I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (19 page)

Our
dizaine
's first duty was guarding the main gate, which meant kitting up in armour and helping ourselves from the jumble of weaponry piled at the foot of the tower beside it. I picked up an eight-foot halbard with a metal end as viciously complicated as a giant Swiss Army knife with all the blades open. Everyone else had brought their own protection; a very cheerful Dane sourced a breastplate, helmet and gauntlets, and helped me on with them. Cursed as I am with the hands of Miss Muffet and the head of Mr Happy, this was not a straightforward process. The gauntlets' giant articulated fingers were a knuckle's length out of sync with my own, making the simple act of grasping the halbard a feat of pain-defying endurance. The helmet was a kind of cross between a Nazi stormtrooper's and one of those boat-brimmed conquistador jobs; with it perched atop my bulbous skull like a party hat, I could be fairly certain the effect was not sinister. Moreover, with the chin strap fastened, I could barely open my mouth. 'Is that OK for you?' asked my kindly Dane, stepping back and trying to mould his latent guffaw into a smile of encouragement. 'Go, got geally,' I rasped through clenched jaws. 'It gurts like guck and I geel lige a gogal gickhead.'

This latter sensation intensified impressively when I learned that the castle was soon to throw open its gates to several hundred French schoolchildren, and that the Dane and I were to stand outside these gates, halbards at our side, as the Company of St George's welcoming committee. We could hear the massed squeaks of Gallic impertinence even before the castle staff arrived to unlock the mighty wooden wall that lay between us. 'Those about to die,' said the Dane with a wink as it creaked ajar. 'Oh, shuh uh,' I replied.

Being eight years old, the first few dozen visitors didn't give us much trouble. A few even called me '
monsieur
'. The Dane and I worked up an effective good-guard, bad-guard routine – he strode around, brusquely corralling the children into a double column, while I did my best to contort my jaw into a smile whilst conveying a welcome in ventriloquist French. 'Gonjour, et giengenue au chateau de Haut . . . Gerggisgerg.'

We waved in each group then waited for the next to shuffle up the steep and twisting woodland path that led from car park to castle. It was a happy time. 'Take away that postbox,' sighed the Dane, 'and you've got a perfect view.' I surveyed the misty plain beneath us and saw just what he meant: a scattering of rural settlements whose only eminent structures were church spires, and not a car to be seen on the byways that connected them.

The trouble began with the first group old enough not to be scared of the Dane, tall enough to see how stupid my helmet looked, and bold enough to tell me. Our routine quickly fell apart. The Dane aimed his glower at them and they sneered; I attempted a throttled greeting and they jeered. When we noticed their accompanying teachers nudging each other and giggling, we gave up.

For the next half an hour I stood in the cold, white sun, gazing in resignation through the leafless trees as sniggering young Frenchmen flicked my breastplate, rapped my helmet and employed me as a prop in an endless series of demeaning photographs. It was an ignominy I'd so often seen busby-clad guardsman enduring at the hands of junior tourists on the Mall, and one I endured with appropriate stoicism. At least until a youth in a turquoise tracksuit snatched my halbard away, and I trotted off in clanky pursuit screeching gritted, incomprehensible abuse.

I'd only just retrieved it when Johann, somehow resplendent in a sort of metal skullcap accessorised with crimson ostrich feathers and what looked like giant steel earmuffs, led the balance of his
dizaine
out through the gates. Relief that my shift was over lasted as long as Johann's announcement that we were, at this very minute and in this very place, to put on a display of halbard drill.

'Raise halbards . . . carry halbards . . . turn . . . prepare to . . . ah, Mr Englishman?' Hiding in the middle row had been a mistake – four orders in and my unschooled recklessness with this enormous weapon had cleaved a huge hole in the ranks ahead and behind. The Dane's reward for whispering quickfire tips over his shoulder was an errant spike snagged in the nape of his cowl; while detaching this I endeavoured to whack a passing teacher with my weapon's stump end. In my subsequent research I found the halbard thus described: 'In the hands of an agile trained man a formidable weapon, but otherwise more dangerous to the wielders' companions.' They might as well have given Buster Keaton a ladder, nailed a big saw to one end and sent him off down a crowded high street.

