I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (21 page)

One of the most striking facets of Company life was the bond of mutual respect and practical competence – of course you won't drop this brimming cauldron if I pass it to you; of course that enormous iron tripod won't collapse into the fire the minute you tell me you've put it up; of course you won't yelp like a stepped-on puppy when I hand you these coils of rope and you find they're all covered in cobwebs. Having failed all these tests of time and many more, I had at last earned my stripes – and the
dizaine
's respect – as a giggling, swivel-eyed explodophile.

Once we were all set up – barrels poking out of the window-slits and trained on the arriving tourists, gunpowder and smouldering linstock placed as distantly apart as our modest confines permitted – Johann dutifully endeavoured to kick-start an authentic scenario. 'The captain has told us to look out for enemy scouts, so we should—' Our opening volley drowned him out, and in the roof-raising high-fives that ensued, he somehow forgot to carry on.

We settled into a routine. Boom, giggling whoops, idle banter, boom. Extrapolating from my solitary relevant experience – a paintball session spent hiding atop an obscure gantry in some abandoned warehouse, firing hopeful pot-shots into the mêlée beneath – it was a wartime posting well suited to my temperament. Rightly confident that no one was watching, they whipped out tins of chewing tobacco, and insisted I take a muslin-wrapped portion – to look at and to taste, like a fag-end wrapped in a tea bag. Spitting it out through the gaping hole in the floor, I imagined this was how life would have been for gun crews through the ages: with his helmet-strap dangling loose across his stubble, the heart-throb Dane was more Iwo Jima than Bosworth Field.

Between salvos, as golden sunlight filtered in through the hazy, pestilential vapours released by our explosive butts, we talked. Sometimes the focus of debate was the relationship between fear, death and religious faith; at others – can't pretend this wasn't a surprise – it was Captain Pugwash. A brief foray into Middle Eastern politics ended after Johann named Benjamin Netanyahu as the Israeli Prime Minister, adding 'or at least he was when I stopped paying attention to the modern world'.

There was the now traditional exchange of hideous injuries sustained or witnessed – the fencing demonstration that had ended with an eight-year-old girl in the audience being carried off on a stretcher with a quivering épée lodged in her skull; the wayward shield parry that embedded a photographer's camera in his face; the re-enactor who somehow stabbed himself in the leg with his own broken sword, and bled to death in five minutes. After a fencing career that had left every one of his front teeth chipped, Johann celebrated his recent retirement by having them filed down. 'So far this year I've broken a nose and two fingers,' said another of the Swedes. 'But luckily they weren't mine.'

In an unexpectedly introspective soliloquy, Johann traced his vainglorious, Muhammad Ali-like superiority complex to a distant LARP event, where for a week he had reigned as king of over 1,000 participants. Ten years on, he still found himself forgetting that it took more than a meaningful glance at his empty coffee cup for it to be refilled. 'And ever since I have always loved criticising, but hated being criticised.' Just as he risked a Fat Butt fragging, our leader disarmed us all with an account of the sweetly vulnerable dream he'd had the night before, in which the Company's provost had quietly asked Johann to resign, on the simple grounds that nobody really liked him.

Bang, spit, guff, bang. Baz outlined his theory on re-enactment's seven-year itch, referring not to the inevitable side-effects of the period lifestyle, but the breaking point of spousal tolerance for this all-consuming hobby. His inability to give up living in the past had already cost Baz more than one longterm partner. 'And let's be honest, it's basically a man thing, this.' Considering my historical experiences it was hard to disagree. The train-spotting dedication to mindless detail, the fighting, the casually exuberant, hose-rippling flatulence – most of re-enactment's dominant traits were predominantly male.

The latter was a grimly prominent feature of our day in that tower, and the former asserted itself when Baz, gallantly offering to retie my oily pig-string neck fastenings in the correct period manner, detected something untoward beneath my linen shift. 'Is that a
thermal vest
you've got on?' he asked, wrinkling that huge forehead and fingering the relevant hem in the manner of an underworld heavy exposing a hidden voice recorder.

Two days before I'd have shrugged fatuously, but now I was a team player, a member of an elite unit, and I didn't want to let my buddies down. 'It's wool,' I said in a very small voice, already lowering myself through the hole in the floor.

