I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

by Moore, Tim

  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.

  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.