Stepping away from existence

The first time I remember wanting to die, as in not wanting to be in the state of existence we call 'being alive', was during the summer before my second birthday. I was playing in a paddling pool beneath the pine trees in the garden of the officers quarters where we lived in Hampshire. Across the wire fence that separated our garden from the gardens of the children who were of a senior rank to me- ie their fathers were a senior rank to mine, which meant their mothers ranked over mine, and they in turn ranked over me. Women and children found these things important, and seldom were you allowed to forget it. Deborah was a little girl who not only out ranked me, at 3 years of age, she out- aged me, so when she came to the wire fence to excitedly brag that they were having a birthday party for her baby brother Lindsay that afternoon, I scampered over the pine needles and asked if I could come to the party. Deborah grabbed one of Lindsay's T shirts from the washing that her mother was pegging on the line and began to windmill slapping me about the head with it, screaming no no I couldn't go. Of course I started to wail and ran back to the paddling pool where I lay down in it and waited to die.

Army children knew all about death, even before they were two years old, then. This was the 1950s, not long since the War, and the Blitz. We all knew about how babies could be sleeping in prams in the garden one minute and blown to smithereens by a bomb the next. Everyone had someone dead, and we were all always prepared for the possibility that our Daddies would go to work and die. It happened.

The grown ups were always warning about not going near the edge of the pond in case I drowned. I guessed drowning had something to do with not being anymore, so I was sure that lying in the paddling pool would take away the pain of humiliation and rejection, because if there was no you, no one could hit you with their baby brother’s wet T shirt. It would have been better if the airplane dodging in and out of the rock-and-tower clouds could have dropped a bomb on me though, then I wouldn't have been responsible for not existing and no one would hate me for doing it. However, my life was probably defined from this point by there having been a slow puncture in the plastic ring sides of the paddling pool, and a leak in the bottom where it had been placed on a stone or somthing, so the pool had about half an inch of water and was pratically as flat and useless for drowning purposes as a used and discarded condom. At that moment though, Mum came down the garden path and said that we had to get ready to go to the NAAFI to get a birthday present for Lindsay. She asked why I had so many red marks but I don't think I could actually articulate that Deborah had attacked me with Lindsay’s wet T shirt and said I couldn't go to the party because I was too inferior,, and I wanted to die and be planted deep in the ground where no one could be nasty to me, and even if I could have done, it wasn’t the done thing to complain. There was nothing Mummy could have done about it because they out-ranked us. In Northern Ireland once, my big brother had thrown a tin can at the Colonel’s son and cut his ear because he had been nasty to him and said I was an ugly baby, and it was my Daddy who had got into trouble because he was only a Captain.

There were many occasions following that over the next ten years, when I simply wished to cease to exist right there and then, and fantasised about ways that it might happen. I never seriously contemplated actually killing myself, suicide. I heard the adults talking about cowardly people who killed themselves. I also heard all the rows and the fights that sounded like Dad was killing Mum, and I assumed it was my fault for being born and wished almost everyday that I hadn't been and could miraculously be unborn, especially when there were whispers about what to do with me if there was a divorce and how I could stay at Boarding School and go to Grandpa’s in the holidays would hardly notice any difference.

When adolescence struck it got worse in some ways and better in others. It was fashionable to want to die then, and a few of the people at school tried it. A couple succeeded. Meanwhile I still tried to think of a method that would be quick and relatively painless. One reason I never attempted suicide, never really thought it was the solution to ceasing to exist, was that I was unsure about the existence of the afterlife. I mean, what if you killed yourself, only to find that death was not oblivion after all and you had to go through it all over again with the embarrassment of knowing the consequences of what you did? That would be no better than continuing to be alive. The thought of being in the spirit world, there in a parallel universe watching yourself make a complete and absolute dick of yourself and seeing what happened and what they all said when they found out that you had failed this week's Maths test miserably, or that you had a crush on a boy in the sixth form and people had found out about it, or that it was you who accidentally scratched the Georgian bookcase, or that you had farted as you got up to do the reading in Assembly and everyone knew it was you and never stopped teasing you about it.

