I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (25 page)

William, the most senior under-steward, found me aimlessly humbling peasants in the paddock grove. He placed a hand on my shoulder, and as he led me back to the house explained the request he had now himself fulfilled: our noble lord had been asking for willow wands to smooth out tablecloths, as laid for the benefit of those gentry who had opted to eat outside. 'It's tough to get the hang of the language,' he said, when at length we reached the courtyard. 'But I just want you to know I think you're doing . . .
really well
.' If William had been older than thirteen, I would have felt less like burying my knee in his jewylls.

With those who would dine within waiting expectant in the great hall, we joined the grooms and stewards lined up by the kitchen. William had advised me I was to lead the procession of dishes and announce each to the seated gentry, but while assimilating this looming duty I found myself distracted by my first experience of the cook and her staff in action. It seemed more like a boiler room in there, a blur of smoke, fire and broth-spoiling industry. The utensils were crude and smutted, the raw ingredients of base and wholly unexotic appearance, and the ovens might more convincingly have been employed to power some pioneering pit pump.

How extraordinary, then, to see floury hands emerge from this filthy maelstrom bearing dishes of such aromatic and opulently decorative splendour, each passed into a waiting page's hands with the cook's flustered pronouncement: 'Marchepane tart of peaches . . . salat of portingales . . . snow in summer . . .' Pie of this, farce of that, brisket of the other – I didn't at this stage have any useful idea what most of these things were (marchepane is marzipan, in case I forget, and portingales – then shipped in from Portugal – were oranges), but that hardly seemed to matter. Each dish was at once a fabulous creation, and a sombre reminder of the dumbfounding gulf that divided the impossibly pampered few from the barley-boiling many. A gulf neatly embodied in the little ramekin of pease pottage that was last out of the kitchen: an ironic bit of rough, like those miniature cones of fish and chips they serve at up-market functions.

A maid rushed in from the dairy with a tray of butter pats fashioned into Tudor roses, followed by another bearing golfball-sized soft cheeses garnished with delicate blooms from the walled garden. I took them both, then turned to find the procession had left without me.

'. . . and marchepane tart of peaches!'

William's assured tones rang out around the great hall, giving way to a smattering of genteel applause from the high table, a dozen noblefolk seated Last-Supper-style behind the neatly marshalled pewterware. He turned as I walked in, shot me an infuriating wink, then nodded up at the minstrels' gallery, high above us near the distant hammer-beam ceiling. On cue, Master Symon and his fellow musicians launched into some plucking, parping hey-nonny-nonnyism.

'Yeah, sorry, mate – we had to get cracking,' murmured my youthful usurper as I joined him and the other maids and pages by the serving table. Watching a moment later as he dispensed pleasantries and portingales to his enchanted high-table fan club, I realised I was beginning to despise this child of thirteen. And pathetically, I despised him because I was jealous: jealous of his accomplished self-confidence, jealous of how he had won the hearts of every Kentwell notable with his cheeky (but authentic) banter and mischievous (but authentic) roister-doistering high-jinks. Jealous, most overwhelmingly, of the countless acts of reckless rebellion that always went undiscovered: refreshing himself from the wine jug, despite the ample crimson evidence that besmirched his ruff; hoisting surreptitious V-signs behind many a gentry back; idly flicking large amounts of food – soft cheeses, fruit, chunks of pastry – straight out of the window behind the serving table.

Contingent as they were upon my own poor showing, these resentments hardened impressively when I was taken to task by the high table's most terrifying resident, a forthright and aggressively flirtatious noblewoman. In a severe whisper, delivered as I proffered her a pie, she warned me that I was failing to display the authority befitting my role. 'Just
assert
yourself, man,' she hissed, her shrewish stare intensified by the wives-of-Henry headdress that crowned it, 'and for heaven's sake, work up a bit of chat, the odd witty rejoinder,
anything
.'

Half a dozen schoolboys now approached, gurning in automatic revulsion at the fare on display; presented with an audience, milady addressed me in ringing tones.

'Why, 'tis an ill place for a feather, Master Wat!'

A sudden silence entombed the hall; I tracked her prompting gaze to my quill, which through an accident of gravity now gave the impression of sprouting forth from my codpiece. A tinkling of noble laughter swelled then died away; many pairs of eyes, young and old, settled expectantly upon me. What Would Joshua Do? A hundred klaxons went off in my head, with the unfortunate effect of evacuating it.

