I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (7 page)

We toiled through our period tasks as the children ran sweatily amok under a limb-wilting sun. Some time in the afternoon, as the examiner and I were squishing heated goat's milk, sour cream and vinegar into an authentic cheese press, John subtly raised the stakes by inveigling the present tense into his conversation. 'See, we can trade this, maybe for salt,' he announced quietly, and, despite the heat, our labours thereafter were characterised by a gathering sense of purpose. Particular enthusiasm was devoted to our Diane-emulating efforts at twig-whisking cream into butter, though try as I furiously did it wouldn't work for me. Surveying the slurried whey that was the fruit of my twenty-minute manual frenzy, John solemnly announced that such a failure could be interpreted as evidence of witchcraft.

'Smirk if you must,' he whispered, holding out a finger, 'but first let me tell you a story.' And so, with the roundhouse shadows stretching out across Cinderbury's barren stubble, he told us the tale of a pagan acquaintance who, having been teased at work, cursed his tormentor so effectively that he was soon tearfully begged to lift the hex, and indeed handed a great deal of cash to do so.

'And the nature of this curse?' John's small, bright eyes darted from face to sunburnt face. Then, with a grim smile, he leaned towards me until that blistered nose was almost touching mine. 'See this face?' he hissed, jabbing a whey-flecked digit at his beard. 'Tonight, when you're shagging your wife, at the point of orgasm you'll see this face again, and you'll keep seeing it every time you shag her from now on.' All I can say is that this statement affected me a lot more than it would have done three days previously. A year on and I still have occasional cause to hate him for it.

Walking into our roundhouse in AD 25 – the year John had recently opted to place us in – and walking out of it two millennia later had a jarring,
Mr Benn
quality to it, though it might have felt more jarring had I not been wearing the same shoes in both shots, and been offered a shave and a shower in between.

En route to my fireside farewells I glanced through the door of the roundhouse commandeered by the Time Tarts, where Karen was collecting instruments for the after-dark festivities to come. A shield lay against a plank-framed bed draped with sheepskins, and on a low chest beside it sat a pair of wooden bowls and the cluster of Romanesque oil lamps that bathed the scene in soft, warm light. It was a most becoming still life; standing there in my tourist shorts and a Woodstock T-shirt, I at last felt a nape-tickling frisson of Will's 'period rush'.

Sensing this just as I was about to leave should have seemed a frustrating disappointment, but approaching the fire and its encirclement of tousled craftsmen, I accepted that the reality of my experience was this: you could have fed me from the porridge drawer and dyed my clothes in wee, you could have locked me up in Cinderbury for a year with only the Time Tarts and those sheep for company, you could have done all that and still I'd never have made it to the Iron Age. My clock just couldn't be turned back that far.

The night before John had railed at length against a distant BBC historical-reality show in which a couple of dozen me-type urbanites were left to cope alone in an Iron Age village in Wales. Describing the consequent shambles, he'd rhetorically wondered what the series was attempting to prove. 'You were just watching people without any period skills faffing about – any Iron Ager would have known that if you cook chicken in the dark, you'll end up with food poisoning. We didn't learn anything about their period at all.'

Perhaps not, but we learned a little about ours. Mainly that most of us in the developed world have mislaid all the fundamental talents that were once hardwired human nature, but which in the space of a breathless couple of centuries have been rendered utterly irrelevant. Appraising my least ridiculous cloak-brooch, John diplomatically commented how difficult it was to master tools and crafts that had played no part in one's formative years. And there we were: I was simply too modern, too pampered and closeted, all that ancient know-how jettisoned in favour of more contemporary life-skills, like digital copyright theft and sarcasm.

Yet there was hope, and it lay just beyond those wooden walls. Buried out there were the remains of a structure that would have astounded Cinderbury Man perhaps more than the phone mast erected beside it 2,000 years later. The invaders that built it brought with them the sophisticated technology and culture that would at last haul our filthy forebears towards civilisation as I recognised it. They were, in short, the kind of people I might more convincingly pretend to be.

