I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (6 page)

Squatting on the cool earth, in the hour ahead, Karl energetically ignited bits of singed linen, cedar bark and tinder fungus, which grows in black clumps on birch trees and was thus close to hand in ample supply. The necessary sparks were coaxed from the manual interaction of flint, metal and quartz, though he never quite managed it with his bow-drill, the string-powered wood-on-wood method that is the primitive-technological apotheosis of rubbing two sticks together.

Neither did I, of course, though you should have seen my face when I procured a couple of sparks from a flint shard and a flat piece of hardened iron: sweaty, it was, and flecked with spatters of blood from those ravaged fingertips. Yet how magical to watch the spark evolve into a red glow on the tinder fungus's corky surface, to spread and intensify as I cupped it in my hands and blew. A fistful of straw, a single well-aimed puff, and whoompf: fire, and the acrid whiff of singed eyebrows. It was the most impressively red-blooded achievement of a sheltered life, and I hailed it with an incoherent, primeval growl of triumph. When Karl stamped my fire out a moment later I could have clubbed him to death.

Leaving a trail of hot testosterone, I followed Karl down to the campfire, and his one-I-made-earlier cauldron of nettle tea. The common stinging nettle, he revealed, was of such versatile importance that Iron Agers would probably have cultivated it. I certainly wasn't aware that the leaves could be eaten raw (by Karl), if picked from the non-stinging underside and carefully folded. But the nettle's main use was to provide cordage, better known to you and me as string – an often overlooked survival essential. 'You can't use a bow or set a trap without it,' said Karl, grasping a bunch of benign, boiled stems from the tea cauldron. 'And they'd certainly have made a lot of their clothes out of nettles.'

Together we stripped off the fibres, then rolled them together atop our thighs, like Cuban virgins making cigars. 'There you go,' he said, as I held up my nine-inch mess of straggle. 'After flax, that was the strongest twine known to man.' Sceptical in the extreme, I tied it round my right wrist. Eight months – and 1,500 years – later, its last strand finally snapped as I helped manhandle a cannon through a French castle.

Karl drove off with Wayne's cheque in his pocket, leaving me with a handaxe and an improbable glow of authentic achievement. I'd be ready to face those woolly mutants tonight, nude or nay. Though ideally nay, as the arrival of a large van reminded me that this night, I would not be holding Cinderbury alone.

Dai was a stalwart chap and a supreme blacksmith, but he wore blue Y-fronts and flattened his spearheads on a railway line. Karl knew every skill necessary for recreating ancient life, but didn't go in for actually recreating it. A minute in the company of the van's occupants made it plain that Cinderbury's past was at last to become its present.

John ('call me Tinker') was the compact, lightly bearded half of the husband-and-wife team hired by Wayne to entertain his weekend guests. Despite their flippant name, my later research backed up John's businesslike assertion that the 'Time Tarts' ranked amongst the nation's most sought-after teams of professional re-enactors. 'There's maybe 45,000 serious re-enactors in this country,' he told me as I helped him and the cheery Karen unload their looms and drums and straw palliasses, 'and nearly all of them dream of making their hobby their job.' He showed me a gap-toothed grin. 'But not many have the discipline to make it work.'

A former deputy headmaster with a recreational background in medieval combat, John had arranged multi-period filming assignments around the world, from documentaries to adverts, as well as countless public displays. The easy part of the job was getting the props right; finding reliable re-enactors to wield them was a different story. 'It always comes down to ego and arrogance,' he said, passing me a basket full of prehistoric crockery through the van's side door. 'Most re-enactors hate admitting they're wrong, and being told what to do.' Confirming what I'd heard from Neil Burridge, John said the comparative dearth of evidence and an associated breadth of interpretation made earlier periods particularly vulnerable to this syndrome. During the recent filming of a documentary on Viking Britain, he'd endured a terrible time with the Dark Ages group his company had hired. One of the 'chieftains' had insisted that the film crew address him at all times as 'my lord', and another responded to the director's request to remove the white top he had on with a furious diatribe rounded off thus: 'Do you even care that I bleached this in my own piss?'

