I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

by Moore, Tim

  This previously unencountered level of dedication was embodied by the Jewish merchant I'd seen carrying his seven-branched candlesticks across the courtyard. That evening I learned he had not only personally tailored his entire outfit, from those Star-of-David belt studs to that bobble-topped yellow skullcap, but hand-fashioned an oil lamp and other accessories from period designs on display only in Jerusalem museums, learned how to bake the requisite type of unleavened bread, and – despite not actually being Jewish – mastered the Hebrew text and speech necessary for performing religious ceremonies. And he had done all this in six months.

  I made my home at the attic's far edge, just by a sizeable gap where roof failed to meet floor. Trying to ignore the graveyard mist curling up through this opening, I stripped off my twenty-first-century wardrobe, bundled it away with my nylon holdall and paint blanket under the straw sack, and set about making sense of the outfit I'd been given. It was a task that would prove distantly beyond me in the four days ahead.

  Night had fallen when at last I creaked back down the stepladder. First into shot came my death-scented peasant shoes, followed by two tightly woollen-clad legs: one Lincoln green, one off-white. Somewhere around mid-thigh lay the bottom hem of an extremely capacious scarlet wool tunic, bunched in at the waist with a thin leather belt from which dangled that shrieking sore thumb of a patchwork bag and a linen knapsack heavy with thigh-battering utensils. Next up a red sleeve the girth of a Brotherhood of Man trouser leg, then another, a quick flash of moss-coloured linen jerkin and the greasy pig-strips that half-fastened it at the neck, a crumpled sliver of the raw linen shift beneath this and just the hint of the thermal vest beneath that, and then the crowning glory – a skull-clinging, eyebrow-grazing dome of a cap, one half red, the other black. Manchester United's court jester.

  I slipped and scuffled along the dark walkway, stopping many times to yank up my green and white hose, unsatisfactorily attached to my jerkin using the eyelets and a dozen-odd metal-tipped laces (sorry, 'points'). Very cold moisture was already blotting through those thin leather soles and the covert cycling socks, and my long johns didn't seem nearly long enough. But if I was shivering, it was largely down to a sense of apprehension more powerful than I had experienced at any previous re-enactment. Because already, this didn't feel like one.

  I tagged on to a column of hooded, lantern-carrying mutterers, and followed them through an archway, up a perilously slick-stoned path against the outer wall and into an open area flanked by soaring walls and towers. In one corner a fire was bringing a cauldron of root vegetables to the boil, and amongst its circle of Smurf-hatted huddlers I found many forms of comfort. Most principally, there was confirmation all around that the Company's lingua franca was not fye-on-thee, but MTV. One of the half-dozen Brits warming their hands amongst the Swiss, Germans, Frenchmen, Poles and Czechs explained why: 'If it can be done properly, like the kit and food and that, then we do it properly. If it can't, like getting everyone to talk medieval, then we don't. No point. Same goes with daft period names. I'm Baz.'

  Baz was a crop-headed ox of a man who I'd earlier seen shouldering three of the Company's hefty standing shields at once; no one else had managed two. He filled my tiny pewter cup from a vast flagon of ale and aimed his thousand-furlong stare up at the battlements. 'No matter how many times I do these things,' he said, in pancake-flat Yorkshire tones, 'that thrill never goes away. Fuck: I'm living in a castle.' Baz went on to tell me of his day-job as a fencer, his past as a roadie, bouncer and hardcore punk, his dalliance with Second World War re-enactment as a Russian infantryman, his £1,500 peasant outfit.

  His oft-heard pronouncement as the kitchen area was prepared became a catchphrase: 'Show me where you want the hole and I'll dig it.' As the physical embodiment of a stout yeoman, Baz was plainly back where he belonged. If it was true of the Vikings, it was even truer of this lot – I couldn't avoid concluding that many Company members had gone medieval largely because their face fitted. Put-upon slap-headed fatso in the twenty-first century; respected friar in the fifteenth.

  We filed past the cauldrons for a ladle of soupy stew, and after a mumbled, desultory grace, washed it down with a monstrous surfeit of ale. In the days ahead I would learn that in glorious contradiction of Christian's domestic precedent, getting medievally tanked up was one of the duties of castle life: you don't have to be drunk to work here, but it helps. Only when ordered to do a run to the booze barn, there to decant ale from deposit bottle to glazed earthenware, did I discover our brew of choice to be the monk-strength ruin of many a Belgian. And by then, it was already much too late.