The idea of ceasing to exist by dying was supposed to take that embarrassment and humiliation away, but what if hell was being forced to keep going through it, watching the reaction of your family when they found out why you killed yourself and you faced an eternity of living it in an eternal loop. It was enough to put anyone off the idea. However, a bit of razor blading your arm and watching the crimson beads form on the parallel slashes met half way and there was always the possibility of slipping and accidentally catching an artery, or even getting Lockjaw. I used to get Tetanus and Jaundice confused. imagined that a rusty blade would give me jaundice and I would go all yellow like my brother who was born in Malaya- I somehow got the idea that he was yellow anyway, so it didn’t kill him like tetanus should really, but I wasn’t born in Malaya, I was born in Ireland, so it probably would kill me, but I wasn't keen on being yellow when I ceased to exist, so that was not the ideal solution either.)

Adolescence passed, at least I think it did. It probably returns periodically, something like once every couple of weeks until the day of the ceasing to exist happens. I engaged in activities where accidentally ceasing to exist, or being killed through no real fault of my own, and thus having an insurance pay out when it happened to ameliorate any desires by my nearest and dearest into investigating why I did not want to be alive, and therefore not hurting their feelings because they might think I didn’t like them and wanted to get away from them permanently, were a likely result. I think the term is seeking out death and danger, taking risks for a living. Hey, this way I could cease to exist by the method that might actually do someone or society some good in the meantime. It failed though. My existence continued despite dangling it brazenly in front of greedy fates. Obviously it was not tasty enough for them. Back to the cuts and burns.

As middle age came upon me, amazed to have got so far, I thought that at last ceasing to exist without any intervention was going to be a doddle. There have been a couple of glitches like giving up smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol except on odd occasions, eating healthy food and taking exercise and somehow maintaining a body that is more healthy than I , as a studied hypochondriac needs. In fact, as middle age bit hard, I discovered a temporary solution to ceasing to exist. Or should I say rediscovered it. As a child I had the ability to completely cut off from the world that rejected me and go into an inner world of my own making, in my imagination. I could be anything, do anything I wanted until I was rudely dragged back into the world I wanted to stop living in. Even then I could do back to the world what it did to me- be on the outside looking in and refuse to be drawn into it.
Of course as a functioning member of society, outwardly I cannot literally do that, but what I can do is look at through a backwards telescope. Today there is a label or labels for what is in my head, the desire not to exist and the disconnection. I don’t need the labels, just to pull the darkness over my head from time to time, until it really is time not to exist.

Homesickness

Vasili, the new Lithuanian boy, smokes on his veranda.
Cigarette aroma, redolent of carefree Summers-past before health scares
and sensible years kicked in, drifts through my open door,
hangs in the cool dimness of my hallway like nostalgic incense.
Vasili screws up his face in the stripy sun, stabs the dog-end out on his beer can.
He checks his phone, but there are no calls. Vasili throws his hood over his head
It hides his face, but the dejected slide to sit hunched on the decking
indicates his habitual sadness has not lifted despite last night’s party in the house.
The railings cast shadows over his body, build a cage around him.
An exile who pines for the birchwoods and lakes, he anticipates
Sunday voices from home, tests the signal, battery and ringtone. Satisfied
there is no fault, he picks embedded splinters and grit from the soles of his bare feet.

Ivor the Humber Box

Sometimes, the re-enactment world is more bizarre than even the general public think it is . Sometimes, the re-enactment world is bizarre to the re-enactors themselves.
Granted, there are several different levels of re-enactment for many eras, and for the 1940s, people who recreate various aspects of it range from the hardcore living historians, to the swing dancers, to the 'promenaders' who dress in anything from approximations of imagined impressions of wartime apparel adapted from anachronistic items, to those whose attention to detail would call up the expression 'more wartime than wartime' in order to pose on the platforms and ride the steam trains at various railway events. Let us not also forget the battle re-enactors and the military and classic vehicle enthusiasts who may or may not match their obsession with having the vehicle spot on to the last cross headed bolt with their own appearance when driving or displaying the ever-demanding cash and petrol guzzling mistress.

