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.