I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (26 page)

'Hath not your chamberlain a voice?'

Master George shrugged slightly, shot me a bracing look, and sat down.

Knowing this dreadful moment might come, a couple of days before I had as a precaution commissioned our scrivener – the kindly old dear who penned the daily bill of fare in quill-etched Tudor script – to knock me out a couple of period graces. You may imagine my horror when I rose, bent to retrieve these from the belt purse I had folded them carefully into the previous morning, and found it empty but for my dice and coins.

'Prithee, I must away!' screamed a thousand inner voices. But with William licking his lips in my wobbly peripheral vision, from somewhere deep in my doublet I summoned a thousand and one more to scream them down. Before I could think better of it, I was stuttering my way through an on-the-hoof olde worlde remix of the standard text. 'For what we art to receiveth anon,' it began; mercifully I recall no more. Except that when it was done, I repaired directly through the forbidden door and there refreshed myself lavishly from Master George's vessel of squared form.

For those of us in the house, the afternoons were pleasingly low-key: most visitors, having made a beeline for the hall on arrival, did the grounds after lunch. As the shadows stretched across the Tudor Rose maze, we had little more to do than gaze into the carp-rippled moat, or mill photogenically about the courtyard. When that palled, and the coast was clear, we'd gather in the kitchen's smoky sunlight for tea and Jaffa cakes, sending out a page every few minutes to check the flag on the right-hand gatehouse. Factory-whistle cheers accompanied the news that it had been lowered: this was the sign that the last visitors had left, and we had this whole glorious place to ourselves.

Frisbees and farthingales on the front sward, mugs of Rhenish spritzer by the ice house: so schizophrenically entertaining were Kentwell's early evenings that I began to regret not experi encing them, as did the underclasses, in full kit. At least, even after hours and out of costume, I was still Master Wat; no one ever asked my real name, or used their own. Only through one rare slip did I learn that Mistress Joan's son Christian – a splendid fellow who ranked amongst Kentwell's finest archers – was in very truth a Paul. Many diehards had gone the extra mile and christened their offspring Harry, Bridget, Ned or some other Kentwell-ready name.

At around seven we all filed through the kitchen, where Patrick's Polish caterers doled out canteen nosh from big tin trays into our wooden bowls. We ate out on the front sward, watching the low sun gild the heraldic motifs that decorated the pavilions before us.

This restful prospect, and the rigours of a long, hot day, unfailingly sapped my enthusiasm for the jarring, Butlins-model entertainments arranged in the overcroft each evening. Instead, after a moderately beery deconstruction of the day's events with my fellow foremen, I would take the long way back to camp through the blue-black denouement of an early summer's day, breathing in hay and roses, and keeping an eye out for the alehouse keeper, whose nocturnal habit it was to get a little too high on his own supply, then roam the grounds with an assault rifle.

First a stroll through the delightful walled garden, a trim but fecund encapsulation of English horticulture, and then off across the moonlit fields, glancing back at the hall's dark old brickwork and leaden cupolas rising magnificently from the golden corn. Out here in deepest Suffolk the prospects were helpfully timeless, a yawning agricultural flatness broken only by oaks and church spires. It was startling to contemplate, as I did one night after rescuing a local paper from a bin outside the time tunnel, that somewhere out there was a world where people were racing lawnmowers and being convicted of selling solvents to minors. And thence, at last, to my sweatily nylon ease, waiting for barefoot sutlers in split-thigh cocktail dresses to trip over my guy ropes on their unsteady way home from casino night.

Appropriately, I began to lose track of time. One afternoon or other, someone's pet jackdaw got stuck in a goodwife's hair, and in the consequent flailing she lost her wedding ring. The morning before, or maybe after, a young gentry female split a seam whilst cheerleading for William at some sporting event; that afternoon, or the next, the two swapped roles and outfits for a Shakespearian lark.

