I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (22 page)

It seemed so jarring, so sudden, like the house lights coming on in the middle of a deeply engrossing film. I felt almost betrayed. When the Dane strode past in a fleece and hiking boots, rucksack on back and digital camera poised, it was like Dorothy coming face to face with the real Wizard of Oz.

I was dreading my last sight of Johann – catching him in a tracksuit would have paralleled the moment in
Quadrophenia
when Jimmy spots über-mod Ace Face trotting out of a hotel in his bell-boy outfit. When the towering Swede strode into the courtyard in plus fours and a tweed cap I could have kissed him. As I watched, a number of giggling young females from the castle staff rushed over to do just that: Johann's last act, before driving off in a Swedish minibus full of weaponry and
dizainiers,
was to pose for a series of photographs with a lovestruck girl on each knee.

There was an almost indecent haste in the departures, and not just because of the gastric complaint that several wheyfaced Company members were taking home as a period souvenir. 'Oh, I'm not so fine,' groaned one sufferer when I saw him hunched over in the booze barn. 'And see what somebody have done to my breastplate!'

It was as if everyone wanted away before the spell was completely lifted, before that final strike of twelve turned our fairy-tale castle back into a twenty-first-century tourist attraction.

With the medieval make-believe suspended, the closeness and camaraderie of our co-dependent proximity seemed abruptly awkward. As we climbed out of our damp and filthy outfits up in the attic, there was none of the fuzz-buttocked flaunting that had been such a prominent feature of attic life. The chest-out, hail-fellow swaggers were gone, replaced by the diffident, eyes-down shuffle of modern urban life. Filth was suddenly undesirable and inappropriate: 'Bad combo, black denim and distemper,' called out a departing Dwayne the Blacksmith, seeing me lean against a tower wall. Yet the cataclysmically soiled clothing I'd returned to its owner a moment previously would have made a great medieval doorstep challenge: 'Gunpowder? Pottage? Cannon grease? Let's see you shift that lot without a boil wash, Gwenevere!'

The Company's head cook, Josianne, very kindly offered to drive me to Bern. Our opening conversation revealed that neither of us understood a single word the other said, but this didn't stop her delivering three straight hours of amiablesounding chatter. Somehow it wasn't awkward: she talked and talked and talked, and I gazed out of the window, watching in mild awe as Haut-Koenigsbourg briefly emerged high above the gloomy, flooded fields in a Holy Grail halo of sunlight, then blurred back into the smudged grey.

A jack-knifed lorry, contraflows, rush hour – the twenty-first century wasn't trying very hard to win me back. As we crept through Bern's outskirts I compiled my usual post-historical inventory. The physical fallout was as disparate as ever – if previously I'd paid a painful price for hands unaccustomed to wielding shields or longbows, this time the payback was for forty-two years of muscular unfamiliarity with cannon barrels and shoulder yokes. More positively, my first rain-dominated re-enactment had taught me the importance of not getting things wet, because if you failed, the only guaranteed way to dry these things was to spend a whole night with them shoved down the front of your tights. I had almost mastered the art of laying items out in the frail daylight of morning that you might need in the pitch dark of night, and between these extremes could now with reasonable accuracy estimate the hour by consulting the sun. Having for once survived on strictly period rations, I'd come to appreciate age-old epicurean pleasures: a long draught of cool water, a nice crunchy apple, a finger dipped in the honey pot. And under Johann's charismatic command, I had at last emerged from the long period of history when leadership was generally determined by brute physical strength, and the eager willingness to assert this in mortal combat.

My first hours of freedom after previous re-enactments had hitherto been occupied with an unsightly overdose of Homer Simpson-type modern comforts. But after Josianne dropped me off at Bern station, while waiting for the airport minibus I succumbed to what felt a lot like contempt for certain aspects of modern life. Yes, I went into a newsagent's and thumbed through a three-day-old
Financial Times
in a vain quest for football results, but did that warrant those tuts of theatrical disgust from the hausfraus around me? Yes, I ordered two kebabs, but when I smiled at the man who handed them over the kiosk counter, did he have to recoil so visibly? Only when I paid 45p to do something that for four days I'd been doing up against a castle wall for free, and afterwards glanced in the mirror, did I see that he did.

Chapter Five

If a common theme connected all the previous periods I'd stuck a grubby toe into, it was the daily struggle for survival. The Iron Agers had led a hand-to-mouth existence; with the others it was more fist-to-face. Only now, emerging from the Middle Ages, was I entering an era when a West European might reasonably expect to enjoy a life untroubled by the fear of war or famine, albeit one cut rudely short by disease.

In Britain, certainly, we had by the mid sixteenth century established a generally prosperous and stable society, where most people had a roof over their head and enough to eat, and therefore no longer routinely felt quite as eager to kill each other. The delightful consequence, as described in
Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
, was a celebration of human happiness more universal than any previously known. Or, indeed, since.

'Beginning in England in the seventeenth century,' states the author of the aforementioned work, 'the European world was stricken by what looks, in today's terms, like an epidemic of depression.' Having at last resolved his basic human needs, European man looked around at the jolly, prosperous realm he had created and sighed, 'So, is this
it
?' The instant mankind was no longer preoccupied with the lower end of his hierarchy of needs, existential world-weariness kicked in. One minute our sample Englishman was gaily skipping around a maypole, the next he was bitterly pissing on the ribbons, despising himself for the empty-headed pointlessness of it all. In other words, I had better make the most of 1578. It was going to be all downhill from here.

