by Moore, Tim
Friday night meant a fish supper, which would add pollocky undertones to the complex flavours impregnating my bowl. In the cauldron queue I eavesdropped on the loudest conversation: a debate introduced by its Austrian originator as 'why we do this shit'. A predictable majority, including nearly all the Scandinavians, were searching for life after LARP; a couple of Brits had more obscurely graduated to hardcore reenactment from 'hippie fairs'; a German newbie said she'd found herself inspired during a tour of Scottish castles. Most intriguing were the three Dover customs officers whose curiosity was first piqued by repeated contact with tooled-up re-enactors in the red channel.
For a great many Company members, four days of unwashed medieval knees-ups applied a little historical balance to working lives spent, like Christian's, at the soulless, lonely frontier of twenty-first-century information technology. For a very few, like Jim the Potter, this was a full-time way of life: throughout the re-enacting season he travelled the continent, hawking his wares at events and fairs. Having made a career from his historical hobby, Jim was the envy of all Company members, or at least all who hadn't taken the time to imagine living for half the year in the back of a Transit van.
With the last cauldron drained, one of the Poles walked about with a wheelbarrow of straw hats he was trying to sell, while everyone leant against castle walls striking the standard medieval quaffing pose. Why not give it a go? Curl an imaginary drinking vessel to your puffed out chest, plant the other fist on your hip, splay your legs slightly and stick out a lower lip. A slight glower helps. Imagine Henry VIII down his local, warming his arse by the fire. I was getting quite good at it when two Company officers rushed up from the gate babbling theatrically about a hostile party in the woods.
'Here we go,' sighed Baz, reeling his lower lip back in as liveried guards scuttled along the dim battlements above. 'Some sort of daft "repel the invaders" thing's about to happen.' Over supper he'd delivered a rundown of his greatest battlefield hits: the Tewkesbury re-enactment where his one-man charge had broken right through the enemy lines, a street-based event in Spain which had evolved into a kind of human Pamplona, the Running of the Baz. The veteran of these and many other brutal victories shook his head and drained an impressively capacious tankard. 'It's dark, so you can't use sharps . . . and if we're not hitting each other, I mean properly, what's the bloody point?'
Reassured that I probably wouldn't be hurt, I left him there and jogged across to our handgun tower. There was a lookout already in place at the top; I recognised him as the dishevelled priest. 'Hello there,' he drawled, still peering out of the window. 'I'm Brother Balthasar, Andy, whatever. Oh – here they come.' I squeezed my head alongside his and squinted into the night. A glint of armour, a flash of red feather – it was the Swedes, of course, manhandling their handgun through the moonlit forest.
A rather desultory exchange ensued; the Swedes later complained, with much justification, at the lack of defensive activity. They let off a couple of blasts in our direction, then made a charge at the front gate; we shrugged a bit until someone tottered up the tower stairs with a bucket of water, and emptied it on the invaders through the 'boiling-oil' hole.
'All a bit too Python, this,' said Brother Balthasar, during the aimless stand-off that ensued. He snapped soon after, sticking his head right out the window to roar great chunks of John Cleese's silly-English-niggits speech at the puny enemy force gathered distantly beneath. All I really brought away from this experience was an enhanced appreciation of how much better it must have felt to be this side of the huge stone wall. To be – oh, really, Brother Balthasar – inside the castle pissing out.
It rained again, and sliding off to bed I wondered how anyone completed even a stunted medieval lifespan without shattering at least one limb, and thus ending their one-score-years-and-ten as a hobbled invalid. That dark and lonely walk back to the attic dormitory always seemed to shrink what you might call the time difference; the harsher realities of fifteenth-century life never seemed more tangible. Trailing my cloak through the mud and pools of whiffy froth, and flinching at every woodland scuttle, I was struck by the self-evident but otherwise elusive truth that this was indeed how all Moores had once lived. On the first night, this thought had been accompanied with pity for my forebears; just a day later, I found it giving way to towering respect. Perhaps, with two more days to come, I could still make that final leap to envy.
