I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (18 page)

The purpose of these became apparent in a very quiet village soon after, when Christian creakily raised an up-and-over garage door to reveal two artillery barrels marooned in a jumble of trestles, stools, cauldrons, earthenware, ironware, wickerware, saws, axes and a great many savagely spike-topped halberds and pikes. It was a dumbfounding moment, the closest I've ever come to knowing how Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter felt that day down in the Valley of the Kings.

A professional haulier rumbled up in a big lorry, which over two very wet hours we almost entirely filled with the contents of the garage. When it was done we stood back, rested our rusty, damp hands on our hips and looked up at the extraordinary load. 'So,' said the driver, in the perfect English I was already taking for granted, 'where is your theatre?'

There was still a lot of driving to do, and while other people did it I hunkered down with my candles and mattocks for a last run through the incredibly detailed background scenario Christian had laid out for our event. The days before the Company arrived at Haut-Koenigsbourg had not been uneventful: a Burgundian messenger had been ambushed and his nose cut off; a group of burglars had attempted to scale the castle walls; a noblewoman had slipped on a wet step in the inner castle, 'but luckily, her leg did not break'.

Then it was into the routine we would adapt to once garrisoned at the castle, one largely dictated by the rule that 'the Company does not function as a democracy'. Participants would be split into ten-man
dizaines
under the command of a
dizainier
, himself responsible by turn to the quartermaster, the provost, the petty captain and the captain. With a curious blend of dread and excitement I re-familiarised myself with the daily drill: 'The wake-up call will be around 0700. We will have morning prayers before breakfast. The provost has an eye to check they are being attended. Each
dizaine
will by rota help in the kitchen, clean the cauldrons, provide the artisan stations with food, chop firewood and support the quartermaster with whatever work there may be. Two of the
dizaines
will be on guard during the night.' The reward if I could stick all this until Friday: 'the arrest and trial of a Polish agitator for causing unrest'.

The expectation of utter authenticity went without saying, alluded to only in a footnote: 'As usual, no smoking visible to non-smokers. Likewise, no use of cameras in costume. If you want to take pictures, please put on modern clothing.' I wiped a porthole in the condensation, gazed at the grey-misted hills and thought again of the troubling paragraph I'd found in the 1990 issue of
Dragon
. 'This year at le Puy, a very small group of the Company indulged in an extremely personal "hobby" that finally tested the good humour and tolerance of their comrades, and brought semi-official complaints on the flight back.'

I'd wondered if there would ever be a good time to find out more about this 'hobby', and if it was still practised. At any rate, this was not that time: with our destination now apparent as a tall red smear on a distant hilltop, Christian's right foot eased towards the floor and the gleam in his eye evolved from cheery to manic. His mobile rang, and in distracted impatience and three languages he brusquely despatched an enquiry related to his work as a web-server engineer. '
Ja, ja, ja . . . eh bien
, reboot
le
router!'

The road shrank and rose and twisted; a vast battlement the colour of dried blood reared out of the mist; Christian wrenched up the handbrake, leapt out, and scuttled in through an arched doorway the height and breadth of a double-decker. I followed him and stumbled straight into a Bruegel.

The slushy, snow-bordered courtyard within was alive with medieval scurrying: a clay-slathered potter in pointy boots and a pointy felt hat, shouldering his wheel; dangly capped minstrels lugging lutes and flutes; florid, linen-coiffed wenches with spinning wheels and baskets of apples; frowning gentry in fur-trimmed cloaks; shrieking urchins in bring-out-your-dead cowls. Liveried soldiers were stacking breastplates, standards, shields and helmets beside a barn, home to a small mountain of hay, half a dozen comatose figures in tights, felt caps pulled over their faces, three pitchforks and perhaps 200 crates of bottled alcohol.

For a while I gawped from the foot of the mighty witch-hatted tower that bore down on us, overwhelmed by the scene's scale and faultless plausibility. Then a lofty, green-cloaked man with a fat armful of fabric and a huge smile breaking through his riotous facial hair strode up, and addressed me in high-pitched Germanic English. 'Tim, yes?'

This was it: I blinked hard and launched recklessly into my rehearsed opening gambit. 'Hail-fellow-tis-pity-indeed-God-hath-not-sent-us-a-faire-day-how-goes-it-with-thee.'