As the week wore on we started putting together what the old hands called 'a bit of by-play for the punters'. One morning Mistress Joan's son Christian rushed breathlessly across the moat bridge to report that a Spaniard was abroad in the manor; someone had plasticated a pig's heart, which we later presented to the schoolchildren as proof of the spy's capture and execution, making two of them spontaneously retch. Three young vagabonds were apprehended in the sunken garden with a pair of great-hall candlesticks; a couple of hags came to beg scraps from the kitchen, and I was summoned to expel them. ('I've got a background in theatrical design,' whispered one, when I passed approving comment on her soiled repulsiveness, 'so I know how to degrade myself.')

That same mid-morning, Master George and I did take our feudal ease about the manor, our mission to extend to the common folk an invitation to dine upon the great-hall side-show known as 'low table'. Even though I now expected it, the shock and awe wreaked by our presence was still too much, or almost too much. Forelocks were tugged until I feared they might tear loose, and the standard reaction to our offer was a wordless whimper: half a dozen places were up for grabs, but in an hour we only offloaded four. No interest amongst the potters, or the mummers, or Christian and his hawser-armed comrades on the archery butts, busy ventilating a straw-stuffed Scotsman from eighty yards. And this despite the fact that they'd be dining that day, in the words of one stout bowman, 'on roadkill'.

In the end only three of our invitees were bold enough to turn up at the appointed hour, and their cowering servility was something to behold. 'Do I use a spoon or a knife to eat this?' whispered an aged seamstress, grasping desperately at my many detached hose-strips as I passed along the low table with a marchepane tart of something or other. 'And what should I say to people? Please?
Please
?'

I grimly unclamped her filthy hands from my livery and walked on by, wishing this act of haughty contempt didn't feel so good. That it did was down to my latest humiliating reverses in the War Against William, and the ego repairs thus necessitated. An hour before, as I was filling my mug from the water-butt, he'd run up, plunged his sweaty head straight in, and run off, leaving me soaked and revolted. And just a minute gone by, there he was, giving me the wink as I was once more brusquely recalled to the high table. 'Are there not two ends to the table, Master Wat? Is your head addled by the sun?'

As the week wore on I became rather deft at rationalising these petty inter-staff rivalries as an authentic part of behind-the-scenes life in a big house, but somehow that day it was all too much. Too old to buddy up with the vast bulk of my fellow servants; too thick to cut it with the toffs.
Upstairs, Downstairs
, with me marooned on the landing.

A day or three later I crossed the courtyard on the most fiery morrow yet, ducked into the darkness of the stewards' room and found it in sweaty disarray, a Vermeer reimagined by Hogarth. A flotilla of Starburst wrappers bobbed gaily about on the water-butt, the wheelchair ramp was home to many empty aluminium reminders of the previous night's cider-powered courtyard ceilidh, the two maids who now shambled in were both wearing Ray-Bans, and the first school party would be crossing the moat bridge any minute.

I was halfway into a rather impressive rant when a chorus of listless mumbles from the shadows cut me short: 'No schools . . . late opening . . . Saturday.' My furious glower melted away. Saturday; my last day. It was with some surprise that I detected a pang of regret in the emotions this information released.

Emerging from the overcroft a few minutes earlier I'd noted a spring in my flat-soled step, the spring of a man on his merry way to work, not some humiliating fancy-dress parade. A glance at my reflection in the moat confirmed the authenticating effect of a few days away from the razor: in the Kentwell vernacular, my outfit now suited me right meet. Yet again I had adapted to period life only at the death. It would be a week before I felt entirely comfortable without a hat, and purging my vocabulary of the last remnants of Tudorspeak required twice that; 'mayhap', 'most wondrous' and 'upon the yester' were the last to go.