Being less drunk, I negotiated the trans-attic assault course in under ten minutes, and once at my palliasse successfully removed the lashed-together doublet and hose, using the 'babygro' method advised by Baz: untying the front two 'points', then pulling my arms and legs out in turn. It was the first time I had managed to remove any part of my medieval outfit.
Assured by the sound of a thousand snoring medievalists, I set off for an early-hours comfort break by the light of my mobile phone, and was navigating the trap-door steps when the frail illumination picked out an ascending hand. It belonged to a middle-aged German, one of the many Company members hairily decorated with a 'tache-less, Henry VIII face-girdler. 'Maybe we all have this,' he hissed, flicking a ghostly finger at the phone as I passed him, 'but only you have these.' And in the quarter-watt half-light I saw the beardless parts of his face pucker in elaborate contempt, his gaze fixed hatefully upon my thermal undergarments. Out of sight, in this realm, was never out of mind. Every night after that I peed through the hole in the roof. Or at least tried to.
First to arrive for prayers, I found Brother Balthasar arranging candles on the altar, mumbling Doris Day songs customised with yawned profanities. When the room was half full he uncrumpled his liturgical crib sheet, coughed horribly, and embarked on those sanctus-spiritus mutterings. Ten minutes in he briefly lost his place; believing the service at an end, his flock filed as one towards the door. Brother Balthasar stopped us in our tracks with a hoarse and loutish bellow. 'Oi! Not so fast. Plenty more where that came from.' And on he murmured, and on, and on.
Christian kicked off the post-breakfast muster with a rundown of found property; the presence of 'a pair of women's hiking boots' amidst the tankards and daggers sparked off loud jeers. He finished with a reprimand to the many artisans who'd been deserting their stations, and whose presence I had completely forgotten about. Later that afternoon I passed amongst the knife-makers, pewter-casters and blacksmiths who plied their fiery trades along the far side of the outer bailey – how fulfilling to engage this latter artisan in informed debate, and not just because there were those who called him Dwayne.
It would be two days, though, before I was given leave for a whistle-stop tour of the parallel kingdom that was the castle's only properly habitable tower, home to manuscript illuminators, fancy needleworkers, Jim the Potter and a shuffling surfeit of warmth-seeking visitors. I concluded that it was probably authentic to the spirit of a fifteenth-century castle that high-status craftspeople (if not potters) should exist in a rarefied world-within-a-world from which the low-born likes of me were excluded. And that as things in there seemed dreadfully insipid when set against the explosive excitements of outdoor life, this was a social apartheid I was happy to endure.
I'd first met Barbara when helping dismember her in a lock-up garage, and in the hours ahead I would acquire a very intimate knowledge of her every nook and cranny. Named after a saint – as was her sister artillery piece, Catherine – Barbara was the Company's apparently faithful reproduction of a fifteenth-century iron-barrelled, breech-loading cannon. Our dizaine's morning duty was to lug her extremely weighty component parts, and the many iron pins and hoops that held them all together, from the stable block to the elected artillery courtyard, over at the far side of the castle. This was an uphill journey on rain-slick flagstones, one which demanded a degree of team co-ordination as yet beyond us. At one point a wheel got away from one of the Swedes and me; I watched it roll waywardly off down the inner bailey, imagining the deadly game of human skittles that would have enlivened the scene a few minutes later, when the c
astle opened its doors to visitors.
Our gun captain was a black-clad Englishman whose toneless, iron-throated sarcasm called to mind an officer addressing hopeless new recruits in the National Service years. A bevy of serving wenches arrived with a basket of bread and a jug of ale, which we worked through while half-listening to the instructional lecture and watching the small grandstand to our right fill with visiting families.
The drill he outlined required us to dismantle Barbara, reassemble her, then fire a round – blank, sadly, as the cannonballs Christian had picked up en route were merely for display. For perhaps fifteen minutes we dithered inefficiently, putting the wheels on the wrong way round, forgetting the axle bolts, mislaying the wedge that held the loaded chamber firm against the breech, and enduring the weary rhetoric with which our gun captain pointed out these failings and many more. At length, Barbara stood ready, a Swede applied his linstock to the sprinkling of primer powder, and a soul-shredding boom thundered about the ancient walls that towered around us.
