I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (23 page)

Each Great Annual Recreation was set in a different Tudor year, and this time Patrick had stuck his pin in 1578. 'I'll need to get this outfit seen to,' said the cheery fellow deputed to show newbies around the grounds, glancing down at his red and black puffball hose through a pair of Reactolite prescription shades. 'Not baggy enough for 1578, even allowing for Suffolk being a little behind London fashions.'

We were led past the ice house and along a stretch of manicured yew. 'The thing to remember is that everyone services the manor,' he said, pointing out the Hall-adjoining moat house that would be home to the bakery, dairy and sundry herbalists and seamstresses. I gazed up at the mighty flank of red brick and soaring mullion windows: it wasn't hard to empathise with awed Tudor ruralites experiencing this unimaginably rarefied other world for the first time.

For an hour we trooped around the extensive grounds, inspecting each of the many far-flung outbuildings that would house all the 'stations' manned by craftworkers and tradespeople. The muddy tracks that linked these were topped with a frigid crust; a vicious wind, tainted with the pervasive stench of free-range, rare-breed agriculture, carried away our guide's words. The rain evolved into sleet, and then an ear-stinging hail. Someone shouted out a query about bathing facilities, and was told that the showers – both of them – were in a block about 400 yards from the campsite where all 200 of us would sleep under twenty-first-century nylon. Never before had the great unwashed been so aptly named. The bulk of my fellow first-timers were students or recent graduates in search of a budget summer break with a twist; but to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, this was a cheap holiday in your own misery. I looked at the many disconsolate faces around me and accurately predicted I wouldn't see half of them back at the second open day.

'What job are you going for?' asked one of the young women shuddering along beside me at the column's rear. In the previous hour my occupational ambitions had become very tightly focused. 'Anything fire-based,' I said.

We returned to the overcroft, now home to a period careers fair. Old hands with name tags identifying their 'station' rushed up, trying to secure our services; I looked vainly around for a badge reading 'bakery' or 'smithy'. (Later I learned that these stations, and a few others, operated long-established closed shops.) A kitchen job was out – in a humbling interview with the genteel head cook it emerged that even an entry-level culinary assistant would already have mastered several pastry-making skills I had never heard of. At her recommendation, I went off to meet the sutlers: outdoor-based camp cooks, serving up pottage for the masses. During a swift chat these hearty dinner ladies made it plain they would welcome anyone who could cut a turnip in half, and swear a lot while doing so. I gave them my provi sional pledge, and joined a long queue leading to the storeroom where Patrick was passing final – and very feudal – occupational judgement.

'A
sutler
?' he repeated scornfully, when, over two hours later, I at last filed in to meet him. 'Oh, no, no, no, no.' He ran his patrician gaze over my application form, then over me, then over the hand-scrawled register laid on the crowded desk before him. 'I've been making these decisions for twenty-six years,' he murmured, 'and you can count my mistakes in single digits.' As he drummed his large fingers together ruminatively, I tried to imagine how these mistakes manifested themselves: some Lord Percy caught jet-skiing round the moat, perhaps, or the Baldrick who bellowed Kwik-Fit jingles from the dovecote roof, hose round his ankles.

At length Patrick clapped his hands, sighed magnificently, and delivered his verdict.

'Chamberlain,' he boomed.

I felt my brow furrow. 'Actually, it's Moore. Timoth—'

'Chamberlain!' he cut in, sharply. 'Head of the household. Second week. Next!'

How head-swelling, how chest-puffing Patrick's adjudication had sounded, even before I learned what a chamberlain was: I'd walked in to meet him as a shitty-peasant-to-be, and walked out as the grandly costumed master of Kentwell Hall's entire domestic staff. And how little these bodily engorgements subsided, even after I'd deduced that my appointment was entirely attributable to my advanced years, and a desperate shortage of age-appropriate male applicants for the role.

The first misgivings had taken hold at the follow-up open day two months later, in May, as we filed up to present our outfits for approval. I smiled encouragingly at all those queuing up with armfuls of unfinished linen and wool, many of them still stitching frantically away at ruffs and coifs – with the Great Annual Recreation now just over a month off, all costumes were expected to be very nearly Kentwell-ready. How fortunate I was to have stepped out of Patrick's interview and immediately been offered a complete outfit by a Kentwell regular who had served many years as a steward, a sort of assist ant chamberlain.