  At some indeterminate point in the night I found myself ricocheting along the covered walkway, my muddied hose bearing testament to a fitful mastery of the medieval walk that was apparently obligatory: a sort of cocksure, rolling gait, half cowboy, half costermonger.

  This method of progress proved very poorly adapted to the terrain encountered once I'd ascended the trap-door stepladder at the third attempt. After two swaggering strides into the attic blackness, it was made vocally apparent that many more people had made their beds here during my absence, and that most of these were now in them. For a minute I stood there, swaying gently as I waited for my eyes to adjust. When I accepted they wouldn't, I inched unsteadily across the dusty boards, outstretched arms probing the dark.

  Twice my forehead impacted forcefully with some ancient beam; twice I recoiled and felt my wet heels make human contact. Chivvied off course by tuts and hissed Teutonic curses, I was soon utterly, utterly lost. At one point I tripped over something, or someone, and, finding myself prostrate on a stretch of unoccupied floor, very nearly didn't get up again. Only after an almost tearful eternity of hunched fumbling – and one very unfortunate false alarm – did I locate my straw-bag. Effortfully I removed one sodden shoe, and after yanking in vain at the other flopped backwards, half covering myself with the paint blanket and Christian's cloak. Shortly after I pulled both of these off, and stuffed them into the numbing blast that rushed in through the gap by my head.

  It was a predictably trying morning. Terrified by the prospect of a day in the stocks – the default punishment, I imagined, for any idle heathen who forswore morning prayers – I'd blundered about the castle's many courtyards in search of the chapel, at length finding a plain and very damp chamber where a stubbled and bleary Englishman in a crumpled white habit was lighting candles with a shaky hand. For half an hour he mumbled schoolboy Latin at his filthy, frozen and very modest congregation; evidently, threats of a headcount were included only to add a little colour to the scenario.

  My drunken failure to wash up the night before meant a breakfast of turnip-tainted porridge, and as the assembled Company stood in silence for our debut morning muster, the toothbrush I'd secreted down the front of my tunic dropped to the flagstones with a tell-tale plasticky tinkle. The harlequin throng around me wheeled about as one; I laughed foolishly as I stooped to pick it up, but I laughed alone.

  Standing on a low wall before us, Christian – resplendent in the red and white Company livery – ordered us into dizaines by name. I wound up in a largely Scandinavian unit, headed by a man called Johann who was by some distance the most conspicuous human presence at Haut-Koenigsbourg. At six foot four he was the tallest Company member; with an exuberant Prussian-general moustache he was also the most facially flamboyant. Most compellingly, in that keenly fought contest for the castle's daftest wardrobe, no one ever came close. That morning he teamed his fur-trimmed scarlet coat and red and cream hose with a towering bell of a hat, silly of itself, but also quite plainly intended to suggest the business end of a great big cock. Yet somehow – perhaps because of the defiant, preening self-confidence with which he carried himself – he got away with it. Somehow, in fact, he looked like the coolest man in all Christendom.

  Our dizaine's first duty was guarding the main gate, which meant kitting up in armour and helping ourselves from the jumble of weaponry piled at the foot of the tower be
side it. I picked up an eight-foot halbard with a metal end as viciously complicated as a giant Swiss Army knife with all the blades open. Everyone else had brought their own protection; a very cheerful Dane sourced a breastplate, helmet and gauntlets, and helped me on with them. Cursed as I am with the hands of Miss Muffet and the head of Mr Happy, this was not a straightforward process. The gauntlets' giant articulated fingers were a knuckle's length out of sync with my own, making the simple act of grasping the halbard a feat of pain-defying endurance. The helmet was a kind of cross between a Nazi stormtrooper's and one of those boat-brimmed conquistador jobs; with it perched atop my bulbous skull like a party hat, I could be fairly certain the effect was not sinister. Moreover, with the chin strap fastened, I could barely open my mouth. 'Is that OK for you?' asked my kindly Dane, stepping back and trying to mould his latent guffaw into a smile of encouragement. 'Go, got geally,' I rasped through clenched jaws. 'It gurts like guck and I geel lige a gogal gickhead.'