Our reward from the audience was harrowed silence, then fitful applause and nervous laughter; but just as it had been up in the handgun tower, those responsible for this explosive cataclysm punched the air, whooped mindlessly and trotted about exhibiting most other male-pattern celebrations. It was as if we'd scored a thrilling goal at the end of a ponderous but ultimately brilliant team move. When the smoke had settled, I rolled up my idiotically billowing sleeves and rubbed my gunpowdered hands together: we were going to do this properly, and often. If it had all been a little Jeux Sans Frontières until this point, thenceforth things got very Royal Tournament.
It took time for our dizaine to find its best formation. Throughout the early afternoon I sat in the loading area with Werner, a jovial, pug-nosed Belgian who had driven all the way from Brussels with 10kg of gunpowder in his boot. Our station was necessarily distant from the cannon itself: Werner merrily recounted the story of an English Civil War re-enactment that had ended in tears after windborne artillery sparks ignited dry grass in the spectators' car park, torching several vehicles and their unfortunate canine occupants.
My job here was to take the spent chamber from the runner who ferried it back from Barbara's breech, still smoking, clear away any debris and lingering embers by blowing through the torch-hole in this cast-iron facsimile of a beer tankard, pass it to Werner for a measure of powder, then grab a wodge of straw and stuff this on top, hammering it all down with a wooden rod and a mallet. 'The harder you hit it in, the bigger the bang,' said Werner with a wink. Quite soon he was doubling the powder dose, and I was clouting the straw wad so hard that the end of the rod began to split. The louder the boom thus procured, the more eagerly we worked.
Most involving was my subsequent stint as one of the heavy mob who took Barbara to bits and rebuilt her; most successful was the role I would assume in the final line-up: grabbing the loaded chamber from Werner, dashing over to the cannon and slotting it into the breech, clouting in the wedge and running away as a waiting Swede sprinkled the priming charge on.
We all had a go at applying that godlike coup de grâce with the linstock, but I would never enjoy a shift as our rammer/swabber. This crew member's twin tasks were to stick a big rod down the barrel in simulation of loading a cannonball, and then, post-bang, to douse any surviving cinders with a long-handled damp mop. My perception of what seemed at worst a tedious station was dramatically reshaped during our lunchtime discussions.
Even without a ball shoved down its gob, I learned, a primed cannon was capable of wreaking deadly havoc; if the swabbing failed to do its job, premature detonation would expel at great velocity anything that happened to be in the barrel at the time. Inevitably, this would be the ramrod; and when it was, the force of ejection meant that at least some part of the rammer's person went with it. Our gun captain had been part of a neighbouring crew when this occurred at a Battle of Crécy re-enactment in 1996; the unfortunate rammer, a noted military illustrator, had half of his right arm despatched to the horizon. (His brother, also an artist, visited him in hospital the next day with a paint brush and paper; in months he had trained his left hand to do what his right once had.)
'This is why you always stand at one side when you use the ramrod,' said one of the Swedes, before telling us of the Russian artilleryman who had failed to do so at a Napoleonic re-enactment. This unfortunate man's colleagues dragged his impaled corpse thirty metres back to their cannon, propped it up against a wheel, and continued with their work. I didn't quite know whether to believe this tale, but every time the ramming job came up for grabs thereafter I seemed to find myself paying very close attention to some part of my outfit, signalling at imaginary associates in the grandstand, or, as on one especially shameful occasion, actually hiding behind the powder box.
In fact, with artillery design still very much at the trial-and-error stage, in the mid-fifteenth century there was no such thing as a safe artillery job. In the early years, cannons accounted for as many attackers as defenders; King James II of Scotland added his name to the friendly-fire rollcall when a cannon barrel exploded during a siege in 1460.
A couple of times the primer failed to set Barbara's main charge off, meaning a call of 'Misfire!', a long wait, then a gingerly, rather whey-faced return to a lit cannon. I was never required to remove the still-live chamber, but if it had gone off halfway through this procedure there would have been more than enough shrapnel to go round. How wonderful it had felt to find at last my medieval métier; how distressing to learn that it was one that guaranteed being poured into a very early grave.