Chapter Two

They pioneered our urban way of life, and left behind vast lumps of epic civil engineering. They conquered a huge swathe of the known world with their winning blend of ruthless tactical efficiency, big catapults and splendid helmets. They lived it large, and wrote about it. Everything that Wayne felt the Iron Age lacked, the Romans had in shiny spades. No surprise that, in contrast to the dearth of prehistoric re-enactors, the problem now was an overwhelming surfeit.

Britain alone hosts more than a dozen very active Roman groups, most with a military bias, some boasting over 100 members and a history stretching back to the sixties. Germany is another stronghold. Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Holland, Russia, Australia, Venezuela . . . no matter how far I cast my Google net, it came back with a haul of sandalled legionaries. Shamed by their subsequent decline, or just bored with an era whose relics cluttered their city centres, Italy could muster only one mothballed group; indeed it seemed that the Romans were most popular in those countries they had either failed to annex in totality or never even knew existed. Perhaps inspired by Hollywood's enduring fascination with the era, no fewer than twenty-one practising legions patrolled the United States. The Legio XIV had declared Buffalo, New York, a 'formally recognised province of Rome'; I watched in silent awe a YouTube video depicting period military drill solemnly performed in a Las Vegas parking lot.

Aware that soldierly lifestyles were likely to dominate many of my forthcoming re-enactments, I spent some time tracking down civilian-oriented Roman groups, pretending I was doing so in search of a more rounded experience, rather than just to avoid pain and humiliation. Fruitlessly so. Hope was raised by a post in livinghistory.co.uk's Roman section headed 'For those inclined to gentler pursuits', then dashed by the message beneath: 'We always need body draggers, arena guards and someone to portray Pluto ushering the fallen into the afterlife.' Of all the historical enthusiasts I would contact, only the Vikings proved more singularly bent on violence.

My misgivings were eloquently encapsulated in the pages of
www.gladiator.hu
, a Hungarian organisation whose annual 'Traditional Fighting Club' attracted period hardmen from across the world. 'Our training camp reflects the mentality of Roman gladiator schools, and besides developing your endurance and fighting skills, you will also find people with similar interests and a strong sense of fellowship. The quality of training is guaranteed by magister gladiators.' It seemed impossible to imagine a less appealing event, though researching the Dark Ages I found one: 'Although such encounters are well documented in European history, Beth believes this was the first nude battle re-enactment. By all accounts, it was a great success, and there is already talk about next year's event. Hopefully the weather will be more cooperative.'

In the end, I applied to join the half-dozen pan-Continental groups whose website photo archives featured members at least occasionally doing something other than hurting or being hurt. The first to come back with a positive reply was the Legio VIII Augusta, a French group based predominantly in the Toulouse area. It was a happy result: their commanding officer expressed his genial enthusiasm in mercifully fluent English.

'We are invited this summer to spend some days in Denmark in an archaeological park, living in historical conditions. You will be our first British. It's great because in the Roman days in the period we depict it was the same, a mixture from different origins. Jean-Luc Féraud SIG LEG VIII AVG.'

A week with French Romans in Denmark sounded irresistibly cosmopolitan, and the legion's website uniquely depicted the presence of a great number of young and attractive female camp followers. I signed up without hesitation, and three months later wandered through the gates of the Lejre Experimental Centre.

'Oh, it's very late for a visit,' said the woman manning the trim and very contemporary reception area. 'This is a big place and I'm really sure you won't have time.' In doing so she presented me with my first opportunity to grab bragging rights over a MOP. 'But I'm not here to visit,' I announced, airily. 'I've come to join my legion.'

I might have announced an intention to hold my breath for an hour.

'You're a
soldier
– a
Roman
soldier?'