It was pleasingly restful up in the misty gloaming that passed for daylight in the attic. Over at the distant far side someone else was getting changed, a symphony of soft linen swishes and the creak of thick leather. When they had left me alone, I embarked on the harsh synthetic rustling required to extract my holdall from its under-mattress hiding place, and to stuff the shameful thermals inside. This was the first time I had bared any significant flesh, and I succumbed to the now familiar guilty thrill of sniffing my unwashed torso: those usual muscular aromas of hard labour and woodsmoke were now counterpointed with cannon grease and the acrid, eggy tang of saltpetre.

The extent of my explosive contamination was revealed on my way back to the tower, when I stopped off for a pee. The public loo was a vitreous enamel, stainless-steel microcosm of the life we'd left behind, and as such most Company males preferred to avoid it, instead taking great pleasure in loudly and very publicly anointing any vacant stretch of courtyard wall. Quite often they would manually vacate their nostrils while doing so: for well-bred, antiseptic Scandinavians and Teutons, Company life offered an outlet for activities that would in their home towns merit lifelong civic opprobrium, and several thousand hours of community service.

My own fear of the castle's smallest room was what I saw in its mirror. On this occasion, I learned that I had just put most of my clothes back on inside out, and that I had been walking about with a big black ring all round my mouth. For a day and a half: a little probing with my tongue detected the sulphurous legacy of blowing out all those cannon chambers.

I rejoined my crew just as they discovered that the bread we'd brought up for sustenance made a more than effective substitute for our straw gun-wadding. Serendipity was doubled after the bread ran out: a Swede returned with a big bowl of dough left over from its preparation, a material that proved itself the most deafeningly percussive wadding imaginable. We were thereafter able to reduce all arriving visitors to yelping, scuttling panic, despite the great distance that separated us from the public entrance. Later we found blackened dough splattered all over the facing walls; one of the guards on gate duty told us he'd managed to flick a smouldering lump from a push-chair cover just before the cowering parents noticed.

The most thunderous salvo of all was saved for a hapless young couple who arrived mid-morning in fancy-dress medieval kit: Rapunzel for her, Errol Flynn for him, cowboy boots for both. From their sober expressions – and game attempts to master the cocksure period swagger – I could sense the pair were in earnest; I am ashamed to confess this did not prevent me from gleefully agreeing to a double-charge from our Butts. As they ambled out through the gate, we let them have both barrels; the huge cloud of smoke released spared us their reaction.

Only later did I suspect that my fellow gunners were blasting away at the bumbling, ill-clad newbies they had all once been. I'd already noted the seasoned re-enactor's reluctance to reminisce upon their early days – there was no fond nostalgia for that first-time experience, just silence borne of cringing shame. The wooden spoon Christian had lent me belonged to a small fellow they called Seagrass, a voluble Company veteran who seemed to have a different outfit for every day. When at the end of our stay I handed this crude pine utensil back to him, he plunged it into his bag with evident embarrassment, before treating me to an extended eulogy to his current spoon, a forty-euro rosewood job 'copied directly from an archaeology find'.

A thoughtful young Englishman I'd talked with the night before believed that even as a re-enactor strove towards utterly authentic perfection, he secretly dreaded the sense of hollow redundancy that came with actually achieving it. The example he gave was of a medieval associate who finessed his character to the extent of calculating, through studious socio-historical research, the likely size and composition of his amassed family fortune; having reproduced this to the last groat with minted facsimiles of period coinage, he realised he had nowhere else to go, flogged the lot and started all over again, in 1942.

The light faded and we returned to the kitchen courtyard. I sat at a table with some of the Poles and joined them in a variant of nine men's morris, pushing ducats around a handpainted board. After all that high-octane ordnance it was hard to sustain enthusiasm for such gentle entertainment, especially once the novelty of the nude-gargoyle dice had worn off: for the very first time in my life I understood what drove people to voluntarily enlist for active service.

Around us the preparations for the postponed feast were proceeding in earnest. A cauldron brimful with a broth of bratwurst and broad beans was coming to the boil, and great earthenware jars of rollmop herrings were being decanted into glazed bowls. Out in force were the mustards and many types of pickle, whose glorious presence made a piquant delight of even the most unpalatable leftovers. Notably excepting the grey, egg-based matter that had lingered undiminished on a side-table for days, the one substance to fully merit the repulsed disbelief that accompanied every visitor's inspection of our culinary receptacles.

