I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (5 page)

When at length the Aussies ambled away to film extras trying not to giggle as they poked sticks at a half-built kiln, Dai let me have a go on the bellows. It was desperate, punishing work, and more than once my fatigue-addled technique allowed a nugget of glowing charcoal to be sucked back up the length of central-heating pipe that focused its output into the crucible. Reluctant to watch his most important tool destroyed in an idiot's conflagration, when it happened for the third time he gently asked if I'd like to try my hand at hammering. With these words all weariness vanished. Show me a man who'd spurn an invitation to batter seven bells out of a length of red-hot metal, and I'll show you a liar.

Sadly, the next stage – fashioning the abused ingot into something recognisably useful – involved the transition from labourer to craftsman, a transition for which we soon found I was not ready. I cannot therefore claim full responsibility for the splendid five-inch spear tip that now sits on my desk, though in fact I have, and often. Surveying it I note widespread evidence of corrosion, and am reminded once more just why we know so little about an era that endured longer than the Roman Empire.

Cinderbury emptied as the shadows lengthened. After polishing off the last of their hidden Lucozade stash – it's
Glucose Galore!
in this part of the Forest of Dean – the extras drove home into the sunset, followed by the hotel-bound Australians; the presenter's unfulfilled desire to churn butter on camera meant the latter group would be back in the morning. To my mild unease, the exodus was promptly swelled by the departure of Dai, who rumbled away in his Vauxhall-badged mobile foundry as soon as Wayne turned up and paid him. When Cinderbury's beleaguered owner trudged off to his own car I felt a more powerful twinge of insecurity, which persisted until he trudged back out of the twilight bearing a mighty flagon of local scrumpy.

The contempt I'd been nurturing for Wayne's shambolic stewardship melted into pity as we sat by the campfire and worked our way through this 7.5 per cent curse of the rustics, and a stash of combustible building materials I'd found round the back. It all came out. He'd acquired Cinderbury the summer before as an escape from that debilitating split existence, desperate for gainful employment that didn't demand his absence from the family home for half the year. But visitor numbers, already modest, had dwindled further when the nearby Clearwell Caves attraction launched their own 'spoiler' Iron Age settlement. 'It was made out of fibreglass,' said Wayne vacantly, 'but no one complained.'

The reason they hadn't, as he saw it, was that no one really cared about the Iron Age one way or the other. 'It's just not . . . sexy. No shiny uniforms, no big war machines, sod all in the way of art and culture.' At last his blank face furrowed. 'Eight hundred years of nothing.'

Beyond an astonishing level of disillusionment, the Cinderbury jinx had also caused Wayne untold sleepless nights, ratcheting debt and reacquaintance with a nicotine habit that had lain fallow for a decade. Yet he hadn't quite surrendered. There were plans to promote the village as a music venue, to hire it out to live-action role-players and new-age spiritualists. The school-party visits had gone fairly well – 'kids are great, really easy to please'. And then there were the half-dozen weekend guests who I learned were to arrive the following afternoon: the first such intake under his ownership.

It seemed no stone would be left unturned in Wayne's quest for profitability – quite literally so with regard to the Roman villa whose foundations lay just behind the mobile-phone mast. 'Archaeology students excavating their own Roman ruin, and staying in an Iron Age roundhouse while doing it . . .' He aimed a rare smile into the fire. 'Imagine what the American universities would pay for that.' With difficulty I forced out a small hum of encouragement, thereby inspiring Wayne to reveal the triumphant zenith of this extraordinary proposal: the roadside stall where everything that was dug up would be flogged off.

Certain it was only a matter of time and scrumpy before Wayne dragooned me into some 'What the Blacksmith Saw' period peep show, I greeted his departure with quiet relief. And the noisier sort, once noting that he'd thoughtfully left me the considerable balance of our gallon of peasant's ruin. Yes, I was going to make a one-man Iron-Age night out of it: just me, the starlit sky, the roaring fire. Oh, and this diseased sheep here.

The feral quartet of flyblown woollybacks I'd regularly encountered outside the Cinderbury walls were survivors of a flock of authentic ancient breeds brought in by the village's creators. The rest, I gathered, had long since been sacrificed to provide the original owners with something appropriate to eat, and their roundhouse guests with something appropriate to sleep on. Considering this as I chivvied my grubby, unkempt guest back out through the entrance and blocked it up with the pallet provided, I felt a pang of compassion. This swiftly evolved into an adrenaline surge of alarm when, not yet halfway back to the fire, I wheeled round to investigate the source of a sudden clackety stampede. In the fire-lit gloaming I found myself face to blank-eyed face with the same animal, as in the dim background his three associates trampled clumsily in over the upended makeshift gate.

