I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

by Moore, Tim

  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

  The moment I beheld Roman legionaries clanking in formation around a Las Vegas parking lot was the moment I vowed to experience transatlantic living-history at first hand. A horribly patronising sneer besmirched my face whenever I imagined the prospect, which was increasingly often now that my journey through time had nosed into the realms of nonnative American history – let's not forget that Virginia was named thus in honour of the famously intact Elizabeth I.

  What a deflating, sneer-wiping experience, when at last I sat down to select myself a Stateside group, to discover historical re-enactment as we know it today to be an entirely American invention. The transatlantic phenomenon that is the Renaissance Faire may have serious re-enactors choking on their pottage, but the fact remains that these beery c
elebrations of velvet and cleavage, which today attract five million Americans a year with their Drench-A-Wench stalls and jousting unicyclists, can trace their heritage right back to the late fifties. A young Dustin Hoffman earned his acting spurs at one, playing a dragon slain by St George.

  By the mid sixties, while those pioneering neo-Vikings shuffled uncertainly up the Isle of Man beaches in their Dr Scholl's sandals, American enthusiasts were already organising incomparably more professional re-enactments as part of the Civil War centenary festivities. The movement was soon sufficiently well entrenched for US participants to abbreviate themselves as 'nactors, and before the decade was out an American had coined what would become the globally accepted term of derision applied to any ill-equipped weekend casual: 'farb', a word of obscure etymology, perhaps most convincingly explained as a contraction of 'far be it from me to criticise that impression'. It is perhaps the greatest testimony to US living history's well-worn heritage that its participants were dissing each other for inauthenticity at a time when the Sealed Knot, the English Civil War group that kickstarted European re-enactment, was still but a pewtery twinkle in its founders' eyes.

  Give or take the odd ringtone and roll-up, in terms of immersive authenticity my experiences to date had been characterised by a generally upward trajectory. If I wished to continue this trend, it would mean tracking down an unusually dedicated living historian, the 'nactor's 'nactor. And that, in splendid defiance of my lazy preconceptions, meant crossing the Atlantic.

  'I have heard this fellow spoken of at re-enactors' workshops, revered as the ultimately developed character' . . . 'His persona is a truly authentic settler, like a relic from another age' . . . 'My brother said he just showed up with his animals and blew everyone away.' Clue by clue, link by link, arresting commendation by arresting commendation, I homed in on my target and began to track him down across the American scene's sprawling online territories.

  The nameless cattleman in question seemed imbued with a semi-mythical status: the few who claimed a sighting told of a character apparating at historical fairs with a well-trained team of oxen, then apparating out again, leaving a profound impression but no contact details. After a couple of weeks of this I began to wonder if the whole thing was the product of febrile minds and too many nights round the campfires, like something out of a Clint Eastwood ghost Western.

  I was about to move on when a name abruptly landed in my inbox. 'Hi Tim – I think you are looking for Gerry Barker, from Wisconsin.' An eager reply prompted a photographic attachment: 'Here is the gent in question at an event in Ohio. He really projects the image!'

  I double clicked and found myself confronted by a senior interpretation of the Rocky Horror Show's Riff Raff, casually at ease upon a recumbent, nose-ringed steer. An attendant foreground schoolboy, beaming into camera beneath a tricorn hat evidently removed from the bald pate behind him, obscured most of what went on below that craggy face and the straggly curtains of grey hair that framed it. Only the cattleman's feet were visible: utterly bare, but for a lavish slathering of bullshit.

  The personal details swiftly procured an email address; the almost instant reply to my tentative approach confirmed that here was a re-enactor cut from a very much rougher cloth than any I had yet encountered. Declaring that his focus was on 'living-history experiments', not public events, Mr Barker described at length the life of a lone ox wagoner, circa 1775, and his zealous determination to emulate it. My eye ran through paragraphs littered with troubling phrases of intent: 'middle of nowhere . . . fifteen miles a day . . . sleeping on the ground without a tent . . . trail food – a lot of Johnny cake'. In reference to a throwaway comment I'd made regarding his bare feet, he wrote: 'I do usually walk without shoes, but I got frost-bitten this past winter and am not recovered yet, so may reconsider.'

  All this meant I had to struggle very hard to accept an invitation to accompany him for a few days in the calmly gracious manner with which it was issued, and to blot out the implications of its accompanying caveat: 'I had not intended to ask any one else to take part, because it is going to be uncomfortable.' The sign-off that ended this sobering communication seemed to toll out across the screen. 'Good enough, I have to get out and beat animals. Your Obedient Serv't, Sir, Gerry Barker.'