I was expecting John to greet Cinderbury's many compelling anachronisms with a gurn of outrage, but as a man who'd once been asked to erect a Roman camp for a Vodafone ad, he was clearly used to worse. When Wayne pitched up and breathlessly enquired what he might do in the half-hour before the first guests arrived, John calmly advised him to remove the school-canteen cookware, and the large plastic chemical drum that would otherwise welcome them as the village's gate-stop. 'And you might want to do something about those,' he added, indicating one of the many carrier bags snagged in the perimeter fence and roundhouse roofs.

I'd had no idea what sort of people might pay £200 for a weekend in the Iron Age, but as they began to arrive Wayne must have been delighted to note their principal shared attribute: a look of benign tolerance not associated with those accustomed to demanding their money back. The first was a very quiet middle-aged woman who worked for an examination board, followed shortly by a posh and hearty chap with a predictably underwhelmed young son in tow. Wayne – who'd taken the trouble to don a Guantanamo-orange jerkin, but not to remove his glasses – led them off to the caravan, and they returned a while later wearing brave faces and the standard Cinderbury uniform: knee-length cotton dress, shoes model's own.

By then Karen and John – barefoot in simple, heavy tunics hand-sewn from beige-dyed flax and linen – were well advanced with the dinner preparations, and the latter held forth as we sat down by the fire to help shell peas and skewer duck parts (Wayne's Safeway pork chops were quietly set aside). The frisson of disappointment that accompanied John's failure to address us in some kind of pre-Chaucerian rustic dialect was familiar to me from my first encounter with Dai, but as before, darkness brought the Iron Age to life. Particularly once Cinderbury's youngest resident had been packed off to the car with his GameBoy.

Nursing mugs of sickly warm mead, we allowed John's words and the flickering fire to draw us back through time. The Iron Age was by no means his speciality – a Time Tart has no fixed historical abode – yet he certainly knew enough, and delivered it with an involving sense of theatre. 'Our life here would be just working in the fields around,' he intoned, 'and we'd none of us ever leave this valley. If a chap who lived a day's walk away turned up, it would be like meeting a weird foreigner.' We all nodded into the fire. John explained that this humble, self-sufficient way of life persisted all but unchanged from 5000 BC to perhaps AD 1100, 'when feudalism came along, and with it the concept of having a surplus, and widespread trading and all that. So when you talk about "the olden days", you really aren't making a lazy generalisation.'

Again I thought how strange and sad it was that our current lifestyle had rendered redundant the human skills honed over all those millennia. But how fortunate for me personally that it had: the lesson of the previous three days was that I'd have made a pitifully inadequate Iron Ager, capable of nothing more than poking the fire and a little light weeding. For 6,000 years, this hefty roster of physical, technical and spiritual failings would have rendered me utterly dispensable to mankind, a makeweight – or a millstone – in any community. As it was, in the modern era these sundry handicaps hadn't inconvenienced me since the days of being picked second last in playground football.

By the time the final guests arrived – a rather harassed mother and her eight-year-old daughter, who'd driven right across the country from Norfolk – I was flat on my back looking up at the Milky Way, as John and Karen serenaded Wayne and I with thumpy-flutey period music. The other residents could be heard dragging haybales about as my roundhouse was converted into a multiple-occupancy dwelling; the exhausted new arrivals clicked on torches and went to join them. This was John's signal to lay down his drum, and deliver to the blank-faced Wayne a friendly but forceful tutorial on where Cinderbury was going wrong.

'The hard work's been done here,' he began, 'but when you have twenty-first-century stuff around, even if it's shoved away round the back of the huts, it punctures the atmosphere.' The Bacardi-bottle stashes were right out, and those information boards should be hung from hooks, John sagely advised, so that they might be removed during living-history stayovers. 'And you know those goatskin bellows over by the kiln?' Wayne's impassive gaze said he might or might not. 'Well, I can see someone's taken a lot of time making those, but the frame's been put on back to front, so they don't work. And that, to me, is worse than not having them at all.' His searching look at Wayne went unreturned. 'It's just a matter of putting things together with a little care.'

For the first time Wayne turned his head from the fire. 'But I don't care,' he said. 'Not about the Iron Age, and not about re-enactment.' And for once there was a light in those lifeless eyes, a burning glower that said: the only good flint-knapper is a dead one.