'Stuck right down my bell-end, innit?' I blared, or later wished I had. Instead, I looked back down at the feather, ears aflame, and directed at it an almost inaudible grunt of assent. My noble tormentor issued a strangled exasperation, and as the minstrels struck up afresh, leaned back and muttered, 'Well, maybe it'll come.'

After the nobility had had their fill and departed, the staff, as would henceforth be the case, dined in the next room along, on any leftovers not defenestrated by bored servants. The first school party filed in to find me mashing together pie crust, pottage and honey dressing in my bowl, and were filing out when, with an echoing report, my ale-filled wooden beaker split from lip to base.

I was dealing with the hose-soiling, William-cheering aftermath when in walked the chap who had shown me round the manor all those months before. By dress and back story, the man I would know as Master George should have taken his rightful place on the high table; I was never quite sure why he had instead been obscurely seconded to ours. But how glad I would be of his and Mistress Joan's unfailingly cheerful guidance in the days ahead, and how glad I was that very moment when he spared me the ordeal of leading grace. In the bowl-clattering chatter that followed his amen, he sourced a spare cup from about his person and handed it to me with a smile. 'Master Wat, I bid you take this to the chamber yonder, and there refresh yourself from my vessel of squared form.' He flicked his head at a door marked 'Go Ye Notte This Way'; I slipped through into the off-limits realm beyond and there, on a side-table dense with silver-framed photographs of Patrick's forebears standing to monochrome attention, stood a three-litre wine box.

And so life about the manor settled into its peculiar two-speed, two-age routine. The days began with increasingly sweaty tent-reveilles, and long, hot mornings spent educating childer in the shadeless courtyard, clad from head to toe in thick black wool. 'A most fiery day about the manor,' said Master Symon each morning, trotting past with his lute towards the cool darkness of the house. My first duty was now to fill a huge zinc waterbutt from a standpipe hidden under a sheet of hessian by the stewards' room door, for the purposes of rehydrating staff and visitors. Or, in reality, just the staff: the schoolchildren were invariably unwilling to spare themselves from parched death if doing so meant ingesting fluid which had 'got all bits in'.

Most of the days were now what they called 'free-flow', with the staggered school groups supplanted by a juvenile free-forall: instead of seeing off regular waves of attackers, we now had to cope with an eight-hour blitzkrieg. The heat made the children more stupid and us staff more intolerant. It was very hard to give a straight answer when asked if those candles on the window sill were real, or that feather in my purse. Or the dead hare a teacher spotted rotating gently in the moat one morning, which a page and I fished out with a basket on a pole, and presented to the kitchen staff. Four hours later I ladled out jugged lumps of it on the high table.

Worst were those small groups with a very high staff-to-childer ratio, evidence of severe behavioural issues at best, impressive criminal records at worst. 'Is that a real knife? Can I have it? Are you a pirate? Are you a wanker?' Wilmott confided that though most Kentwellians came to escape the realities of modern life, she was here to get back in touch with them. I could see what she meant, but after such a gritty encounter it was very hard not to take it out on the next party of open-faced youngsters, beckoning them forth onto the courtyard, waiting until their rapt faces were angled up at mine, then shattering the expectant silence with a larynx-stripping bellow: 'I am Chamberlain, HEAR ME ROAR!'

On the most stifling morrow, a new batch of pages joined our ranks: I commandeered the smallest and most cherubic as my winsome courtyard assistant. After an hour young Nicholas, hitherto a silent and biddable prop, interrupted one of my interactive bow-and-curtsey workshops with a sort of extended wolf-like yodel. When I wheeled round to reprimand him, he looked straight through me, said, 'That's about right, David,' and embarked on a deeply unsettling drunken giggle. Then his eyes rolled up into his head; I caught him before he bit maze.