After a quiet word it was agreed that I should stay guarding the gate while the drill continued; I watched as my
dizaine
clumped off into the woods for a formation march around the walls. It was much quieter now, with most of the school parties already inside the castle, but reflective appreciation of the timelessly bucolic plain laid out distantly beneath was no match for the ratcheting discomfort of my vice-like finger and headwear. By the time Johann led his boys back up the forest to meet me the pain was so great I could barely focus. My pulsing brain seemed set to escape through whatever head-hole it could find; it was as if a door had been gently closed on my halbard-holding right hand, and not opened.

Johann brought the halbardiers to attention, then sauntered across and gave me a quick up and down. 'Listen, ah . . .'

'His name's Tim,' supplied the Dane, noting my wan distraction.

'Listen, Jim, there's this thing about armour.' My commander lightly clanked his own breastplate with both gauntlets. 'Because I'm tall and slender, armourers love me. I look
really great
in this stuff.' He allowed himself a smile of deep content, then sighed. 'But I have to say you just look really stupid.'

This seemed more than a little rich from a man with a huge bouquet of feathers on his head, but I gazed up at him without reproach: it was a statement of inarguable fact, delivered with commendable simplicity.

'I'm thinking perhaps you could . . .' He broke off, idly fingering his moustache with a steel-plated digit and looking vaguely about. 'Go somewhere else and never return,' was doubtless his preferred conclusion to this sentence, but after a while he concocted something more diplomatic. 'Perhaps you could go to the top of this tower, and help with the handgun.' I followed his gaze up and spotted a thick, hexagonal barrel poking out of a space in the red stone. A moment later, gleefully relieved of my armour, I bounded up three rickety flights of wooden stairs and found my medieval career relaunched with a glorious, shattering bang.

Being a four-foot tube of heavy black iron with a bore the size of a golf ball, the handgun proved inaptly named. More accurately it was a sawn-off, wheelless cannon, or perhaps a fifteenth-century bazooka. The Swedish crew preparing this crudely magnificent firearm for action included the self-taught blacksmith responsible for its manufacture: the day after he offered to make me one for 900, and the day after that I very nearly placed an order. All my best memories of 1474 involved the handgun, but none are more treasured than those of the two afternoon hours I spent up in that smoke-filled, plank-floored turret.

Working as a crew of three, we rotated jobs. I spent my first shift carefully decanting crumbly gunpowder from a stoppered cow's horn into torn squares of paper, sealing each with a twist and passing it to the second in line (a lofty Dane whose physique, stubbled good looks and unusually stainless smile made him the undisputed goodwife's choice), who dropped it down the gun's gaping muzzle, followed by a wad of straw and a good damping down with the ramrod, then handed the loaded weapon to the gunner. He heaved the mighty beast through the small window, then waited as I tipped a little gunpowder over the touch hole to prime the charge, before number two ignited this with our linstock, a slow-burning length of rope wound round a pole. After a quarter-second of heavily pregnant silence, the known world was filled with an apocalyptic blast that shook the stone walls around us, caused some internal organs to change places and left our turret filled with sulphurous smoke and boyish peals of hysterical laughter. I might never make the mental leap back to 1474, but there I was in 1980, watching red-hot pieces of Dinky shrapnel scythe across our back garden.

It was an especially happy moment when my first turn at firing the gun coincided with the egress of the older school parties. We waited until the outside courtyard directly beneath us was thronged with truculent adolescents, then filled our castiron avenger with a double charge of powder . . . If I listen closely, I can still hear that chorus of harrowed, whimpering moans.

The three of us stumbled blinking out of the tower in a state of dazed, sooty-faced elation, looking like Guy Fawkes and his boys might have done if things had gone to plan. Aimless wandering was not tolerated for long amongst the lower orders, and a passing officer swiftly seconded me to wheelbarrow duty – ferrying wood from a necessarily huge pile to the kitchen fire, and returning with a load of festering scraps to tip in the neighbouring spoil pit.

The Dane was helping me shovel in turnip tops and fish heads when the next
dizaine
marched up to take their turn on guard shift. 'If you thought you had a bad time, watch this,' he said, as the crop-headed German
dizainier
barked out the first drill command. His furious displeasure at one soldier's response swiftly reduced the culprit to wobbly-lipped distress.

'Had enough? Want to go home to mamma? Huh? HUH?' A tear rolled down a bearded cheek, and a traumatised school party scuttled by.