Four sheep, I recognised immediately, were many more than four times as unsettling as one sheep. One was a sorry, stupid object of sympathy. Four was a gang. I knew it, they knew it, and most significantly they knew that I knew it. I took a pace towards them and they stood their ground; I essayed a threatening bark and they fanned out into a four-square, head-on attack formation. The effect was compounded by their neglected disfigurement. Strips of filthy, matted fleece sloughed off unshorn flanks imparted a look of haunted, mutant decay that connected powerfully with the childhood nightmares I'd suffered after reading an illustrated magazine account of wartime anthrax experiments.

What had possessed these creatures to act with a fearless, focused determination so far beyond the feeble capabilities of their species? The only herbivorous sustenance within these walls had been strimmed down to a parched stubble, and on such a balmy night they could not be wanting for warmth. Had these leprous, forsaken animals come in search of companionship? I had only to picture myself amongst them to know they had not. The proffered hand, the playful nuzzle, then a nudge, the nudge trumped with a butt, another, two more, then a stamp and a Buckaroo back-kick, and as I went down the first probing nips and gnashes . . . Backing slowly away from their ghastly yellow gaze I understood what had impelled them here. Before them stood a man who had taken his ease upon the flayed hides of their colleagues, and must now face vengeance.

What, I speculated frantically, would my Iron Age self have done? The question was no sooner asked than answered. Teenage memories of a Paleolithic-set film entitled
Quest for Fire
flooded my brain, and filtering through the depressing bulk that centred on muddy nudes being pleasured from behind, I recalled that the primeval obsession with flickering redness was less about warmth and cooking than warding off predators. With this in mind I retreated briskly to the fire, snatched up a blazing length of four by two, and, before allowing myself to wonder how it had come to this, charged at the invaders, a ragged, warrior death-yell shredding the warm, black air.

Their unhurried withdrawal was half-hearted, even patronising. My cloven-hoofed tormentors ambled blandly out through the gate, passing en route the information board reminding visitors that the modest fortifications which encircled settlements such as Cinderbury were there not to deter human assault – generally benign co-existence was one facet of those '800 years of nothing' – but to keep destructive wildlife at bay. It wasn't a good time to remember a film extra's excitable account of the boar he'd spent many nights trying to hunt down through these very woods: 'Half the size of a donkey, nine-inch tusks – if he comes at you, it's all over.' Bar the awful, pleading screams.

Working fast, I resurrected the pallet-gate, bracing it with four spear-poles, jammed obliquely into the sun-hardened earth. Bed now seemed sensible, but pausing at the roundhouse's grim, black portal, I understood this was not an option. Instead, I walked very quickly back to the fire, pausing to sweep up a great armful of the only fuel to hand within my shrinking radius of fear: the stack of wooden tiles reserved to display visiting school parties' attempts at period pottery.

In the re-enactments that lay ahead I would become well acquainted with man's spiritual bond to fire, but never again would I feel it so intimately. Hunched up on a log, I didn't so much gaze at the flames as stare into them with a kind of desperate intensity. Be gone my scrumpy, my Clarks, my Fiat Punto – here, blazing savagely before me, was the competitive advantage that set my genus apart from and above the spiteful, dumb beasts outside those wicker walls. First created, then tamed, man's red fire had allowed my woady forebears to prosper where other mammals could barely survive. It had seen them through ice ages and raw leftovers, catalysed the very process that defined the era I was here to experience.

The fire was there to offer solace and displacement when the sheep rallied for a noisy and persistent assault on the rear wall, and when a moth the size of Dai's fist slammed blindly into my right temple. In more dwindled form, the hypnotic mind-balm applied by those flickering orange fingers helped me through the moment I grabbed hold of Wayne's flagon and felt a large slug being pulped in my grasp. I stayed until the scrumpy was drained, the last wooden tile no more than a fading ember. Then I tramped dolefully back to the roundhouse, pulled off my sweaty, smutted clothing, blundered on to the nearest haybale and lay there, feeling small things explore me and cursing myself for failing to anchor both arms around Wayne's departing ankles when I had the chance.

