I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (4 page)

The whole experiment was billed as a triumph for the academic value of hands-on living history, but from where I was sitting the tributes were principally due to our Iron Age ancestors. Contemplating the lifestyle that Cinderbury was intended to recreate, I was awed by the multi-talented practicality it demanded. These people ground their own corn, and baked it into bread in an oven of their own construction. They raised their own crops and livestock, then cooked them in pots and pans they had crafted themselves. They sheared sheep, and spun the wool, and wove it into clothes. And at the end of the day, they sat down in the house that they'd built, and drank the beer that they'd brewed.

The most humbling consideration was the universality of these diverse skills. You might be better at some than others, but you'd have to be capable of doing them all. Two thousand years ago, even I would have been pulling honeycombs out of trees and hollowing out antler drinking horns. Now all I could do was sit there and poke at the cold hearth, wondering if the nearest petrol station sold logs and matches. Where had it all gone wrong?

Over the following six hours, solitude and the mind-softening heat combined to reinforce this sense of inadequacy. Powerfully so once nightfall was added to the mix, and the occasional whoosh of traffic from the B4228 faded to leave me only a chorus of rural scuttles for sonic company. With no means of communication or illumination, I found that the authentic enhancements which had so recently made my situation seem better, now made it seem much, much worse. In through the dim roundhouse entrance crept loneliness and fear; out of it, in the last squinting snatch of half-light, swooped a bat.

What else lurked up there in the unseen eaves, or out there in the hobbity scowles? And why, now that my mind inevitably came to alight on it, did those eerily well-preserved Iron Age corpses that periodically bobbed up out of peat bogs invariably display evidence of ritual death preceded by torture? I hunched down against a haybale and drew one of the shields towards me, looking every inch the craven sacrificial offering.

Time passed, and I lacked the spiritual wherewithal to find out how much by making a dash for the car and its clock. I began to hum, reedily at first but soon with desperate, tuneless gusto. It was no relief to hear myself drowned out by the judder and rumble of neglected machinery bumping up the track, and creaking to a nearby halt.

A car door opened and clunked shut, and after a few scuffles and thunks, I detected the approaching sound of a big man dragging something heavy towards the roundhouse entrance. I stopped humming and pulled the shield up so that it hid everything but the top third of my head. The scraping ceased, and into the hut came footsteps and the sound of breathless huffing. Rustles and the snick of a lighter followed; with discovery imminent I whitened my knuckles on the shield's rim and hailed the interloper.

'Hello?' Half whimpered plea for mercy, half preparation for death – it wasn't a great Iron Age sound.

'Oh, right you are. Wayne told me someone might be here.' The lighter was held to a candle, and I saw myself looking up at a damp-faced, shirtless man of late middle years, an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a five-foot spear under one arm. 'I'm Dai the blacksmith,' he said, lighting his fag and letting the spear drop carelessly to the floor. 'What you doing behind that shield?'

The pitiful relief engendered by the comradely nature and forthright competence revealed as Dai strode about preparing the roundhouse was partly offset by the nature of these preparations. Lighting was a couple of dozen IKEA tealights placed atop the adobe oven and around the floor; bedding a pair of grubby sleeping bags sourced from the wooden chest – also home, I noted, to an empty half-bottle of Bacardi and twothirds of a Kellogg's Variety breakfast assortment. I thought of all those deep-breath discoveries I'd made during my Iron Age acclimatisation research at home: 'Gruel was generally mixed with stock or fat, then left to set in a "porridge drawer", to be sliced and eaten cold over the coming weeks.' And here I sat, watching a man in trainers drop Silk Cut ash in our Frosties drawer.

As comforting as this was to the very large part of me that dearly wished to be back in my nineteenth-century house, in my twentieth-century bed, watching twenty-first-century telly, the whole point of being here was to peel away that part, bury it in the porridge drawer, then eat it sliced and cold. 'Taste history, feel history, be history' – it was clear now that the website's grand mission statement, along with its promise of historically accurate fruit juices, was not the work of Cinderbury's current owner.