'Who's doing the alterations?' enquired the wardrobe mistress when I blithely told my tale. I remembered the steward as a vertically conspicuous figure, but now learned – from an eavesdropper who revealed herself as his fiancée – that only a supreme feat of needlecraft could adapt for my use an outfit tailor-made for a man of six foot five with a twenty-six-inch waist. My wheedling attempts to procure this feat were shortlived: as an end-of-week-two steward, her fiancée would be needing the outfit himself. 'I expect he was just trying to be helpful,' she concluded, with a tight smile. Only through a great effort of willpower did I resist the graceless impulse to wish her a long and happy married life as Mrs Lanky-Arsed Twatbollocks of Cockshire.

An undertone of reedy panic accompanied me through the How To Be Tudor workshops that occupied the rest of the day. Like spies about to go out into the field, we were briefed on how to blend in to 1578 – what to wear, what to know, what to say and how to say it. There were lectures on everything the visiting public might ask us about, from current affairs to fashion. 'A few bullet points for you all,' called out one old hand. 'Mary Queen of Scots is still in prison, fears of Spanish invasion are very real, ruffs are big and getting bigger. Oh, and summer months always brought a terror of plague, so that's something to talk about.'

As a prominent go-between 'twixt gentry and serving folk, I would need to be familiar with all national news, as well as the minutiae of local gossip; another steward-to-be handed over a great sheaf of sixteenth-century family trees and advised me, with a look that implied he'd long since etched every name and date deep into his cortex, 'to have a little glance through'. While compiling our own character's back story, we were urged to ensure it tallied with others. 'If you go around telling visitors that the cook's your mother, make sure she knows.' Because there was nothing the public liked better, it seemed, than catching a Kentwellian out. School parties – the only midweek visitors – were inevitably the worst. When an aeroplane passed overhead, they would mischievously point it out to the nearest man in tights; we were instructed to cup a hand to an ear and complain of 'loud hornets about the manor', or stonewall with a blank-faced 'I know naught of what you speak'. They would sidle up with cameras, hoping to elicit a telltale grin into the lens; the recommended response to all requests for a photograph was a quizzical shrug and the non-committal declaration, 'You may do what you will.' They would plunge their hands into your linen haversack in search of compromising possessions: the advice was to secrete asthma inhalers and the like in a smaller linen bag kept within this, and to ward away any concerted probings with a cry of, 'Away from my privy business!' (If asked to smuggle some larger item of modern contraband into the manor, the procedure was to wrap it in linen swaddling, move fast and repel curious enquiries with a disarming over-the-shoulder call of, 'A dead baby, master!' 'It's become a verb,' said Bella, Kentwell's resident administrator and a jovially reassuring presence. '
Could you dead-baby this first-aid kit to the limners?
')

It was Bella who chaired the masterclass on the event's curious lingua franca: some called it Kentwellese, others Desperanto. 'It's probably best not to speak for the first two days,' she began, 'but I promise you that after you get home you're going to find it hard not to greet people as "good master" and "mistress".'

As I knew only too well from my awful – but mercifully irrelevant – preparatory flounderings at Haut-Koenigsbourg, period speech was the most appalling historical challenge I had yet faced, and I scribbled desperate notes throughout Bella's lecture. Aye for yes, nay for no. 'The dreaded OK' – substitute with 'good enough'. Other dos and don'ts: don't say don't, or isn't, or any other similar contractions. Do say 'I spin', not 'I do be spinning'. No
Archers
accents or cockney, please.

Cruelly, I was to be denied the very tempting 'thee' and 'thou', which I'd hoped to sprinkle liberally into any flawed conversation as a kind of instant Tudor seasoning. Both were apparently appropriate only within one's own family, or when addressing servants or children: 'The next low player who addresses the high table as "thee",' said a stern voice from behind, 'is in with a good chance of a starring role in the stocks.' How grateful I was when Bella handed us a get-out-of-jail-free card, to be played when a visitor backed you into a corner, linguistic or historical. If no old hands were around to help you out, and pretending to be mad hadn't worked, one need simply run off, with a shout of, 'Prithee, master, I must away!' 'Though obviously,' she went on, 'you can't use that one too often.' Let me be the judge of that, good mistress, I thought.