The big man's smile faltered; in horror I realised I had shown insufficient respect. 'Sire!' I blurted. 'Lord . . . master . . . my liege?'

He wrinkled his sizeable nose, then let forth a shrill guffaw. 'Welcome to 1474, dude!' And he handed me a big pile of multi-coloured clothing.

Feeling my whole head burning, I grasped this bundle and a linen sack, which, on his instructions, I stuffed haphazardly with barn hay. Tottering beneath this load, now supplemented with my holdall of personal belongings, I followed him up a wooden staircase, along a rickety covered walkway, through a series of dim chambers strewn with barrels and baskets and finally – stumble, curse, juggle, drop – up a narrow stepladder. 'Your bedroom!' he beamed, then scuttled back down through the trapdoor before I'd had a chance to thank him.

Before me, sparsely illuminated by candle lanterns hung from a cat's cradle of eaves and crossbeams, yawned the largest attic I had ever encountered. Whispery shufflings encroached from unseen corners; as my eyes attuned I could make out caped and cowled figures laying out bedding and possessions. Hourglasses, daggers and iron-hooped buckets lay strewn around; in vain I scanned the glazed earthenware, wood, leather and linen for any trace of modern life. As one of the many Scandinavian participants would later tell me, with a mixture of pride and shame, 'When it comes to re-enactment, we are the real super-nerds.'

This previously unencountered level of dedication was embodied by the Jewish merchant I'd seen carrying his seven-branched candlesticks across the courtyard. That evening I learned he had not only personally tailored his entire outfit, from those Star-of-David belt studs to that bobble-topped yellow skullcap, but hand-fashioned an oil lamp and other accessories from period designs on display only in Jerusalem museums, learned how to bake the requisite type of unleavened bread, and – despite not actually being Jewish – mastered the Hebrew text and speech necessary for performing religious ceremonies. And he had done all this in six months.

I made my home at the attic's far edge, just by a sizeable gap where roof failed to meet floor. Trying to ignore the graveyard mist curling up through this opening, I stripped off my twenty-first-century wardrobe, bundled it away with my nylon holdall and paint blanket under the straw sack, and set about making sense of the outfit I'd been given. It was a task that would prove distantly beyond me in the four days ahead.

Night had fallen when at last I creaked back down the stepladder. First into shot came my death-scented peasant shoes, followed by two tightly woollen-clad legs: one Lincoln green, one off-white. Somewhere around mid-thigh lay the bottom hem of an extremely capacious scarlet wool tunic, bunched in at the waist with a thin leather belt from which dangled that shrieking sore thumb of a patchwork bag and a linen knapsack heavy with thigh-battering utensils. Next up a red sleeve the girth of a Brotherhood of Man trouser leg, then another, a quick flash of moss-coloured linen jerkin and the greasy pig-strips that half-fastened it at the neck, a crumpled sliver of the raw linen shift beneath this and just the hint of the thermal vest beneath that, and then the crowning glory – a skull-clinging, eyebrow-grazing dome of a cap, one half red, the other black. Manchester United's court jester.

I slipped and scuffled along the dark walkway, stopping many times to yank up my green and white hose, unsatisfactorily attached to my jerkin using the eyelets and a dozen-odd metal-tipped laces (sorry, 'points'). Very cold moisture was already blotting through those thin leather soles and the covert cycling socks, and my long johns didn't seem nearly long enough. But if I was shivering, it was largely down to a sense of apprehension more powerful than I had experienced at any previous re-enactment. Because already, this didn't feel like one.

I tagged on to a column of hooded, lantern-carrying mutterers, and followed them through an archway, up a perilously slick-stoned path against the outer wall and into an open area flanked by soaring walls and towers. In one corner a fire was bringing a cauldron of root vegetables to the boil, and amongst its circle of Smurf-hatted huddlers I found many forms of comfort. Most principally, there was confirmation all around that the Company's lingua franca was not fye-on-thee, but MTV. One of the half-dozen Brits warming their hands amongst the Swiss, Germans, Frenchmen, Poles and Czechs explained why: 'If it can be done properly, like the kit and food and that, then we do it properly. If it can't, like getting everyone to talk medieval, then we don't. No point. Same goes with daft period names. I'm Baz.'