  This latter sensation intensified impressively when I learned that the castle was soon to throw open its gates to several hundred French schoolchildren, and that the Dane and I were to stand outside these gates, halbards at our side, as the Company of St George's welcoming committee. We could hear the massed squeaks of Gallic impertinence even before the castle staff arrived to unlock the mighty wooden wall that lay between us. 'Those about to die,' said the Dane with a wink as it creaked ajar. 'Oh, shuh uh,' I replied.

  Being eight years old, the first few dozen visitors didn't give us much trouble. A few even called me 'monsieur'. The Dane and I worked up an effective good-guard, bad-guard routine – he strode around, brusquely corralling the children into a double column, while I did my best to contort my jaw into a smile whilst conveying a welcome in ventriloquist French. 'Gonjour, et giengenue au chateau de Haut . . . Gerggisgerg.'

  We waved in each group then waited for the next to shuffle up the steep and twisting woodland path that led from car park to castle. It was a happy time. 'Take away that postbox,' sighed the Dane, 'and you've got a perfect view.' I surveyed the misty plain beneath us and saw just what he meant: a scattering of rural settlements whose only eminent structures were church spires, and not a car to be seen on the byways that connected them.

  The trouble began with the first group old enough not to be scared of the Dane, tall enough to see how stupid my helmet looked, and bold enough to tell me. Our routine quickly fell apart. The Dane aimed his glower at them and they sneered; I attempted a throttled greeting and they jeered. When we noticed their accompanying teachers nudging each other and giggling, we gave up.

  For the next half an hour I stood in the cold, white sun, gazing in resignation through the leafless trees as sniggering young Frenchmen flicked my breastplate, rapped my helmet and employed me as a prop in an endless series of demeaning photographs. It was an ignominy I'd so often seen busby-clad guardsman enduring at the hands of junior tourists on the Mall, and one I endured with appropriate stoicism. At least until a youth in a turquoise tracksuit snatched my halbard away, and I trotted off in clanky pursuit screeching gritted, incomprehensible abuse.

  I'd only just retrieved it when Johann, somehow resplendent in a sort of metal skullcap accessorised with crimson ostrich feathers and what looked like giant steel earmuffs, led the balance of his dizaine out through the gates. Relief that my shift was over lasted as long as Johann's announcement that we were, at this very minute and in this very place, to put on a display of halbard drill.

  'Raise halbards . . . carry halbards . . . turn . . . prepare to . . . ah, Mr Englishman?' Hiding in the middle row had been a mistake – four orders in and my unschooled recklessness with this enormous weapon had cleaved a huge hole in the ranks ahead and behind. The Dane's reward for whispering quickfire tips over his shoulder was an errant spike snagged in the nape of his cowl; while detaching this I endeavoured to whack a passing teacher with my weapon's stump end. In my subsequent research I found the halbard thus described: 'In the hands of an agile trained man a formidable weapon, but otherwise more dangerous to the wielders' companions.' They might as well have given Buster Keaton a ladder, nailed a big saw to one end and sent him off down a crowded high street.

  After a quiet word it was agreed that I should stay guarding the gate while the drill continued; I watched as my dizaine clumped off into the woods for a formation march around the walls. It was much quieter now, with most of the school parties already inside the castle, but reflective appreciation of the timelessly bucolic plain laid out distantly beneath was no match for the ratcheting discomfort of my vice-like finger and headwear. By the time Johann led his boys back up the forest to meet me the pain was so great I could barely focus. My pulsing brain seemed set to escape through whatever head-hole it could find; it was as if a door had been gently closed on my halbard-holding right hand, and not opened.

  Johann brought the halbardiers to attention, then sauntered across and gave me a quick up and down. 'Listen, ah . . .'

  'His name's Tim,' supplied the Dane, noting my wan distraction.

  'Listen, Jim, there's this thing about armour.' My commander lightly clanked his own breastplate with both gauntlets. 'Because I'm tall and slender, armourers love me. I look really great in this stuff.' He allowed himself a smile of deep content, then sighed. 'But I have to say you just look really stupid.'

