I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

by Moore, Tim

  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.

  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, t
hough 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.