At this point a liveried gentleman I hadn't seen before strode up, looking as stern as a man with an Emo Philips' bowl cut is ever likely to. He presented me with the breastplate I'd worn that morning, silently indicated its many rust patches, and before departing issued a single-word instruction: 'Remove.'

I spent the remaining hours of daylight, and a couple beyond, unsuccessfully engaged in a task that would deprive me of the Trial of the Polish Agitator. It seemed a ridiculous undertaking when everyone else had surely employed proprietary chemicals to bring their armour to a showroom shine. Seeing me work away at an orange scab with my thumbnail, a passing member of the kitchen shift suggested using 'abrasive material': after fruitless experimentation with charcoal and salt, I wound up furiously scouring the hateful object with handfuls of groundup castle. The alarmingly counter-productive results of this meant that a short while later I found myself secreting the breastplate behind a bale of hay at the back of the booze barn.

Friday night meant a fish supper, which would add pollocky undertones to the complex flavours impregnating my bowl. In the cauldron queue I eavesdropped on the loudest conversation: a debate introduced by its Austrian originator as 'why we do this shit'. A predictable majority, including nearly all the Scandinavians, were searching for life after LARP; a couple of Brits had more obscurely graduated to hardcore reenactment from 'hippie fairs'; a German newbie said she'd found herself inspired during a tour of Scottish castles. Most intriguing were the three Dover customs officers whose curiosity was first piqued by repeated contact with tooled-up re-enactors in the red channel.

For a great many Company members, four days of unwashed medieval knees-ups applied a little historical balance to working lives spent, like Christian's, at the soulless, lonely frontier of twenty-first-century information technology. For a very few, like Jim the Potter, this was a full-time way of life: throughout the re-enacting season he travelled the continent, hawking his wares at events and fairs. Having made a career from his historical hobby, Jim was the envy of all Company members, or at least all who hadn't taken the time to imagine living for half the year in the back of a Transit van.

With the last cauldron drained, one of the Poles walked about with a wheelbarrow of straw hats he was trying to sell, while everyone leant against castle walls striking the standard medieval quaffing pose. Why not give it a go? Curl an imaginary drinking vessel to your puffed out chest, plant the other fist on your hip, splay your legs slightly and stick out a lower lip. A slight glower helps. Imagine Henry VIII down his local, warming his arse by the fire. I was getting quite good at it when two Company officers rushed up from the gate babbling theatrically about a hostile party in the woods.

'Here we go,' sighed Baz, reeling his lower lip back in as liveried guards scuttled along the dim battlements above. 'Some sort of daft "repel the invaders" thing's about to happen.' Over supper he'd delivered a rundown of his greatest battlefield hits: the Tewkesbury re-enactment where his one-man charge had broken right through the enemy lines, a street-based event in Spain which had evolved into a kind of human Pamplona, the Running of the Baz. The veteran of these and many other brutal victories shook his head and drained an impressively capacious tankard. 'It's dark, so you can't use sharps . . . and if we're not hitting each other, I mean
properly
, what's the bloody point?'

Reassured that I probably wouldn't be hurt, I left him there and jogged across to our handgun tower. There was a lookout already in place at the top; I recognised him as the dishevelled priest. 'Hello there,' he drawled, still peering out of the window. 'I'm Brother Balthasar, Andy, whatever. Oh – here they come.' I squeezed my head alongside his and squinted into the night. A glint of armour, a flash of red feather – it was the Swedes, of course, manhandling their handgun through the moonlit forest.

A rather desultory exchange ensued; the Swedes later complained, with much justification, at the lack of defensive activity. They let off a couple of blasts in our direction, then made a charge at the front gate; we shrugged a bit until someone tottered up the tower stairs with a bucket of water, and emptied it on the invaders through the 'boiling-oil' hole.

'All a bit too
Python
, this,' said Brother Balthasar, during the aimless stand-off that ensued. He snapped soon after, sticking his head right out the window to roar great chunks of John Cleese's silly-English-niggits speech at the puny enemy force gathered distantly beneath. All I really brought away from this experience was an enhanced appreciation of how much better it must have felt to be this side of the huge stone wall. To be – oh,
really
, Brother Balthasar – inside the castle pissing out.