I was boiling my morning bathwater when the film crew turned up. 'You all right there, mate?' breezed the sound man, who could have seen from some distance that I was not. I looked up from a one-handled saucepan of oily, brown water and showed him a matching face, one deeply lined with physical and spiritual exhaustion. 'Bad night, yeah?'

It seemed best to respond with a shrug. Hard to imagine any Australian sympathising with my ovine ordeal. Particularly its most testing episode, wherein an apocalyptic overhead crash had propelled me from the hut at the break of dawn, nude and spear-wielding, to find that a sheep had somehow vaulted the stockade and was now grazing contentedly on my turfed roof. It had taken a direct hit with the scrumpy flagon to get him down, and in the chase that ensued to expel the repulsive beast out through the gate we'd disturbed a fox in the act of plundering Wayne's snack pantry.

I hauled my steaming saucepan round the back and sluiced off at least some of the sweaty filth that is the lot of the excitable blacksmith's assistant. This was my debut experience of period bathing, and it laid out what would prove an enduring circular truth: historic body-dirt could only be shifted with a lot of hot water, a valued commodity whose onerous creation accumulated much additional historic body-dirt. Ergo, it was best not to bother. If you can't take the grime, don't do the time.

When I returned, smeared and damp, Diane was standing before the camera whisking a twig in an earthenware pot of double cream. 'Do you hanker after days gone by, when Lycra didn't exist and the butter' – pause for theatrical pot-sniff – 'was real?'

It was a matter of considerable relief when a hefty old Jeep clunked up and delivered a primitive technologist into my faltering prehistoric experience. Stubbled and down to earth in every sense, combat-trousered Karl Lee was an archaeologist who had made a name for himself as a hardcore practitioner of ancient survival skills.

Before the film crew stole him – to his great credit Karl refused their insistent demands that he don one of Wayne's Caveman-at-C&A jerkins – he accompanied me for a walk through the woods. 'You've got ground ivy, comfret, wild raspberries, coltsfoot and beech nuts,' he said, scanning the vegetation. 'All perfectly edible. Acorns too, once you've boiled them to get rid of the tannin.' He stooped to snatch up a bramble leaf, then thrust it towards my mouth. In thrall to his manly certitude, I opened wide without protest: pleasantly nutty, if a little acid. Even better was the almost moreish wild garlic, and though Karl's subsequent harvest proved of diminishing appeal, I only spat out the beech leaves. 'Not that long ago, anyone could have walked through these trees and come out the other side with a meal,' sighed Karl as we marched onwards. 'We were all Ray Mears in the Iron Age.' Later he confessed that a medical condition – unfortunate in most other lines of work – had deprived him of any sense of taste.

Wayne was waiting for us, or rather Karl, when we walked back in through the village gate. He explained he was off to get supplies for the 'Iron Age feast' that would welcome the soon-to-arrive weekend visitors, and wanted a primitive technologist's input into the menu. This wasn't the first time Karl had been booked by Cinderbury's owner, and his deadpan reply was delivered with careworn brevity: 'A pig.'

Wayne pushed his specs up the bridge of his nose, squinted at us, and cleared his throat. 'Um, how about pork chops?'

Once he'd been filmed boiling nettles, Karl did his best to make an Iron Age man of me. He dug out a bag of hefty chunks of flint, and in the shade of the boundary fence schooled me in the art of crafting stone hand tools. Because they were so quick and simple to make and use, Karl was certain these would have been common long after the introduction of iron smelting. 'The fields are full of them round here,' he said, alluding to the youthful finds that had first fired his enthusiasm. 'Go out after a night of heavy rain and you'll see flint tools and arrowheads all over the place.' In parts of the land, they're still in use: Karl had met Scottish deerstalkers who carried flint scrapers, attracted by the no-cost aspect and finding them 'more effective for some of the, ah, heavier work'.

Hoping I wouldn't be asked to disembowel Bambi with it, under Karl's watchful eye I fashioned some sort of flattish, pointy stone by hacking a large bit of flint obliquely against a smaller one. On occasion parts of my hand came between the two. Karl's subsequent demonstration of the flint knapper's art involved a flurry of clacking strikes that left a scattering of stone flakes on his lap and a straight-outta-Bedrock handaxe in his left fist. Then it was into the roundhouse for a practical seminar on the daddy of all survival skills: man make fire.