The 1940s weekend at Haworth, West Yorkshire is a place for people- watching. Haworth, usually more famous for the Bronte Parsonage, the Bronte Tea Rooms, the Bronte Antique Shoppe , the Bronte Mauseleum and the Bronte Toilets goes all red white and blue bunting and criss-crossed masking tape windows every Maytime around the date when Victory in Europe was declared in 1945. The steep cobbled mainstreet is closed off so that various jeeps and trucks and staff cars, gleaming Austin 7s, Ford Populars, sleek Vintage Rolls Royces can prowl and purr and prink while a thousand seamed stockinged, fur-stoled, killer heeled, rather less than svelte Rita Hayworth wannabe lookalikes pose beside them to the click of a thousand camera shutters.


There isn't much to do apart from looking at the shops , queuing, (but then queuing always was and always shall be a way of life in England), then finding a vantage point such as the raised seating area outside of the Black Bull pub, from which "Winston Churchill" with his obligatory bowler hat and, just in case anyone is in any doubt of whom he is meant to be, a cigar the size of a baboon's cock between his teeth, drawls the Victory speech accompanied by what appears to be some kind of strange furry animal but is in fact someone impersonating Queen Elizabeth (wife of George VI- the one who stayed in London during the blitz and was pleased when a bomb dropped on Buck House so she could hold up her head in the East End- Mum to our current monarch). From such a place the comings and goings of the crowd can be observed, the puffed up Military Police, blowing whistles you really yearn to shove somewhere dark, telling people to get out of the way. This is often a difficult thing to do because women get their heels stuck fast between the cobblestones and cannot move until men in hobnail boots which have absolutely no grip whatsoever on the slope slide gingerly to rescue them.

Bottlenecks occur as the shuffling crowd heaves and suddenly comes to a standstill when two small groups , one travelling up hill, the other down hill stop to talk to each other, or someone stops dead to take a photo of an old pram containing a life-like baby doll in a full suit gas mask that some poor bloke sweating in Home Guard Hairy Marys and a fat woman with very swollen ankles ,curlers hanging out of her turbanned head-scarf, and a dead ferret with six legs slung around her neck are pushing up and down the hill as if it were a broken down Austin 7.

A cold wind wuthers off the moor and people shiver. The real Yorkshire people bound up and down the hill like sheep dogs in a Hovis advert, the visitors complain bitterly about backs and feet and legs and varicose veins. They hang around the ENSA stage, which someone, as usual, has put by the steps of the church so no one can get through to the steps to the car parks to get out. You are trapped by the nightmare strains of a ukelele and a George Formby impersonator. The crushing crowd and the smell of mothballs, the feel of old fur on your neck (you hope against hope it hasn't got fleas) the puckered lips of old ladies smacking your cheek or worse, mouth, as they shriek that you remind them of some long dead flame , all combine to give you a panic attack. Clouds bank up blackly and the jeeps , those who do not know Haworth Moor weather, scramble to put the canvas on the tilts.

A group of German SS joke around , their black uniforms sinister. What they are doing there, promenaders portraying Axis troops in an English village reliving Victory in Europe Day, has been a cause for concern and question for years, but they are allowed to come. It helps bring home what the war was about. At least that is one way of looking at it.
Attention this year is diverted from them by the Japanese bloke, dressed in full Eastern Theatre uniform, with his wife in traditional kimono , obi, tabi socks and pattens, the whole geisha works. No one complained at the incongruity, the inappropriateness, the total lunacy- instead they all wanted their photographs taken with them. And the Japanese soldier and his lady complied with never ending patience and miles and miles of white toothed smiles.

It was the most surreal thing I have seen in years. What was also surreal is that I knew I should express disapproval as I usually do with the presence Gestapo, but somehow this smiling couple was symbolic of something more than old enmities. I felt sort of ashamed that I had ever objected to these very friendly chaps doing the Nazis- the leader, when I got talking to him, I have always turned my back on them in disgust before, turned out to be a car park attendant in Blackburn and his politics to the left of Trotski, and their representation of 'what might have been' extremely accurate. The Jap was showing part of his country's history that he was not proud of, but we cannot erase it, and neither can he, and to see him and his wife confront it in this most unlikely place was at once humbling and a lesson in what courage can really mean. It has caused me to rethink a few things, including my own arrogance.