Baz was a crop-headed ox of a man who I'd earlier seen shouldering three of the Company's hefty standing shields at once; no one else had managed two. He filled my tiny pewter cup from a vast flagon of ale and aimed his thousand-furlong stare up at the battlements. 'No matter how many times I do these things,' he said, in pancake-flat Yorkshire tones, 'that thrill never goes away. Fuck: I'm living in a castle.' Baz went on to tell me of his day-job as a fencer, his past as a roadie, bouncer and hardcore punk, his dalliance with Second World War re-enactment as a Russian infantryman, his £1,500 peasant outfit.

His oft-heard pronouncement as the kitchen area was prepared became a catchphrase: 'Show me where you want the hole and I'll dig it.' As the physical embodiment of a stout yeoman, Baz was plainly back where he belonged. If it was true of the Vikings, it was even truer of this lot – I couldn't avoid concluding that many Company members had gone medieval largely because their face fitted. Put-upon slap-headed fatso in the twenty-first century; respected friar in the fifteenth.

We filed past the cauldrons for a ladle of soupy stew, and after a mumbled, desultory grace, washed it down with a monstrous surfeit of ale. In the days ahead I would learn that in glorious contradiction of Christian's domestic precedent, getting medievally tanked up was one of the duties of castle life: you don't have to be drunk to work here, but it helps. Only when ordered to do a run to the booze barn, there to decant ale from deposit bottle to glazed earthenware, did I discover our brew of choice to be the monk-strength ruin of many a Belgian. And by then, it was already much too late.

At some indeterminate point in the night I found myself ricocheting along the covered walkway, my muddied hose bearing testament to a fitful mastery of the medieval walk that was apparently obligatory: a sort of cocksure, rolling gait, half cowboy, half costermonger.

This method of progress proved very poorly adapted to the terrain encountered once I'd ascended the trap-door stepladder at the third attempt. After two swaggering strides into the attic blackness, it was made vocally apparent that many more people had made their beds here during my absence, and that most of these were now in them. For a minute I stood there, swaying gently as I waited for my eyes to adjust. When I accepted they wouldn't, I inched unsteadily across the dusty boards, outstretched arms probing the dark.

Twice my forehead impacted forcefully with some ancient beam; twice I recoiled and felt my wet heels make human contact. Chivvied off course by tuts and hissed Teutonic curses, I was soon utterly, utterly lost. At one point I tripped over something, or someone, and, finding myself prostrate on a stretch of unoccupied floor, very nearly didn't get up again. Only after an almost tearful eternity of hunched fumbling – and one very unfortunate false alarm – did I locate my straw-bag. Effortfully I removed one sodden shoe, and after yanking in vain at the other flopped backwards, half covering myself with the paint blanket and Christian's cloak. Shortly after I pulled both of these off, and stuffed them into the numbing blast that rushed in through the gap by my head.

It was a predictably trying morning. Terrified by the prospect of a day in the stocks – the default punishment, I imagined, for any idle heathen who forswore morning prayers – I'd blundered about the castle's many courtyards in search of the chapel, at length finding a plain and very damp chamber where a stubbled and bleary Englishman in a crumpled white habit was lighting candles with a shaky hand. For half an hour he mumbled schoolboy Latin at his filthy, frozen and very modest congregation; evidently, threats of a headcount were included only to add a little colour to the scenario.

My drunken failure to wash up the night before meant a breakfast of turnip-tainted porridge, and as the assembled Company stood in silence for our debut morning muster, the toothbrush I'd secreted down the front of my tunic dropped to the flagstones with a tell-tale plasticky tinkle. The harlequin throng around me wheeled about as one; I laughed foolishly as I stooped to pick it up, but I laughed alone.

Standing on a low wall before us, Christian – resplendent in the red and white Company livery – ordered us into
dizaines
by name. I wound up in a largely Scandinavian unit, headed by a man called Johann who was by some distance the most conspicuous human presence at Haut-Koenigsbourg. At six foot four he was the tallest Company member; with an exuberant Prussian-general moustache he was also the most facially flamboyant. Most compellingly, in that keenly fought contest for the castle's daftest wardrobe, no one ever came close. That morning he teamed his fur-trimmed scarlet coat and red and cream hose with a towering bell of a hat, silly of itself, but also quite plainly intended to suggest the business end of a great big cock. Yet somehow – perhaps because of the defiant, preening self-confidence with which he carried himself – he got away with it. Somehow, in fact, he looked like the coolest man in all Christendom.