I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History Read Free

blast assailed my ears as his wife carried the phone out to the garage; a trailing echo, a moment of shocked silence, and there I was, speaking to my first reenactor. 'Sorry about that,' said Neil, brightly. 'Just trying out a – what do you call it? – a percussion-cap navy pistol.'
    With a cheerful candour I frankly hadn't expected, Neil outlined the various rival factions in the small world that was the native Bronze Age scene. 'You've got the weekenders who just like to dress up – a bit iffy and amateur in my book, though I'll certainly put the gear on if you're paying – and the super-authentics, always fighting about who's doing it right.' I'd already encountered a couple of those, duking it out in a heated online debate on knotwork that was the essence of historical correctness gone mad: You state that the design was brought to Britain in the sixth century by Saxon Christian monks – this simply isn't so . 'And then there's your actual fighters. You know – the warrior syndrome, guys that just want to drag people out into a field and hurt them.'
    This prospect became less unattractive as Neil described some of the other characters I might otherwise be spending the Bronze Age with. There was the droning know-all who never tired of boasting that no living man had spent more nights in a roundhouse; the lascivious eccentric who held pagan rites in his bedroom; the 'complete fruitcake' who had recently diversified into Nazi re-enactment.
    For a week I worked through the more promising online resources Neil helpfully directed me towards. Some period enthusiasts were motivated by myth-busting evangelism ('The Bronze Age is stereotyped as ignorant and malnourished, but these were profoundly adept people who often grew to six-foot-six'), and some by the lifestyle trappings ('They had nice big houses, chariots, hair gel – lots of fun stuff!'). But no one seemed willing to translate thoughts into deeds by actually getting out there and reliving the Bronze Age. As a fully rounded prehistoric experience, one of Neil's sword-making weekends on Bodmin Moor wouldn't quite cut it, and nor would the residential workshop introduced by this memorable phrase: 'Why not treat someone you love to the ultimate gift – a voucher for our two-day flint-knapping course?'
    Happily, the field opened when I put my clock forward a few centuries, and upgraded from bronze to iron. Very soon I had my first face-to-face encounter with a re-enactor, a man of modest stature and boyish voice, hauling a rucksack twice his size through a crowded pub opposite Victoria coach station.
    A Welshman now resident in Canada, Will Marshall-Hall was in town to interest the British Museum in his plans to establish an Iron Age village in his adopted homeland. 'The lack of written records means the only way to research how people lived back then is to try and live that way now,' he said, thunking his rum and Coke down on the table. 'Prehistoric re-enactment comes with a built-in academic function.' How heady was the prospect of making a personal contribution to the social history of my homeland, until Will pointed out that as an average pre-Roman Briton, I'd have been dead for twenty-four years.
    Keltica Iron Age Village, as I understood it, was to be a tourist attraction-cum-educational resource, as well as a labour of love for a living historian who had rewound from youthful dabblings with medieval re-enactment. An encounter with a battleaxe during this phase had endowed him the new-moon scar above his left eye: 'In Casualty they asked when I sustained the injury, and when I told them they said, "So was that 12.15 p.m., or a.m.?" and I said, "No, AD."'
    What Will had to say regarding his passion for the Iron Age introduced themes I would find common to re-enactors from all periods. 'It's a back-to-basics thing, a rebellion against consumerism and commuting and all that crap,' he said, dismissing our fellow drinkers and their lifestyles with a flick of his