  Further contact revealed Gerry as a man of companionable charm and understated wit, but did nothing to appease my terror. Three months later, seated in the arid, air-conditioned chill of Cincinatti Airport's meeting point, I reacquainted myself with a print-out of his collated correspondence, and the improbable blend of erudite curiosity and horny-handed endurance that defined it. 'I am probably too intense for most people,' he had written early on, 'but my personal goal has been to learn from controlled living-history projects, experiments that start with a question.'

  Questions Gerry had previously sought to answer included whether it was possible to turn a patch of forest into a twostorey log cabin in three months using only eighteenth-century equipment (it was); if one man could make gunpowder from scratch in a weekend (using bat crap and charcoal, he could; and how long it might take a family to clear a plot of land, raise from this a crop of flax, and process the resultant harvest into a shirt (a year, and 120 hours of labour per head). Along with a hardy crew of likeminded companions, Gerry had built roads, led pack trains through mountains and across rivers, and waged a five-month campaign against Native Americans, who from hereon in I'm going to have to call Indians, because this was 1775 and anything else just sounds silly. He had done things that were doubtless awful in ways I didn't understand, like boiling salt, retting jute and surveying 130 rods of boundary, and things that I all too clearly did: 'At the Siege of Martin's Station we wanted to see what it was like for sixty people and their animals to live enclosed in an area the size of a basketball court.'

  I folded the wodge of paper back into the smutted linen haversack that had now been at my side since the first century AD, contemplating once again how richly deserved was the hallowed, almost legendary status which the 'nacting community had conferred upon the man I was soon to meet. An academic with an MA in Labour History, and an experimental archaeologist whose unquenchable thirst for calloused and malnourished adventure was expressed in the worrisome phrase that ended his final email: 'I am as careful with historical accur acy as the current law allows.' Gerry Barker: Übernactor.

  'Uh, Mr Moore?'

  I looked up and found a generous slice of foreground filled by a huge, panting man with a walking stick. Long grey smock, long grey hair, and an air of breathless bemusement: he looked for all the world like an acid casualty who had wandered off into the woods in the summer of 1967, and only just found his way out. 'How's flying these days?' he wheezed, having introduced himself as Butch. 'Kind of gave that up forty years back.'

  Butch, I knew from our emails, was an old friend of Gerry's, and a long-term collaborator in historical endeavours: the smock, I noted with a now well-trained eye, was in truth a shin-length linen shift, and the headband which kept his hair off that moist forehead was more pioneer than pot-head. 'Gone let myself get unfit and fat,' he sighed, pausing for breath as we shuffled towards the airport multi-storey. How I regretted not expressing more forcefully a willingness to drive myself from Cincinatti to the Daniel Boone National Forest, the million-acre Kentucky wilderness Gerry had selected for his latest experiment.

  Only after several further rests did Butch arrive at the extravagantly careworn pick-up truck that was to take us there. 'Someone bust into the cab last night,' he grunted, unnecessarily nodding his head at the glinting shards of quarter-light that carpeted the threadbare front seats. I brushed off the worst and climbed in, breathing in a now-familiar draught of woodsmoke and dung, and placing my feet carefully into a footwell filled with straw hats, tins of a substance mysteriously labelled 'Instant Shoe Foal Extension' and a great many balls of lead shot, which cannoned noisily into the bulkhead when Butch engaged reverse and stamped on the loud pedal.

  We had about 150 mi
les to drive, Butch reckoned; with the odometer broken and the speedo needle hanging limply at zero, he could be no more precise. What time would we get there? Butch smiled carelessly. 'My watch fell off in 1975,' he said, 'and I never have seen a reason to put it back on.'

  I gazed through the cracked windscreen as malls and motels thinned out into primeval forest, my stubbled cheeks buffeted by waves of thick and clammy August afternoon blasting in through the broken window. Not shaving for three days beforehand was now part of my two-pronged pre-re-enactment programme, the other being to stuff my fat face like a squirrel preparing for winter. Never before had my short-term nutritional future looked bleaker – pondering the composition of 'Johnny cake' as I laid waste to my sleeping neighbour's in-flight breakfast, I imagined Gerry offering some future historical companion a runny portion of Timmy cake.

  We stopped at an agricultural superstore, where Butch shuffled incongruously through clusters of check-shirted, baseball-capped good old boys in search of bovine insect repellent. Fair enough, I thought: the oxen hadn't volunteered for this trip, so it didn't seem right to punish them as part of our own perverse pursuit of period discomforts. Browsing the aisles I found my attention attracted by a display-case crammed with viciously serrated weaponry, lethal chemicals and armoured protective clothing. Presiding over this was a placard with a starkly evocative legend: 'The Stuff You Need Out Here'.