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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