We go down the hill to talk to the military vehicle friends and are offered a ride in Ivor's Humber Box , done out for 8th Army Desert Rats, that won best wartime vehicle in last week's show. Ivor has not done the Haworth procession before, neither has Brandon in the big Dodge 6 wheeler. After the procession is shepherded down the hill and directed to turn around and wait in a narrow side road that no one has measured to see if large Dodge trucks can get down, never mind turn around and wait as instructed, Ivor is beginning to regret deciding to show off the Humber. Brandon defies the MP and drives past the end of the lane. A message comes across John's walkie Talkie that Brandon is lost.

The parade starts. By the time it gets to the top of the mainstreet, and Ivor realises that he is supposed to drive down the 1 in 4 cobbled gradient behind a jeep which is having difficulty with its brakes, through Kami Kazi crowds leaping in front of him with cameras, crowds that will not stand back far enough to allow all wheels to run over cobbles and not feet. We get to where we started and Ivor whistles with relief. Then he is told to do a second circuit. He wails that he is sure his brakes are now shot, but he does it, swearing that no way will he go around a third time. Twice with no casualties was a miracle, three times would be pushing it, not to mention the cost of the petrol. And no one does.

The old blue and cream bus disgorges its cargo of evacuee children clutching gas masks and teddy bears. They get better at looking like bewildered waifs every year. I think I know how they felt as we head out for the car park and home as it begins to spitterspat with moors rain, my opinions and nerves in tatters, not quite knowing where to go in my thoughts of what is right and what is wrong from here. My world, yet not my world. 'They have this thing called Spring in the country, Mum. They have one every year.'

Awakening 2- The flying solar plexus.

Sometimes the soul is so saturated with something undefined: beauty, love, longing, that it becomes one with the air, like a cloud of midges or a field of swelling barley , a crack willow trailing pale new fronds into the music of a brook. My solar plexus is habitually heavy with accumulated dread, but at this moment it soars on the warm air currents and anyone would expect it to drop right out of the sky and splat onto the hard tarmac runway like the proverbial pound of strawberry jam. The idea of the soul as a pollen -laden bee, or a throbbing Lancaster bomber bumblehumming , finds a frequency whose tune almost convinces me that it actually does exist.

How else can I explain the Eureka moment of revelationary understanding that when one is young and is stirred by quickenings of knowledge of love, and longs for that capacity for love to be so filled with love that it brims? I remember imagining a time when my inner and outer world would be one huge Elizabethan May Revel, where some magic potion swapped on the tongues of faun kisses merges the spirits of lovers, and one of those lovers would be me. Or more, the part of the duality which was me would not be able to be distinguished from my imagined Lover.

There are times in life when that love does grab the guts and twist them to ecstatic pain- the birth of one's child, the birth of anyone's child come to that, a friend's pain shared and eased, a long tailed comet moving across the sky, a blood red moon, an untamed sea, a tree in full bridal blossom, the earthy dampness of a fresh dug grave. Always however there is a beautiful yearning for something undefined that drags and strains like a line on a kite. There is a hope, nay, a certainty that at some point in life, that yearning will be fulfilled. We have to believe that, don't we, because if we do not believe it, it cannot happen. Ever.

We left the Aerodrome on Sunday afternoon in convoy of a Half- Track, a Diamond T, a Rio towing a wartime Jeep and an old British Army Landrover, with our 1943 Willys Jeep and trailer after a weekend of glorious sunshine and relaxed enjoyment. We took the convoy through the centre of York. People waved and cheered. We waved back. Out of the city we rumbled along the country lanes that cut through fields of oilseed rape whose scent filled our faces, and whose delicate yellowness bathed us in reflected light. Chestnut candles lit the way through green tunnels. The wide sky over the vale of York met the ridge of the purple moors, while the white horse of Kilvington galloped like a shining destrier from another dimension on the distant horizon, beyond the ubiquitous patchwork of the crop fields that tugged at the essenses of time and my spirit's self imposed boundaries.