I drove home with the notebook open in my lap, its arcane hints and tips consulted at every set of traffic lights. 'No scented toiletries (lavender OK good enough). Stop wearing watch now: risk of telltale tan-lines. Underwear? Half don't wear any. No slacking on Tudor etiquette – acknowledge betters with bob of head. Wear Tudor gear to supermarket – learn to think of it as clothes, not an outfit.'

This last one elicited a bark of mirthless laughter. I now at least had a hat, a musty, fifth-hand black velvet number of a design associated with obscure academic ceremonies, acquired along with a handmade wooden spoon and a thin black belt from a stall set up outside the overcroft. But given the complete and utter absence of other period apparel, that Sainsbury's run would probably have to wait.

Six weeks later, with a kiss, a snigger and a sigh of envy, my wife bid me farewell and drove away down Kentwell's tree-lined approach. We'd set off at dawn, and I hadn't slept well. Ill had I slept. I do be sleeping ill, master, bob my head, good morrow. The Great Annual Recreation had already been running for a week, and a scaffold-framed, self-proclaimed 'time tunnel' shielded the hall from view. I stepped through the plywood portcullis, from the now to the then, and beheld a front sward dotted with knights-of-old type stripy-canvas pavilions. A bead of sweat rolled down my back as I surveyed these and the imposing Tudor edifice beyond, and not just because since my first visit here we'd moved near a score degrees up the centigrade scale.

I dumped my camping gear at the gatehouse and set off towards the overcroft with a huge holdall, filled to jangling, knee-thunking bursting point in a fortnight of internet-centred panic buying. First to thud on my doormat had been a turned wooden bowl and beaker, followed by accessories to dangle from my belt: a handmade eating knife, a sheath to accommodate it, and a small black leather purse, now home to a pair of wooden dice, a goose-feather quill and reproductions of period coinage, tarnished – like the rather splendid set of hefty keys that would clank alongside – by four days' refrigeration in a sandwich bag full of boiled egg yolks.

With eight days to go I took delivery of a pair of black woollen tights and a pair of crimson-lined, black leather 'latchet' shoes, modelled by a Kentwell-approved cobbler on originals retrieved from the wreck of the
Mary Rose
. A day later my wife finished stitching Roman-tunic offcuts into the last of the many linen napkins and aprons appropriate to my office, to dimensions outlined on page four of Kentwell's
Guide for Liveried Staff
. And finally, less than a week before my reign as chamberlain was due to commence, I jogged across a field near Bedford, outflanking a skirmish between Royalists and Parliamentarians, to receive my robes of office from their diffident creator's pavilion.

'Er, there you go,' mumbled Ed Boreham, fingering his House of Stuart goatee with one hand and waving the other at a folded stack of black wool. 'Oh, don't forget these.' He handed me a bag: in it was a linen shift, its sleeves and neck fastened with pearl-tipped silk ties, and three bijou wonders of the period tailor's craft – concertina-folded ruffs, one for each cuff and one for my collar. It was only two weeks since Bella had put me in touch with Ed, and only days since I'd emailed him the dimensions of the widest part of my thigh when crouching, the distance from my waist to the lowest part of my crotch, and many other spouse-troubling measurements.

'I'm not fighting again for a bit,' he said, folding up my cheque for £250, 'so you might as well try it on.' Ed was coercing my bare limbs through four very tight woollen orifices when a woman he would identify as his wife ducked in through the tent flap. I'd met enough re-enactors by now not to expect her to duck back out; without a word she took my knee in an armlock and yanked a hose-leg over it. Ed tied the many sets of points that fastened skin-tight black doublet to baggy-arsed black hose, his wife attached the ruffs, and there I stood, gazing down at the thumb-sized codpiece that nosed apologetically forth from my groin.

'I haven't got a mirror,' said Ed, 'but honestly, you look . . . fine.'

'Absolutely,' nodded his wife. I walked back across the battlefield wondering how Adam Ant had got that correlation between ridicule and fear so very badly wrong.

Kentwell's lower classes were obliged to get changed in their own tents or caravans; as honorary members of the gentry, liveried household staff were accorded the honour of getting dressed in front of each other in the overcroft. I walked in and found myself surrounded by half-naked page boys and minstrels.