With its bubbling cauldrons, bustling goodwives and burlap sacks of Harvest Festival produce, the alfresco kitchen was an exciting place to be. For days I had waited in vain for the kitchen rota promised to all
dizaines
; now, enticed again by the dull gleam of those culinary cleavers, I sat unbidden at a trestle table and laid into a pile of leeks with a small axe. In moments I was chivvied away by a pair of coiffed females, determined to protect their apparent monopoly on food preparation. 'This work is not for you! Go and play with your cannon!'

This was regrettably not an option; instead I joined a team carrying tables and benches up to the appointed party courtyard. On the third trip the Dane came up to reveal that neither he nor I would be going to the ball: Johann had put us down for gate duty. So it was that three hours later, as the huzzahs and hurdy-gurdies echoed down from the upper courtyard, we were stamping away the cold on the flagstones by the handgun tower. Through steaming breath we watched as the final grains slipped into the night-watch hour-glass, then for the third and final time I inverted it.

Wearied by what he saw as counterfeit revelry, Baz had some time previously wandered down to join us. He talked me through his latest kitchen-fitting business venture, then moved seamlessly into an explanation of why theft – all theft – should be summarily punishable by death. Nostalgia for a more forthright stance on crime and comeuppance was emerging as an important appeal of The Olden Days: Dai the blacksmith and most of my Vikings had expressed similar views on a citizen's right to protect his property by any means necessary.

At any rate, it was something of a relief when the next shift arrived to take over. Particularly as this included the Company's silliest man – a tiny fellow whose huge tapering gnome-hat was mirrored by an identical beard, the two divided by an enormous pair of bottle-bottom, bone-framed pince-nez (the widespread use of period spectacles at the castle was ambitiously justified by their presence in a single early fifteenth-century portrait). 'You see?' shouted Johann, strutting down from the now silent feasting courtyard as I shuffled frigidly off to bed. 'Now you can say you were not the stupidest-looking guard!'

Our final morning began with a compulsory dawn procession around the castle's perimeter, a 'blessing of the walls' against enemy attack. Drawn along by the dependably seedy Brother Balthasar's droned incantations, the Company trailed about beneath battle standards, and a lovingly constructed icon of George slaying the dragon. It all seemed much less foolish than it might have done four days previously, but after half an hour the temptation to disrupt proceedings with an abrupt flurry of cruel anachronisms was almost unbearable. Oh, to pull on a pair of giant foam-rubber hands and run up and down the ranks of murmuring, bowed heads, bellowing 'Shaddap You Face'.

Indeed, this was precisely the sort of LARP-ish theatricality that Baz loudly derided as 'pantomime shit'; a rolling Yorkshire groan filled the courtyard when at the post-porridge muster Christian held aloft a reliquary containing 'a part of the dragon's hide', inviting all new inductees forward to press their lips upon this eBay-sourced sliver of stingray skin.

The hour-glass was emptying fast. A few Company members had left the night before, and the rest were now starting to pack up. Jim the Potter – red-cheeked, bandy-legged, pointy-hatted and looking more than ever like a dishevelled Rice Krispies sprite – struggled past with a shoulder yoke hung with buckets of half-finished crockery; on his next pass I asked him for a go, and was swiftly grateful that he had loaded up with unbreakables.

Because this had been by a distance my most immersively authentic re-enactment to date, the bedrizzled end-game proved more than usually deflating. I was replacing turf over the kitchen hearth – a blackened mess topped with fragments of broken utensil – when a voice called out 'Cheerio!'; I turned round and there stood Mrs Dwayne, the blacksmith's wife, wearing a cagoule and jeans and holding a can of Fanta in her non-waving hand. I blinked: for a heady moment, she looked like the one in stupid clothes.

My task assumed a poignant significance. Lying there in the muddy charcoal, those earthenware shards and slivers of wooden cutlery were powerfully suggestive of an historical 'find', and here I was, reburying the past. Men now remarkable only for their occasionally ridiculous beards filed by with torches and fags and bottles of Heineken. With a lick of makeup and their hair released from linen confinement, many women were literally unrecognisable.