The flash of realisation came- this was it. This is the ultimate point, where everything melts away and what is left is pure abstract . One of those watersheds in life where if you were to die at that moment, like getting to the top of a mountain after a long and arduous climb, and jumping off into the void because there is nothing else, there can never be anything else to match the purity of elation, you would die fulfilled; and if that was the last the eyes of your soul had seen to hold in image for eternity, that would be the best anyone could ever hope to achieve. That adolescent awakening longing, of being loved and loving and becoming Nothingness; Nothing at all except for an explosion of sparkling atoms , a cloud of midges irridescent in the late afternoon sun of an English Maytime.

Awakening

Awakening

May Day, and always I am torn between the Workers of the World Unite memories and the nostalgia for the world that, of course never was, or never was for me, the Merrie merrie month of May in which lads and lasses cavorted in bucolic sexual bliss.

Recent memories are of cold winds and incessant rain leading to localised flooding during May, which also happens to be chocka full of re-enactment events, there being the May Day (International Workers’ Day) Bank holiday at the beginning, and Spring Bank Holiday (the old Whitsun or Pentecost) at the end. In the middle, the various other excuses for regional quasi agricultural or religious fests involving Morris Dancers, May Poles, a lot of Real Ale and Cider consumption and hopefully a bit of old fashioned matchmaking.

The weather has been hit and miss at least for the last 20 years that I can remember, sometimes snow, sometimes scorching temperatures, never predictable.

All looked set to be the same last week. There were few ground frosts this winter, which meant that flowers which would normally be ‘annuals’ went on blooming and ‘came again’ rather than being killed off by Winter cold as any self respecting bedding plant should be. Such plants were blooming when they had no right to be blooming, and such anachronisms were commented on by television pundits, pointed to as evidence of global warming, that some flowers were out over a month before their time. This was all well and good, but the bulbs and corms were neither earlier nor later than expected and the trees bided their time , as did the May blossom which started to froth in the hedgerows on the first of May here- exactly as it should.
When I was young I always associated the beginning of the long hot summers of childhood with the breathtaking beauty of bluebell woods. What more magical experience could there be than to see the carpet of special and inimitable , indescribable azure under the softly greening silver birches; to smell the delicate scent before it comes into sight, to anticipate the squeak of the fleshy stalks when you pull a bunch for Mum, enough to fill both hands encircled around the smooth succulence of the cool peatiness of the bright green stems; to bury your face in the rustling fairy-hats and freckle your nose with the golden dust of enchantment
.
They always wilted though, and the blue faded before your eyes, almost before you got them home and into the heavy cut-glass vase that the sunlight threw rainbows at so that they bounced around the walls, and David said they were fairies. Then you felt guilty and sad.

So a few days ago, the trees were still waiting and only the bravest of pioneer bells breeched the earth to signal back to those still below that it was time. Today , once again the suddeness of the Spring explosion took me by surprise, as it has done for the last 40 or so years. I mean, you know that Spring is coming, and you think it has come when the pussy willow pussies, the catkins quiver, the lambs gambol and the daffodils dance all the usual Spring strutting its stuff clichés, but then April flips over into May and the beauty makes you want to swear with the greatest profanities you can muster; it chokes you , overwhelms, drowns you. and there is nothing to do but to cry tears of love and joy and gird up those unexplainable emotions that can only mean that you know that the Earth itself is claiming you as its own.


In the days when ‘Summer is icumen in’ and all the May songs and rituals were made, in the days of the old calendar, May Day was actually on May 11th . Perhaps it is more comfortable for me to think of May Day as the beginning of Summer, rather than the bursting of Spring. That way, the midsummer solstice on 21-22 June does not seem so odd, bearing in mind August is considered the height of Summer. Time is something that has a life of its own, but I feel a need to tuck it up with hospital corners in order to make sense of where I am standing. I need the reference points , whether they be distance trig points high on a ridge on the horizon or a shadow on a sundial on the walls of the Antediluvian Buffalo Lodge on the corner of the street. But that’s just me.

I have no idea if the seasons are changing due to global warming or not, but I do know that throughout history festivals have ended up being in the wrong season and calendars have been hitched up like schoolgirls’ skirts , because the fault was deemed to be astronomical miscalculations. Of course, we have the solar system all worked out now and we know that our systems of time are right now, no need for hitching and nipping and tucking the days and months and seasons. Then of course, throughout history the alchemists, qabbalists astrologers & co all knew they had got it right too.