My hope – or fear – that Dai might now settle into period character by refusing to discuss anything but matters ancient, possibly via a stream of primeval gibberish, was quickly laid to rest. In Welsh tones pruned of their singsong swoops and leaps by an adulthood spent largely on this side of the border, Dai explained that Wayne had hired him for the benefit of the film crew, who he believed were documentary makers. He also fleshed out Will's account of Cinderbury's troubled genesis: one of the original partners had 'pissed off abroad with half the money', leaving the other with no option but to sell up. 'Lost ten grand of his own,' sighed Dai, sparking up another fag. 'But he's been a lot happier since last autumn, when him and a friend made 180,000 gallons of cider.' By tealight, Dai laid out the principal tools of his trade: a pair of bellows, cleverly constructed from thick linen and a hollowed-out log, and the 'travel anvil' I'd heard him dragging over from his car. 'Bit of old railway track,' he said, tapping his nose. 'Right – let's eat.'

Anticipation, heat and terror had taken turns to sap my appetite, but I correctly surmised that Dai would not sap it further with a parade of challenging prehistoric comestibles. He strode out into the dark, quickly got a campfire going, and ten minutes later I was scraping two well-done Tesco mustard-and-onion beefburgers off an abused catering-sized saucepan.

Dai tossed me a can of Grolsch, and we sat down on logs to talk. Like Will, he'd started out in medieval combat, after meeting some enthusiasts in a pub; unlike Will, he struggled to explain what had then lured him further back through time. 'Just . . . all this,' he mumbled when I asked him straight, waving a helpless hand at the campfire, the roundhouses, our immediate environment in general.

As an enviably practical man, Dai was certainly well suited to the many-skilled demands of prehistory. 'We have it too easy now – we don't know how to fix things, let alone the joy of making things in the first place. Everything's disposable. When I come to places like this the big thrill isn't that I've come back to the Iron Age, more that I've left the Plastic Age.' Having been captivated by a demonstration of period black-smithery three years before, he'd gone off and taught himself the exacting ancient art of processing lumps of rusty rock into spear tips and knives. 'There's only a half-dozen or so of us in Britain that can do it all, from start to finish.' (Another was his girlfriend, who he'd met at Cinderbury the year before.)

As Dai talked on, I sensed that here was a man whose historical hobby was an expression of his hankering for a simpler, smaller society with a more straightforward value system, focused on personal responsibility. And violent retribution: he spent an eager half-hour relating his father's no-nonsense approach to street justice – 'One time he just shoved a lit fagend right up some lout's nose' – and proudly revealed that a black belt in karate allowed Dai to carry on the family tradition. 'The other week some little shits tried to mug me at a cashpoint,' he seethed, his genial, fleshy features alarmingly puckered with firelit malevolence. 'I grabbed one and said I'd throw him through a fucking shop window.' As a PE and maths supply teacher in the Midlands, he was unsurprisingly handed many of the more troublesome classes, and given a remarkable degree of freedom in how he chose to educate them. Here his belief in the value of practical skills came to the fore. 'I take them out in the woods and we build things – got a great log cabin on the go. It's amazing what you can get out of them once the ground rules are set.' There weren't many. 'I just tell 'em: mind yourself with the saws, and don't use the C word.'

Dai washed up the Iron Age way – turning the saucepan upside-down over the fire to burn the grease off – and at an unknown hour we headed back to the roundhouse. 'One thing you learn,' he said, dragging haybales clumsily around in the blackness, 'is to do whatever needs doing before it gets dark.' After a while he'd assembled the bales into two beds, and very shortly after, the nocturnal rustles outside were filtered out by Dai's profound, reassuring snores.

An inadequate number of hours later, a great metallic cacophony and the smell of bacon lured me blearily over to the sag-roofed roundhouse opposite. Within, the perennially shirtless Dai squatted before a filthy, sizzling trivet, a strip of bright blue M&S waistband asserting itself above his period drawstring trousers. 'We're going to work hard today,' he said, without looking up. 'You need fuel – fried meat and lots of it.' Working the bellows for a day, he explained, equated to 2,000 one-armed press-ups. The physique endowed by this regime was more six-pint than six-pack, but it certainly did the job. When a fellow teacher recently choked in the dinner hall, Dai's slap on the back had knocked her unconscious.