Mistress Joan took charge of the patient, and after we'd half-walked, half-carried Nicholas into the shade her suspicion of heatstroke was confirmed: we unbuttoned his doublet to find a thickly padded military jacket beneath. It later transpired that the poor mite had been turned away from the archery butts on age grounds, but had kept the uniform on out of stubborn pride. I wondered if he'd be carted off through the time tunnel in an ambulance, but the temptation of a bona fide invalid to work on proved too great for the herbalists. Nicholas was propped up in bed with an aromatic cold compress on his pale forehead, an object of curiosity for the endless stream of visitors jostling through the relevant bedchamber. He didn't so much convalesce as lie in state.

In the sparse moments of down time, Mistress Joan and I would find a patch of shade and stand there sharing murmurs of illicit vocabulary, the odd 'weirdo' or 'sod it', like two schoolkids splitting a crafty fag at the back of the hockey pitch. If she wasn't around I'd have to make do with a game of liar dice round the stewards' room table, plonking my plumply padded hose on a stool ('like having a built-in cushion, innit?', as Edmund pointed out). When defeat palled, I entertained myself by striking enigmatic
Man With a Pearl Earring
poses against the sunlit panelling, a period still life of fruit and pewter on the sideboard, frame-right.

It was an expression of how completely I had failed to subjugate them that the grooms and under-stewards all called me 'mate', if they called me anything at all. In the stewards' room I was accorded the stilted, rather reluctant companionship of some vaguely embarrassing cousin, or a French exchange student. And as Mr Barraclough to Joshua's Mr Mackay, how I dreaded ordering, asking, beseeching this room full of Fletchers to do my will.

All this was compounded by the fresh hell of Suffolk's Cockiest Page, a lumbering youth called Riece who one morning strode into the stewards' room to announce that we were all his bitches now. Riece called me 'chief', stole alcohol far more successfully than William and kept an out-of-tune bass guitar in the overcroft, meaning I had to take my tights off to the faltering strains of 'Smoke on the Water'. Somehow, though, he failed to get my goat, and not just because William had already ridden this metaphorical beast off over the horizon. There was no snide artifice in his exploits, just a barefaced and therefore oddly endearing cheek. Plus, as the son of a part-time poacher, he was a mine of era-appropriate trivia: if ever I need to skin a pheasant in a hurry, I now know to grab its tail, stand on both wings and pull.

Comfortably the most dreadful part of every day was gentry dinner, a parade of consistent ignominies that would begin with me announcing the dishes before I had transcribed each to memory. 'Salat of citrus and dates! Pease pottage! Pie of . . . bird!' Then it was into a wearisome hour of scuttling back and forth between high table and serving area.

'Salt, Master Wat, salt! There, doltish fellow, upon yonder mantel!'

'Whither go you, Master Wat? Wouldst thou show me thine arse?'

'Nay, nay, Master Wat, the
Rhenish
wine!'

Yet such theatrical chastisements were all part of what Mistress Joan called 'the game', and could – by a bigger man – be tolerated. What could not were the non-period grumblings of malicious discontent.

The most persistent dispenser of these was a moonfaced woman in a ludicrous dome of a hat that recalled
dizainier
Johann's 'knobhead' titfer. 'Do you think he even
knows
he's supposed to start serving from the middle of the table?' she muttered to her neighbour one day.

It was a fair point – I didn't – but one delivered with such odious spite that I could not hold my tongue. 'I pray most humble forgiveness, my lady,' I proclaimed, in a ghastly, obsequious sneer, 'for this foul and monstrous . . . monstrous . . .'

Oversight? Error? Nothing sounded nearly Tudor enough, and my indignant sarcasm fizzled out into red-eared silence. How maddening, how hateful that this day of all days William had been invited to dine with the gentry. As I retreated back to the serving table, he waved his pewter goblet and smiled broadly. 'Master Wat? I am run dry.'

I was now flat-lining through staff dinners in a state of humiliated exhaustion, wordlessly ingesting leftovers of heart pie, moat-drowned hare and – on Friday – the ample remnants of a bony and disappointingly bland carp. Inexplicably forgiving as they were of all my other failings, Mistress Joan and Master George both suggested that I assume a more active role at these occasions. No more effective way for the chamberlain to assert his dominance, they gamely insisted, than by ensuring no groom or under-steward put spoon to mouth until he gave the order. Because I knew that this was their gentle way of ordering me to say grace, I rudely stonewalled them. And then one day a ruddy-nosed noble, lately come upon the manor, barged in as Master George was clearing his voice at the head of our table.