. As we pulled a trio of sea chests up to the relocated fire, someone even excused themselves after belching.

The restrained ambience lent itself to more considered conversation. I found time to question Flosi on something that had bothered me since he'd flaunted his toggles: how, over many centuries, had the Vikings failed to envision the modest refinement that would have produced the inestimably more practical button – apparently not in common use until the fifteenth century? An awfully big stumble along the march of progress: like inventing the jug, and taking 500 years to realise you could cut the top half off and have yourself a cup. And while I was about it, what about pockets? Flosi laboured to defend his heroes, demonstrating the superior carrying potential of a belt slung with leather pouches in a manner that caused the most heavily laden of these to swing back forcefully into his groin. 'Well, I don't know,' he winced, pallidly. 'They'd just grown up managing without them.' Had our forebears consistently adhered to this argument, I might have said if I'd been more drunk or he'd been in less pain, we'd all have been sitting there naked, grunting and fireless.

The introspection deepened in the hours ahead. Some campfires make you want to drink and shout and sing, others seem to encourage sombre rumination. And so, as the embers subsided, I came to hear of the tragedies that had befallen this outwardly boisterous tribe, the breakdowns, the illnesses, the bereavements. I learned that V's husband Hereward, like her a Tÿrslið member of long-standing, had been killed the year before in a motorcycle crash. V had been riding pillion: the legacy was a 'leg full of metal', which explained why she was still limping from the blow received in combat, but not how on earth she'd been able to fight in the first place. From Rodstaff I heard of the car accident that had very nearly claimed his life the year before that, when he'd hit a tree on the way home from an event. 'Thor saved me,' he said simply: he'd watched a lightning bolt strike the road ahead a few seconds before his crash, and was therefore driving very much more slowly when it occurred. Many weeks in intensive care and many months of facial reconstruction had followed; I understood now that the many scars etched into his cheeks and forehead were not legacies of combat. When at last Rodstaff felt able to attend a Tÿrslið training session, he was greeted with the words: 'Look – it's Quasimodo!'

It was already plain that this camp, though ostensibly a 'living-history workshop' to showcase newly acquired kit and debate the promotion of historical accuracy, was at heart a weekend away with likeminded friends. Now I came to understand that what bound these people together was more than a shared love of beery sadism – theirs was a deep fraternity that went beyond companionship. Indeed, the word 'family' now emerged with touching regularity: as in Viking days, as in modern Iceland, they were a close-knit tribe, who lived in near proximity and looked after their own. This bond asserted itself through visits to each other's grandmothers, to the bedside vigils for Rodstaff, and the dreadful aftermath of V's tragic accident. Inevitably, it found its most eloquent expression in Viking vigilante missions: 'Rodstaff called me up and said he was having a bit of trouble with some yobs outside his house – we were all there in five minutes.' That was Orc again, of course. His own part of Leicester was notorious as a joyrider's playground, yet the odd judicious display of Dark Age weaponry had proved so effective a deterrent that he could now safely leave his keys in the ignition.

The rain intensified dramatically after the Vikes shuffled off to their sheepskin-covered beds; by daybreak, those in the leakier tents had already driven home in a sodden huff. Mrs Orc followed them soon after, taking that high-spirited brood with her; one of my default images of the camp was the final sighting of young Emrys as he dragged his tunic tails through the car-park mud, pike staff in one hand and an upturned mead empty in the other.

Having shared my tent with a fire it was very difficult to stop thinking about hot running water; pulling on that wood-smoked, mead-stickied tunic was an act accompanied with a loudly guttural shudder of self-loathing. I had fresh pants and a toothbrush in the boot, but being caught with either would raise those mumbles about southern pansies to an unacceptable volume.

Why hadn't I snatched the opportunity during my covert mid-campfire mission to catch the ten o'clock headlines on the car radio? Why instead had I snatched three packets of salt and vinegar from the glovebox, and mindlessly shovelled them into my mud-stubbled maw as I hunched down in the footwell? What a horrible price I'd paid for that – my very eye-sockets now seemed rimed with soured trans-fats, an oily penance for this nutritional transgression. The dried Icelandic haddock I proudly laid on the breakfast table might have redressed the historical balance, but after devouring two butter-smeared lengths of it without recourse to cutlery I hardly felt less like a shower.

It was treacherous underfoot; after my second mouthful of campsite I understood why Nikes now poked out beneath many cloak hems. We gathered under the food tent, stirring wooden mugs of tea with huge and filthy daggers, and dispensing muted ribaldries. Asked to help wash up – frankly no onerous task, given the unchallenging quality control – young Otto embarked on an epic teenage sulk, flailing with such impressive abandon that he knocked his own tent down from the inside.

We pottered about, packing up; I helped take down the chapel tent, decommissioned without once seeing active service. The rain briefly evolved into canvas-clattering hail: 'Hail, Thor!' went up a lone, almost apologetic cry. 'Repeat after me,' mumbled V to no one in particular, '"I like doing this."' I sensed that if a few of them hadn't, it was because there'd been no public to dress up for, show off to, petrify, repulse.

The unquestioned highlight of these downbeat final hours was having Hrothgar inflict a deep wound to my left cheek. A livid, two-inch gash, dribbling patent-recipe crimson from a brownish central scab – it was the work of a mere moment for his practised hands. The mysterious clear fluid he first applied somehow caused my skin to contract, giving the impression of a deep, stab-like fissure; there were no mirrors around, but the effect was evidently convincing. As I walked around what was left of the camp, offering thanks and farewells to the few Vikes who remained, Bede – a trained army medic – strode up with a merry glint in his eye, tapping his left cheek referentially. 'Ooh, tasty! Argument with a pike, eh?'

A couple of hours later, cruising down the M1 with my longbow-blistered fingers curled gingerly around the wheel, I wondered what I'd brought away from a long weekend in the Dark Ages. On a micro level, the lovingly collated
Big Book of Fire-Stuff
in my head now included indexed entries for rosemary (a sprig thrown in a smoky blaze considerably reduces eye-sting) and wool (a superlative flame-retardant, as the Cornishman had demonstrated while idly extinguishing a skillet inferno with a corner of his cloak). I had become a little more accustomed to the unchecked accumulation of smokescented bodily filth, to everything that passed my lips being powerfully tainted with damp wood and onions, to the challenging discomforts and intimacies of communal outdoor life.

And there was certainly evidence of a more bluffly practical approach to personal mishap, as I discovered just before Newport Pagnell, when a disheartening flappity-slap from my off-side rear obliged me to pull over into the hard shoulder. My routine in changing a wheel is not to even look for the jack until I've spent at least fifteen minutes howling at the accursed injustice of my predicament. But there I was, bounding out on to the hard shoulder without hesitation, and effecting the necessary pit stop with swear-free focus and almost alarming vigour.

It was difficult to pat myself too hard on the back, though, and not just because I'd just burst all those blisters on the jack handle. Because the overbearing legacy of my stay with the Vikings, as it had been with the Romans, was that violent conflict, such a dominant feature of modern history's first millennium, really wasn't my thing. Try as I might to pretend otherwise, I was still very much a man of my time. The first thing I did when I got home was to alarm the children with my scar, but the second – after being frogmarched at arm's length into the shower by a wordlessly disgusted spouse – was to update my sat-nav's speed-camera database. It was the most twenty-first-century thing I could think of.

Chapter Four