All I can say with this ramble is that it would be something of a crime to allow the absolute beauty of this May morning to go unremarked, even if there are no descriptions that are new and original. Then they do not need to be. It is there already, inside every one of us that the Earth has claimed and whose chest hurts with the annual thrust of the awakening of the Green Man, the quickening of his sap.

What I did in my Easter Holidays Part Two -

All my life I have been what I suppose would be called delusional or psychotic, in that sometimes I see things that are obviously not there. I know they are not there, yet I see them. It usually happens in towns like Richmond or Knaresborough, where I will be walking along and suddenly the surroundings will change so that I am not looking at the modern street scene but there are horse drawn carriages and people in Victorian costume, or in York it may be a pre Norman Conquest street scene. Outside my house, in the street I have seen a Victorian funeral cortege, including hearse drawn by black horses with black ostrich plumes waving from their heads and men in tall sealskin stovepipe hats walking in front and behind. Even in my own kitchen I have turned to see the room transformed into a bedroom, with a cast iron bedstead , a fire in the hearth and a woman in a dark green dress standing watching me. When we stripped the paint from the original pine doors, we found ‘bedroom 2 ‘ written on the frame in pencil. It can happen anywhere, I see horse ploughs on fields in the countryside, children playing in car-less streets, just people going about their normal business. The hallucinations last for two to three minutes.
At the museum, the Roman Fort, Celtic Village and Danelaw site are built as outside classrooms and backdrops. They are not 100% authentic and they are certainly not built on original sites. The Park itself was probably once part of the estate of a long gone stately home, but there seems to be no history extant about it. I have never had a psychotic episode there in all the years I have spent there as a site volunteer.

However, there was the weekend five years ago when Chris Flimsy-Whimsy came to visit for the evening, a reunion with him from another life in re-enactment. People tend to gravitate back towards the re-enactment comrades of their youth round about middle age and paths had crossed after a gap of several years. Someone had brought some poteen and dypsomaniac Chris imbibed enthusiastically until he was drunk enough to win at Mikado and extremely inebriated enough to sing ‘As I walked out one Sweet Moooorrrnnneeng in May, one Sweet May Morninge I walked out with a pretty fair maid with a pretty fair maid I walked out nnyaaahhh…’ There was much reminiscing and apocryphal story telling, not to mention revelations of political shenanigans in the hierarchy of the English Civil War Battle re-enacting fraternity. Eventually Flimsy decided he must return home and wailed in anguish as he crossed the fort compound and stopped dead in the middle. He then moved his body in strange ways, like some slow motion puppet dance. Fearing that his sanity had finally fled, we rushed to see what was wrong. He asked us to assist him in climbing the wall , which we did, even though there was no wall. However, we failed, as he just could not manage to get enough of a grip to get over, so using our intelligence, we noticed a gate a little further down the wall which was not there and led him safely through it, whereupon he staggered happily up the lane singing about shagging his love on a bright May Morninge.

That was the weekend of the Children of the Village of the Damned. A family of mother and father and 4 very blond, very blue -eyed boy children who stood and stared at us, silently, unblinking as if we were waxworks, but more as if they were the waxworks. It had freaked me out so much that I had gone into the shack and shut the door, where I stayed in hiding, trembling, until there was a peremptory knocking. Guiltily I opened the door and they were there, mother, father and four sons fixing me in their Aryan gaze, studying every detail of me and the dressed up hut I cringed in.

. That was also the weekend of Yvonne (not her real name) the 12 year old Asperger’s girl who dressed and looked like a character in a strip cartoon story out of a 1950s edition of June and Schoolfriend. This time she had sat down at the Mess Hall trestle and calmly picked up Clare’s embroidery frame and proceed to plickpluck the needle in and out of the canvas at random whilst telling us that her mother had been changed into her father and her uncle was now her aunt and her father was living with another man. The women managed to remain straight faced and professional in the face of these revelations, which somehow they did not seem as strange as they should have done. No one appeared to find it worth the gossiping.