Goodwives and gentlemen crossed my path; I graciously acknowledged or pre-empted their greetings as status dictated. A pair of sutlers ambled merrily past, and I recalled a showdown at the second open day, in which their station had been sternly warned to 'authenticate their pottage', following a raid the previous summer that netted two pots of Cajun seasoning mix. The memory failed to inspire more than a half chuckle: the fear and ridicule that once dominated my feelings for these people had progressed from understanding to admiration. Indeed I now found it impossible not to envy their detailed back stories, their mastery of ancient skills and speech, the almost heroic pedantry that made Kentwell what it was: as perfect a recreation of life at a Tudor manor as you could reasonably hope to expect. Living history was a phrase I had rather wearied of, one trotted lamely out at every 'Eye of the Tiger'-soundtracked jousting demo, but looking around at the coiffed and straw-hatted figures wandering out to their far-flung work stations, it seemed the only accurate description of my environment.

And so I'd clacked across the brickwork maze with a cocky, almost proprietorial air, musing for the first time on my converging responsibilities in both past and present. If, as Patrick had told us, the Great Annual Recreation sustained his estate for the rest of the year, then surely in my role as the big boss man in black, I was charged with keeping this house in order both fictionally and factually. I had grown into my role, and what a very important role it was.

By gratifying coincidence an especially grand dinner had been laid on that day, with the gentry personally subsidising the centrepiece dish that some hours later I saw in the latter stages of preparation: chicken dressed as lizard, a magnificent dragon-like contrivance decorated with hundreds of overlapping cucumber 'scales', and stuffed with sausage forcemeat. No surprise to see that this spectacle had attracted a long line of pages to the kitchen, at least until Mistress Joan trotted rather breathlessly up and informed me that they were actually there to ferry a waiting array of less exotic dishes out to the fronts ward picnic.

My twin tasks at this event, established by precedent and reiterated by Master George that morning, were to usher those gentry who had opted to lunch alfresco to the allotted pavilion in good time, and thence to lead the procession of dish-bearing pages from kitchen to lawn. Waylaid by sack-clothed sycophants and camera-happy visitors during my farewell perambulation about the grounds, I had only now arrived to fulfil the second of these duties, having entirely overlooked the first. For a tiny moment I wondered if this oversight might be laughed off; a glance at Mistress Joan's round-eyed, pale-faced dismay made it plain it could not. As a breach of Tudor protocol and decorum, presenting salat of portingales to an empty table was, as I now well understood, right off the Kentwell scale.

The forces of panic were massing impressively in my head, and in combination with the befuddling heat swiftly convinced me that the best course of action would be to go out in a blaze of ignominy, an in-for-a-groat sequence of outrages. I'd blow off in a minstrel's lap, jump on Patrick's back and ride him into his moat, treat that lizard to a very different sort of sausage forcemeat. Then I looked down the line of pages, saw one face radiant with amusement, and thought of something much better.

'William,' I said, resolute and stentorian, 'are those that would dine without not yet summoned?' My tormentor's glee atrophied, and from the mouth that had expressed it emerged a series of faltering protestations; I'd never previously thought of 'b-b-b-but' as something people might actually say. Graciously I offered to keep his fellow pages in a holding formation while he righted this grievous wrong, and a while later he returned, red-faced, muttering under his breath and tutting theatrically above it. I should have left it there, but my dander was up. 'Mayhap thou art weary from this burdensome undertaking?' The vocab was all wrong, but I took care to linger over the patronising form of address.

'Meaning what, Wat?' he half-spat, and for a vivid moment it seemed this whole idiotic business would end in a physical coming-together.

It was a thought that recurred to me a couple of hours later, when I looked up from a wooden bowl of leftover chicken dressed as lizard, and saw my children gawping at me from the front rank of spectators. In blending amusement, awe and concern their expressions unsettled me not – I had beheld the same mix on several thousand faces over the previous week – but the proportions would have been rather different had they discovered their long-absent father trading ruff-wristed blows with a thirteen-year-old boy.

'Come hither, childer,' I said, at the declamatory volume that was now second nature, and as one they took a small but obvious step thither.

Chapter Six