If my pride was hurt by the tone of her response, it slunk off in a corner to die during the sceptical, lingering appraisal that followed. In the end I scrabbled through the large bag at my feet and retrieved my helmet. I held it up for her inspection, and we both watched as a crumpled crisp packet snagged in one of the cheek-piece hinges freed itself and fluttered down on to her souvenir pens. 'Please,' she said, almost sadly, 'you will find your colleagues behind the hill.'

It was a hot day, and my journey had been a stickily protracted trudge up and down the public-transport hierarchy: train then coach to Stansted, plane to Copenhagen, inter-city to Roskilde, once-an-hour local service down a branch-line shin-deep in weeds, then an otherwise empty bus through the wheatfields and windfarms of the gently undulating, well-ordered Danish countryside. Throughout this odyssey I endeavoured to comply with Jean-Luc's final communiqué, a request to attain familiarity with the legion's orders – in Latin.

Culled exclusively from Roman sources – principally Caesar's own account of his nine-year campaign in France – these offered at once a thrilling insight into the truly immersive, fully codified realm of ancient military history I was about to enter, and a sobering foretaste of what I might have to endure when I got there. Wedged on benches between solemn, Scholl-sandalled Scandinavians, I'd worked diligently through the relevant website printouts, doubly hampered by the complete absence of English therein. I'd hopefully do the right thing if a snarling centurion barked out '
Pergere!
' ('
Marche!
'), followed by '
Ostiose!
' ('
A votre aise
!'), or if an unlikely cry of '
Ad impedimenta
!' ('
Chargez les bagages lourds sur les chariots!
') rang around the camp. But there wasn't much to be made of '
Gladium condere!
' or its runic translation '
Rengainez!
', and it was hard to imagine a happy outcome to any interpretation of '
Ad aggerem!
' ('
Elevez une butte!
').

No such confusion – once I'd foolishly researched its true meaning – muddied the fearful last command of the hundred or so listed in the legion's compendium. The Roman Army's base unit, the
contubernium
, was an almost claustrophobically close-knit squad of eight legionaries who shared a tent, ate together and fought side by side. If one of the group showed cowardice in the face of the enemy, their centurion would declare
decimatio
, the cue for the most inhuman practice ever conjured up by a civilisation synonymous with merciless brutality. The squad, coward and hero alike, would draw straws, with the unlucky loser sentenced to death. Not at the point of an executioner's sword, but with stones and clubs forced into the hands of his own squad, his closest colleagues, in strong statistical probability including the coward himself. As a back-up to this apparently inadequate deterrent – you don't really want to know where the moral compass was pointing back then – the survivors were for some time thereafter obliged to survive on barley rather than wheat.

The prospect of living for a week on either of these period victuals encouraged me to lay down an impressively thick base-layer of twenty-first-century calories throughout my journey. Doritos, hot dogs, a big tub of curried potato salad – in it all went, repulsing even the most stoic Dane into affording me a little extra bench space. It also fuelled my laboured manhandling of a vast holdall containing the most curious selection of personal effects I had ever carried out of my front door.

After the poly-cotton shambles that was my Cinderbury wardrobe, I'd been boyishly enthralled by the prospect of striding about as a fully tooled-up legionary. Particularly once it became apparent that the ratcheting demand for re-enactment kit had attracted a number of Indian craftsmen into the market, meaning period equipment could be snapped up on eBay for significantly less than I'd imagined.

Having sourced a gleamingly splendid, brass-trimmed helmet for under £50 I proudly emailed Jean-Luc the relevant image. In doing so I inspired him to a tone of icy disdain at odds with our previously cordial communications: 'This helmet is completely wrong,' began his reply. 'Not one thing is good on it. Do not buy this helmet.' Chastened, I checked the picture against those worn by the Legio VIII Augusta's jovial membership in their website photo archives. Only very gradually did a tiny, single difference – two decorative brass roundels on the hinged cheek-pieces where there should have been three – assert itself to my untrained eye. Yet as I trained that eye, through a long afternoon of online research, I could feel myself being drawn into a comfortingly male realm of obsessive authenticity and slavish attention to the finest details of make and model.