This was my disheartening cue to turn in, and a moment later I was clumping through the unseen yielding forms that now lay between the roundhouse entrance and my haybale. A stumbling foot on a sleeper's arm, a blindly probing hand on a young face, much yelping and whispered apologies and there I was at last on my relocated bed of straw.

Prone in the snuffling, shuffling blackness, I could hear John still at it out by the fire; having failed to awaken Wayne's inner historian, he now appealed directly to his outer accountant. There were snatches of grim marketingspeak ('it's all about building a brand'), and a stark primer in how to milk the undiscerning cash cow that was the visiting school party: 'Each kid comes in with six or seven quid, right, and their parents don't expect to see any of that again. You can get some old coins knocked up for next to nothing – kids love those. Build up your school contacts and you can pull in three, three and a half grand a month, easy.'

My final day began by the campfire with a wooden bowl of porridge and the difficult aroma of onion skins, boiling in a cauldron to make dye. Karen played a prominent instructional role in what was to be a day of more delicate, perhaps more feminine, period skills. Yet more intensive, too: 'In the Iron Age, no one sat around doing nothing,' she reminded us, unaware that I had spent large chunks of the previous three days doing precisely that.

After an hour or two in the cauldron, yellowed skeins of spun wool were hauled out to dry in the hot sun, then painstakingly woven into wristbands on a fiddly handloom that the men weren't allowed near. Instead, we twisted and tapped lengths of brass wire into distant approximations of decorative cloak-brooches.

As we bent and banged and wove, Karen asked my fellow Iron Age newbies what had drawn them to Cinderbury; I could sense that she herself was curious to discover the appeal of this unfashionable and unglamorous period. Yet it had been plain even to me that their willingness to sit by this fire in Reeboks suggested none harboured a passion for authentic reenactment, and many of their questions ('So was the Bronze Age before or after the Iron Age?') betrayed a cheery ignorance of ancient history in general. There were mutters about an interest in traditional crafts, and the posh dad spoke of a distant though still inspirational encounter with primitive societies in Burma. But the common theme that emerged was a refreshingly simple impulse to get away from it all, one so assertive it had overpowered the chortling contempt of friends and family. 'Everyone thinks I'm mad,' smiled the late arrival, draping smelly, wet yarn across a log, 'driving five hours to sleep on the floor with strangers in a place with no running water.' The examiner had faced workplace jeers ('Give my love to the Flintstones!'), and the absent wife/mother of the father-and-son team had responded to the news with a dumbstruck gawp.

It was almost as if they'd been drawn here against their will by some dormant part of their ancient consciousness, one that had briefly broken through what – on the timescale of human evolution and social conditioning – was after all just a recently applied veneer of urban sophistication. And that didn't just go for the adults: I'd thought our youngest villager seemed unutterably bored until she looked up from her lapful of unspun wool and announced, 'I wish I could always be in the olden days.'

As the sun rose higher, it became ever more challenging to concentrate on the finickety tasks at hand. After a couple of hours, having fashioned a passable ringhead bodkin (oh, look it up), I moved on to a very brief career as a fletcher. I was endeavouring to split and trim my third and final goose feather into something that might conceivably improve the accuracy of an arrow, rather than just remodel it as an anorexic Gonk troll, when John issued a very strange hiss of warning.

'MOPs! MOPs!'

Not yet fluent in re-enactorese – here was an acronym denoting 'members of the public' – I was taken aback to look round and see a quartet of red-faced pensioners ambling towards us. 'Er, are you open?' called out one, and before any of us formulated a reply, in through the gate jogged Wayne, along with a young boy who he'd shortly introduce as his son.

'Yes!' he blurted, approaching them breathlessly. 'Yes, yes. That's, um, five pounds a head.' He stood there rubbing his hands as they scanned the village and exchanged questioning looks. He was still rubbing away when the small figure at his side broke the awkward silence. 'Dad,' he piped up, introducing what was to prove a trademark pronouncement, 'I'm gonna kill your bum.'

Wayne accepted the ensuing barrage of rearward slaps and punches with no more than a twitch of those stonelike features. 'Tell you what,' he offered, once the assault subsided, 'how about fifteen quid for the lot of you?' And we watched as the visitors tapped vaguely at their watches and wandered back towards the car park.