  This seemed more than a little rich from a man with a huge bouquet of feathers on his head, but I gazed up at him without reproach: it was a statement of inarguable fact, delivered with commendable simplicity.

  'I'm thinking perhaps you could . . .' He broke off, idly fingering his moustache with a steel-plated digit and looking vaguely about. 'Go somewhere else and never return,' was doubtless his preferred conclusion to this sentence, but after a while he concocted something more diplomatic. 'Perhaps you could go to the top of this tower, and help with the handgun.' I followed his gaze up and spotted a thick, hexagonal barrel poking out of a space in the red stone. A moment later, gleefully relieved of my armour, I bounded up three rickety flights of wooden stairs and found my medieval career relaunched with a glorious, shattering bang.

  Being a four-foot tube of heavy black iron with a bore the size of a golf ball, the handgun proved inaptly named. More accurately it was a sawn-off, wheelless cannon, or perhaps a fifteenth-century bazooka. The Swedish crew preparing this crudely magnificent firearm for action included the self-taught blacksmith responsible for its manufacture: the day after he offered to make me one for 900, and the day after that I very nearly placed an order. All my best memories of 1474 involved the handgun, but none are more treasured than those of the two afternoon hours I spent up in that smoke-filled, plank-floored turret.

  Working as a crew of three, we rotated jobs. I spent my first shift carefully decanting crumbly gunpowder from a stoppered cow's horn into torn squares of paper, sealing each with a twist and passing it to the second in line (a lofty Dane whose physique, stubbled good looks and unusually stainless smile made him the undisputed goodwife's choice), who dropped it down the gun's gaping muzzle, followed by a wad of straw and a good damping down with the ramrod, then handed the loaded weapon to the gunner. He heaved the mighty beast through the small window, then waited as I tipped a little gunpowder over the touch hole to prime the charge, before number two ignited this with our linstock, a slow-burning length of rope wound round a pole. After a quarter-second of heavily pregnant silence, the known world was filled with an apocalyptic blast that shook the stone walls around us, caused some internal organs to change places and left our turret filled with sulphurous smoke and boyish peals of hysterical laughter. I might never make the mental leap back to 1474, but there I was in 1980, watching red-hot pieces of Dinky shrapnel scythe across our back garden.

  It was an especially happy moment when my first turn at firing the gun coincided with the egress of the older school parties. We waited until the outside courtyard directly beneath us was thronged with truculent adolescents, then filled our castiron a
venger with a double charge of powder . . . If I listen closely, I can still hear that chorus of harrowed, whimpering moans.

  The three of us stumbled blinking out of the tower in a state of dazed, sooty-faced elation, looking like Guy Fawkes and his boys might have done if things had gone to plan. Aimless wandering was not tolerated for long amongst the lower orders, and a passing officer swiftly seconded me to wheelbarrow duty – ferrying wood from a necessarily huge pile to the kitchen fire, and returning with a load of festering scraps to tip in the neighbouring spoil pit.

  The Dane was helping me shovel in turnip tops and fish heads when the next dizaine marched up to take their turn on guard shift. 'If you thought you had a bad time, watch this,' he said, as the crop-headed German dizainier barked out the first drill command. His furious displeasure at one soldier's response swiftly reduced the culprit to wobbly-lipped distress.

  'Had enough? Want to go home to mamma? Huh? HUH?' A tear rolled down a bearded cheek, and a traumatised school party scuttled by.

  At this point a liveried gentleman I hadn't seen before strode up, looking as stern as a man with an Emo Philips' bowl cut is ever likely to. He presented me with the breastplate I'd worn that morning, silently indicated its many rust patches, and before departing issued a single-word instruction: 'Remove.'

  I spent the remaining hours of daylight, and a couple beyond, unsuccessfully engaged in a task that would deprive me of the Trial of the Polish Agitator. It seemed a ridiculous undertaking when everyone else had surely employed proprietary chemicals to bring their armour to a showroom shine. Seeing me work away at an orange scab with my thumbnail, a passing member of the kitchen shift suggested using 'abrasive material': after fruitless experimentation with charcoal and salt, I wound up furiously scouring the hateful object with handfuls of groundup castle. The alarmingly counter-productive results of this meant that a short while later I found myself secreting the breastplate behind a bale of hay at the back of the booze barn.