Inaugurated in 1979, Kentwell Hall's three-week Great Annual Recreation is generally acknowledged as Britain's most venerable large-scale, long-term historical re-enactment. Hosted at a period manor house in Suffolk, Kentwell was familiar to me from a tiny box advert that ran for many years in the
Guardian
's classified section, headed 'Live as a Tudor!' It had been yet more familiar to my wife, frustrated sixteenth-century aristocrat and card-carrying period obsessive (the card in question: her Hampton Court season ticket). This was the one event she envied me: when the application forms and brochures dropped on to the doormat she eagerly tore them open.

It was rather sad to see the vicarious excitement drain from her features as it became apparent that first-timers were not considered gentry material – by hallowed Kentwellian tradition, a place at the high table came as grace-and-favour reward for years of lowly servitude. No madrigal-backed feasting and erudite Shakespearian repartee; no velvet and lace. 'You should expect to perform dull but necessary jobs quietly and without complaining,' she read, with growing disgust. 'Menial . . . privations . . . exhausting hard work . . .' She tossed the welcome pack on the table. 'You're going to be some shitty peasant.'

Such was Kentwell's repute that a two-stage selection process was required to sort the Tudor wheat from the chaff. So it happened that a full four months before Kentwell would open its magnificent gates to the first jeering school party, I found myself approaching them up a muddy carriage drive flanked with blasted oaks. This was certainly the most peculiar job interview I was ever likely to attend, but also the one I most dearly wished to go well; only after much wardrobe-wringing had I decided against the paisley trousers that would have declared an eager willingness to make a vast and very public tit of myself.

The 'new participant's form' I now retrieved from the passenger footwell read like a village idiot's CV. Having awarded myself a bottom-grade D for each of the thirty-four listed 'Tudor skills' requiring self-assessment, I'd thought better and Tippexed in a few face-saving Cs: Animal Care, Herbs, Part Singing and – as the closest approximations to Shitty Peasantry – Scything and Coppice Crafts. 'If you feel you have no talent,' one of the accompanying letters had stated hopefully, 'we may discover otherwise.' You may, I thought, aware that the absence of period ordnance at Kentwell made this very unlikely.

There were a good couple of hundred wet people queuing outside an octagonal gatehouse to register, perhaps a third of them fully Blackaddered up in doublet and hose or coif and kirtle; most wore weather-resistant expressions of bright-eyed, wide-eyed, almost evangelical glee. Beyond the queue lay a 100-yard stretch of immaculate greensward, and beyond that, girdled with a broad moat, the turreted majesty of Kentwell Hall.

I joined the queue behind a young girl in a parka with a big mod target on the back. The two basket-bearing, cloak-wearing veterans in front kept her fitfully supplied with banter as we shuffled towards the gatehouse. 'Thing is, you're always out under the trees, so it carries on raining for about four hours after it's stopped . . . I can recommend the Kentwell Diet – you eat loads, but shiver it all off . . . It's kind of like Glastonbury, in tights, with work.'

Our meeting point was the overcroft, an unheated barn attic filled with many rows of plastic chairs. We trooped in, sat down and watched through clouds of our own misty exhalations as an imposing rural statesman of late middle years, in tweeds, brogues and an age-worn Barbour, rose to address us. In sonorous, barnfilling tones this rather superb figure introduced himself as Patrick Phillips, resident owner of Kentwell Hall for the previous thirtysix years, and, for the previous twenty-seven, co-ordinator of what he billed as Britain's oldest and largest period recreation. 'Just to get things straight,' he boomed, fixing all newcomers with a challenging glare, 'this is my house and my show, so what I say, to a very large extent, goes. Feel free to tell me what job you'd like to do, but remember the final decision is mine.'

My relief as Patrick brusquely dismissed the trend for reenactments dominated by 'all that fighting malarkey' was soon swept away by a wave of new misgivings. 'Can I just say how glad I am that it's cold and wet?' he announced, with a grim smile. 'We don't want any fair-weather fainthearts here.' He theatrically cleared his throat, looking about the overcroft as if expecting those who recognised themselves in this description to make an exit. When they didn't, he treated himself to a sceptical harrumph and continued. 'You are to be part of a genuine sixteenth-century entity,' we were weightily informed. 'Nothing should detract from that – no glasses, no false teeth. People tell me they're stone deaf without their hearing aid, and I say, "
How fantastically Tudor!
" It's a terrible crime in our world, a horror story, if you forget to take off your watch. These aren't minor things – these are our
core values
!'

No other event, Patrick declared, demonstrated so eloquently 'how we are all products of our past'. With his rich voice cracked and quavering, he reminded us that as Tudors we would know everyone we saw, and greet them accordingly; what a tragedy that the decline of integrated communities had now sapped Britain of its sense of mutual trust and fraternity. As he detailed how we were to resurrect the age of collective joy, his language, and increasingly strident delivery, seemed more consistent with a cult leader. 'You must unlearn almost everything you know – purge from your minds all knowledge of the last five centuries. The house is not some ancient monument, it's only forty years old!'

'Two score,' piped up a voice from the rear, inciting a round of sniggers which Patrick silenced with an imperious glower. He strafed this slowly across the audience, face by cold-cheeked face.

'What you are about to do is going to change your lives
for ever
.'

With these portentous words still hanging in the cold air, Patrick let it be known that without the funds the Great Annual Recreation brought in, Kentwell would not survive, 'at least not without a tainted government grant of some sort, which I certainly shan't be begging for'. This was his cue for a protracted, sweeping tirade against 'the astounding incompetence of today's politicians'. After a detailed indictment of Suffolk County Council's recycling policy, a weary sigh signalled that his ire was now spent. 'You may wish to put me down as a complete nutter,' he said, trailing off into a mumble, 'as others have.' With that, our lord and master turned away from the lectern and departed through a rear entrance, leaving the overcroft in a silence punctuated by the distant lowing of unhappy cattle.