It occurs to me as I sit in that same hut these years afterwards my thoughts skittering into the chasing shadows , it was just too much to take in. Poor Yvonne. She is now a big girl, young lady , all handbag , ankle socks and bossy boobs, holding grandad’s arm. He gets progressively more blind. Tunnel vision I think. They take care of each other. I wonder if she will be here this weekend, or if there is not need for them to come anymore, if she has grown out of baby animals now.

The most peculiar thing about that weekend- it had been one at the end of May, Spring Bank Holiday and the sun had shone hotly, stickily, was the pocket-watches. His watch had gone backwards. He had arrived at the station on the restored old railway line on site before he left the fort- usually a 10 minute walk, but in his case, he got there 10 minutes before he left. The person with whom he walked up found his watch had stopped as he had left the Fort. Someone else had gone to their cabin to get their watch to find it had vanished altogether , never to be seen again, and three other people’s watches either gained time madly or stopped altogether forever.

The worst of it all had been that on the day after we had all gone home, the Celtic Village had been burned to the ground by (allegedly) the local didicoys who were and are the bane of the site management.

A lot of re-enactment is re-enactment societies re-enacting themselves. Certainly much of the ‘camp-fire talk is reminiscing of past musters, past weekends, telling the tales with flourishes and embellishments, crafting them, communally polishing them into the stuff of legend. I chuckle a lot when I hear a tale being told in first person by someone who wasn’t even at the event, and who has casually made themselves the hero of the day, when I was there and I know who was that man, and it wasn’t them, being described. I chuckle when they are caught in mid sentence as I walk up; they know and I know they are repeating the tale as told, fitting themselves into a major role. I never call them on it, and neither does anyone else. Why? Because I might tell the tale again with the other names, and in any case, it is part of the whole magic- that a story has made such an impact that someone wants to retell it and star in it. This way are legends born, folk tales committed to collective memory, then as now and ever shall be Gaia willing.

To diverge from proper chronology of this blog, such a tale was told in the museum café next morning, where management had kindly provided coffee and toast for the re-enactors who had slept on site, to warm them up a bit. The manager was telling the American Student Vikings of an occasion in Battle Re-enactment, when the arrogant Scots in phillibegs had come howling down with sword and glaive onto a musket regiment. The musketeers had retreated into a patch of stinging nettles, hotly pursued by the heedless Highlanders, who soon heeded the brambles and stingers around the trossocks. Actually the story was true of a pike regiment at an entirely different muster (unless of course the Highlanders were daft enough to fall for the tactic twice, always possible I suppose). I know, I was that pikeman whose hose had fallen down.

After I had been huddled thus musing for about 45 minutes there was a human banging at the door, and His voice, what was I up to in there, come on out, we had visitors in the Mess Hall (who turned out to be group members who were most certainly not crazy enough to camp out in this weather but would visit at stages of the weekend.) Friday evening then passed with the notable sight of Tony getting steadily more and more drunk and receding into a hippy state of love and peace towards everything and everyone, his face relaxed into a happy smile, his head waggling so that he resembled a stoned gnome. This was mainly brought on by our critical discussion of a book I had given him called ‘Bored of the Rings’ and was probably impossible to make any sense of unless you had not remembered living through the 1960s. I distinctly remember a conversation about the influence of Benzedrine on Hobbits and similar creatures.


Hot water bottles are ace. They are the most wonderful inventions ever. Stone hot water bottles are okay, but smuggling in your one luxury item, the rubber hottie through the time machine is the thing to be recommended. Thanks to the contraband hottie, we did not suffer from hypothermia that night, and, contrary to all expectation, managed some deep and healthy sleep under the blankets furs and coats heaped on top of us, and awoke to a blinding brittle frosty morning- the sky as blue as the Lebensborn kids’ eyes, the sun as yellow as an Easter chick. Soon the drooly smell of bacon cooked al fresco , and coffee steaming on cold air became the epitome of contentment. As good as it gets. Yes.

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What I did in my Easter Holidays Part One- Friday

There I was, you know, like in one of those situations where the finger wags and a voice says ’be careful what you wish for’ and you are glad you can’t see the face of the voice or you would smash your fist into its smug mouth.