After lunch our gun captain was called away to drone disdainfully elsewhere, and with the matily gung-ho Werner promoted to the role, we found ourselves reinvigorated. Someone sneaked a digital watch out of their belt purse, and began timing our drill. Dismantle, reassemble, boom, dismantle, reassemble, boom . . . Once we employed Baz as a kind of Big Bad John human hoist, holding aloft Barbara's massive wooden chassis as Swedes darted about attaching things to it, the times began to tumble. Someone had told us the Company record for the procedure was forty point something seconds, and when – at perhaps our twentieth attempt – Werner stopped the watch at thirty-nine dead, Johann celebrated so exuberantly that he split his two-toned hose right up the arse.
Word of our achievement got around – no surprise given the stentorian length with which Johann announced it to all Haut-Koenigsbourg's distant corners – and as the light dimmed the Company's official photographer arrived to record a few reruns. It was an honour indeed, though looking at the relevant images on their website now, I'm struck by the disappointing amount of gormless standing about I appear to be engaged in. Also by how, in a world of extremely foolish hats, few proclaimed their foolishness more stridently than mine.
There was to be fencing and dance after dinner, but as the Company lined up at the cauldrons for sausage casserole, the first of many rolls of thunder made it apparent that these would have to wait. Instead my fellow 39ers and I gathered in the shelter of the handgun tower and toasted our achievement, many times, and at length I swayed off dorm-wards through the rain, passionately determined henceforth to apply this new appetite for physical endeavour and logistical efficiency to every area of my life, instead of none.
How strange, I pondered some hours later during Brother Balthasar's unkempt grumblings, to find myself submitting so gratefully to a command-based routine. A couple of my Romans had spoken of the solace of subservience, and as a feckless, rudderless freelancer, I immediately sympathised: despite all the blathering about nanny states, these days fewer of us are told what to do than ever before. I had suggested as much during some aled-up fireside debate on the first night, though only now recalled my subsequent loud analysis of which particular nationalities were most likely to pine for the comfort of taking orders.
At muster something wonderful happened: Johann bent forward, parted the split in his hose and with a cry of purgative ecstasy laid a magnificent golden egg into my waiti
ng hands. Or that was almost how it felt when our dizainier presented me, and each of my artillery companions, with a medallion ordered from the Polish pewter-caster. This depicted St Barbara, patron saint of cannoniers, and in honour of our achievement was etched with the numerals XXXIX. By sundown we'd all stitched them to our hats – at a stroke my berk-beacon headwear became a badge of honour to be worn with pride, pride I still feel as I hold the medallion now. A pride whose glorious zenith came at muster's end, when Christian led the entire Company in a chorus of adulatory huzzahs, one whose soul-kissing echo faded only when Johann sidled up to inform us that we each owed the Polish guy six euros.
Now familiar with my squawking enthusiasm for loud ballistics, a select group of Swedes invited me to spend the day with them and Baz on a handgunning party. Johann – his split hose now concealed beneath a majestic fur-collared crimson cloak – had spotted a semi-derelict tower near the artillery courtyard, one that overlooked the main gate from the other side. Though this ramshackle structure lacked any means of ascent, we endeavoured to get ourselves and two handguns (Fat Butt and the smaller bored Long Butt) up to its rotten-floored turret by judicious use of ropes and a tottering human pyramid.
One of the most striking facets of Company life was the bond of mutual respect and practical competence – of course you won't drop this brimming cauldron if I pass it to you; of course that enormous iron tripod won't collapse into the fire the minute you tell me you've put it up; of course you won't yelp like a stepped-on puppy when I hand you these coils of rope and you find they're all covered in cobwebs. Having failed all these tests of time and many more, I had at last earned my stripes – and the dizaine's respect – as a giggling, swivel-eyed explodophile.
Once we were all set up – barrels poking out of the window-slits and trained on the arriving tourists, gunpowder and smouldering linstock placed as distantly apart as our modest confines permitted – Johann dutifully endeavoured to kick-start an authentic scenario. 'The captain has told us to look out for enemy scouts, so we should—' Our opening volley drowned him out, and in the roof-raising high-fives that ensued, he somehow forgot to carry on.