Replete with Somerfield unsmoked streaky, we headed down towards the scowles in search of forge-fodder. Heating iron ore to well over 1,000°C – and keeping it there for hours on end – is a fuel-intensive process: using Iron Age methods and raw materials, a team of Danish archaeologists recently found that over a ton of wood was required to source the charcoal needed to produce just 5kg of forged iron, the useable end material. By the time the Romans landed, it's estimated that over half of Britain's wild woodland had already gone up the chimney. It could have been worse: historians have suggested that the great Indus Valley civilisation, which abruptly disappeared around 1700 BC, destroyed itself through a frenzy of iron-related deforestation.

The year before, Dai had been down in Cinderbury's scowles to help build an authentic 'clamp' – a turf-covered bonfire employed to produce charcoal – and we now dug around in its remains for any usable surviving lumps. It wasn't the time to admit my blighting phobia of the small invertebrates that had made this place their home in the interim. For half an hour I delved whey-faced in the scuttling, many-legged awfulness; doing so without excreting tears or bacon was a small but significant step in the quest for my inner ancient.

We hauled a fertiliser sack full of our muddy harvest back up to the village and found the film crew milling listlessly about. Their welcoming address revealed an arresting truth – they were Australians, here to shoot a segment for a holiday programme. A quick word with the cameraman confirmed that they'd come all the way here to capture a genuine – if offbeat – vacation choice for Antipodean tourists, and were nonplussed to discover Cinderbury in a state of mothballed neglect. A woman called Diane introduced herself as the presenter, and with the refreshing candour that defines her nation enquired what the bloody hell was going on. I was formulating a diplomatic response when a convoy of vehicles pulled up in the now-crowded parking area, and disgorged half a dozen people of local appearance, led by an expressionless man in jeans and glasses. 'Sorry we're late,' he murmured. 'I'm Wayne, and these are your, um, extras.'

The tiny voice that had been bravely assuring me that Wayne's arrival would herald the sudden onset of hardcore prehistoric authenticity piped down to a whisper as he laid out our Iron Age lunch: petrol-station pasties and packets of crisps. It was silenced for ever when Cinderbury's owner led the way into a fly-floored, semi-derelict caravan hidden away in the woods, and thumbed at a soiled jumble of grubby fabric. 'Your outfits,' he mumbled, and slipped away. We didn't see him again until nightfall.

Our grasp of Iron Age fashion is based on patchy archaeological evidence, and the second-hand accounts of ancient scholars. Striped or plaid trousers, a tunic and cloak, unisex plaits and long moustaches – you could do a lot worse than picture Asterix and his fellow villagers. Greek and Roman contemporaries were most intrigued by the unusually colourful dyes used, and the facial hair: 'When they are eating the moustache becomes entangled in the food,' wrote Diodorus Siculus, 'and when they are drinking the drink passes, as it were, through a sort of strainer.'

A quick investigation of the caravan clothing heap suggested an unfamiliarity with the works of Diodorus Siculus, or indeed of fashion trends in fictional Gaul. The extras blithely pulled on pink acrylic smocks and orange trousers with the air of people who didn't often have much to do, and were about to be paid to sit around in the sun doing even less. I was left with a pair of golfing-uncle checked trousers and a clay-smeared white jerkin that was more of a cap-sleeve T-shirt. 'Don't we get any shoes?' asked Diane, tying a rope round her dress to offset its machine-stitched nylon-ness. Apparently not. My Clarks Wallabees were coming along for the time-ride.

It was a sweaty, peculiar day which I spent largely in Dai's company, envying him his strength, skill and authentic period sandals. As I sat in the precious shade of a willow fence, he swiftly dug up a barrowful of clay, and fashioned from it a crucible the size of a cereal bowl. Extracting iron from its ore was a process that – like filming a holiday-programme segment, as I was to discover – demanded long hours of repetitive tedium. Instead Dai had come prepared with a big sack of scrap-iron brackets and bars as his raw material, to be heated to glowing malleability by his calm, efficient work on the bellows, then belaboured with brutal finesse atop that railway-track anvil. With me as a gormless background apprentice the Australians filmed Dai hammering out spear tips and curly-handled knives from an exhaustive variety of angles, then noticed he'd had a fag in his free hand throughout, and had him do it all over again. Eventually they wandered off to record their introductory sequence, which required our inactive silence. 'This was life in the Iron Age,' Diane told the camera for the eleventh time, stooping out of a roundhouse with a spear in her hand. 'Everything you ate, wore and fought with, you'd have to . . . to . . . oh, bugger.'