After a week of the usual frenetic preparations for the first Living History long weekend presentations of the season, all the tears and temper tantrums and stressings out, the huts were set dressed, everyone changed into costume and character , the range lit and the Friday night crowd settled in the mess hall for booze and bitching and the odd song. Spring had officially arrived . The full moon played hide and seek with the ragged sheep-clouds and hares shrilled in competition with the cold mad wind. Wood smoke played its game of alternately puffing out of the range pipe and filling the mess hall , driving everyone outside and fluttering smuts into beer tankards. This is as cosy as it gets, the range, cunningly made from a battery box from an army truck, glowing cherry red. Little John ,who somehow has managed to grow from being six to being fourteen without anyone actually noticing the years passing, makes it his task to light and keep the fire burning and the water boiler filled. The storm lanterns throw kindly shadows in the sense that we all appear ageless and timeless. We enjoy each other’s company, we are used to each other‘s moods and idiosyncracies, like a family; we consider ourselves a family, more than a family in some cases. We have all been doing this together for some years now; some of us go back a quarter of a century in this hobby, this way of life, living as people lived in past centuries. Others come and go, participate on part-time peripheries but the dedicated core are always there, always set up, always slotted into place on a Fort Friday night, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, piglets at the teats of the Obsession. We know when to speak and greet each other , when to offer help and when to leave alone and wait for conversation and shared situations. Now, huddled around the trestle, for the first time this season we re-aquaint ourselves with our personas and our alter egos., and those of our companions.

Outside the cabin doors bang, someone asks if the main gate is locked yet, if it is time for the first security patrol of the site. We all look at each other and shiver, say that there are Vikings arriving so better leave it a while. No one wants to leave the glow of the fire, but someone goes outside for a piss. We all seem to acquiesce in an unspoken decision that we will drink tonight. We do not usually have a heavy drinking session on the first night in these days, having learned that it can ruin the weekend. He says he didn’t bring our bottle out, so I go back to the cabin for it. The wind slices my clothes, cutting my flesh like a hunter’s skinning blade. It screams around the corners of the wooden buildings, arranged as a Roman Fort. I fight against it to open the door of our 10ft x 8ft shed (Roman Claustrium/line shack) As I fall into the darkness within, bang my shins against a wooden form and kick the emergency piss bucket over (fortunately empty) the wind slams the door back and ice balls splatter in. I reach out and drag the door back, realising there is no catch on the inside and hold it with one hand while I fumble with a match with the other. Door tied shut -ish, I light a beeswax candle. We stopped using paraffin lamps a couple of seasons ago because the fumes were making us ill and anyway the ones we had were unauthentic for the place we were supposed to be representing. The candle flared and fluttered , I rummaged for the whisky bottle. It was a single malt left over from Christmas. Too good really for here, but we had a few and the Chancellor has put up the cost of spirits so much that buying bottles of blended whisky for consumption by drunken re-enactors has become a bit restrictive. The wind whistled Dixie and it sounded like someone was tipping a truckful of gravel on the shack. I opened the door, which the wind nearly ripped off its hinges and got a stinging faceful of frozen rain which was not draining into the shale of the fort compound but forming large puddles. No way was I battling back to the mess hall and getting drenched on first night , so I sat down on the form and wondered how to pass the time.

So that was how I came to be in a much wished for position. Alone, away from telephones, television, all the trappings of my 21st century life; away from all the demands that beset me. There was nothing I had to do, nothing I had to clean or tidy, nothing demanding my attention whatsoever. At least nothing I could do anything about , marooned inside the cold hut , with the known world enclosed within the confines of the limbo dancing candle flame. I could think without interrupted thought, write without distraction. I rooted around under the folding cot and found a notebook, got a pencil from inside the Victorian writing slope and opened the book. I stared at the blank page. The darkness and cold settled on my shoulders like a shawl, the storm rattled around outside, the candle flame twisted into fantastic shapes and I could think of not one word to write. So I put the book away and sat , swigging the whisky from the neck of the bottle, swallowing down the panic of nothingness that I felt rising from somewhere in what I supposed was my bowels. I stood up and looked at my face in the polished steel mirror, distorted by creases and shadows. There was a kind of purity in the nothingness that frightened me, and which I and the storm embraced.