I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (30 page)

Dawn was tinging the edges of a huge green world when I finally lost consciousness, and very soon after a wet slap in the face brought me round. The awning had collapsed; I effortfully pulled it off and found myself memorably presented with the back end of a hairy orange Routemaster. A croaked yelp sent this clumping heavily away, and as I groped about in the sodden turf for the stake it had uprooted, the sights and sounds of human activity assailed me. Jacob was again dashing barefoot through the wet grass, smiling brilliantly, as if on a cover shoot for
Wagoner's Lad
. Over by the rekindled fire, and rather less winsomely, Gerry was rubbing embrocation into the folds and flaps of poor Butch's hugely distended calves and ankles. Dropsy had an authentic period ring, but it was difficult to greet its symptoms with nostalgia.

I stumbled towards them across the pasture. It was hot, it was moist, and that reheated overnight batch of ox pies was doing its olfactory worst. 'It's looking a little better,' murmured Gerry, working another gobbet of cream into those sagging, waxy bollards of flesh. Butch let out a high-pitched snort of derision, the first of his generous daily allowance. 'You said that after the Indian Wars.'

For us, breakfast was charcoal stew leftovers mixed with ground maize; for the boys, as Gerry noted just too late, it was the leather hubcaps off his wagon. 'Charles! I'm gonna cut your ugly head off and beat you to death with it!' The half-smile with which he delivered this alarming reproach was that of a soft-hearted man who had never lost it with an animal; Gerry later confessed that he'd moved on from many decades of horsemanship hoping – forlornly – that he might find it easier to bear the death of a bovine companion. As we yoked his boys up, he outlined his disgust for those who advocated a punishment-based training regime: his own self-evidently successful technique was centred on 'letting them walk towards a wall then shouting, "Woah!"' Sometimes he heard himself telling school parties to haw and hup.

Today's walk was to be conducted under authentic conditions, which meant Jacob and me filling our wagon with the period payload calculated by Gerry's research and currently stacked up under a tarp in a corner of the livestock trailer: fifteen-odd sacks of flour (or, in fact, rice chaff) with a combined weight of 1,100lb, bringing the total of wagon and load to a round ton. The boys barely seemed to notice the difference, trudging doughtily out of the car park to a cheery reception from the road crew, who had announced their recent arrival by setting fire to a truck tyre and covering it with upended vegetation.

Plainly relieved that his experiment was at last up and running, Gerry embarked on a laidback run-through of his goals as a re-enactor. 'Commonality' was the ideal: he liked to imagine walking into a local tavern in 1775, and being swiftly appraised and even more swiftly dismissed by the resident drinkers with a grunt of, 'Pah, wagoner.' You could sense he'd pictured this scene more than once, only without the bit where they peeked in his haversack and found the anthologies of Aristotle and Rousseau therein, then threw him down the well.

'The social composition at the time was ninety-one per cent agricultural and other labourers, and six per cent seamen,' he said, 'but everyone wants to be in the other three per cent.' Luring re-enactors away from the velvet end of the eighteenth-century scale was one Barker priority; another was discouraging reliance on off-the-peg outfits. 'If just one person makes his or her own clothes, not using a pattern, then I've done my job.'

Gerry's fundamentalist approach ruled out wearing, eating or doing anything 'inconsistent with the character' – taken to its appalling extreme, this had once obliged him to extract one of his own teeth, without anaesthetic. Living history, he said, required reprogramming the modern mindset. Sitting around doing nothing, for instance, was right out – park your eighteenth-century arse by the fire and you'd need some undarned socks or a dirty rifle to keep your hands busy. 'Behaviour modification' he called it, a process that had the ominous ring of electro-aversion therapy – performed Benjamin Franklin-style, with Gerry's kite flying high in a thunderstorm, and the string knotted round my testicles.

If Gerry's academic erudition compromised his bid for workaday banality, then so too did the professional perfectionism that had defined his long military career. This had become clear when Jacob watched him covering the wagon's flour sacks with a canvas sheet back in camp, and reminded Gerry that his own research suggested that wagoners hardly ever 'tarped their loads'. 'Well, they might not have,' Gerry had muttered, 'but they should have.' He set out to become a typical wagoner, but despite himself he couldn't stop striving to be the best damn wagoner you ever did see.

On we rolled, creaking up the inclines, then rattling madly down the other side, five tons of beef, wood and rice chaff on the hoof. Every so often, Gerry would tilt his head at some innocuous spoor or scratch mark and announce the recent presence of a coyote, or – stoop, sniff – that a mule had been this way three days ago. His terrifying powers of observation meant it was almost pointless trying any covert chicanery, though I did anyway. A gentle crinkling of foil, even at 100 yards, had been enough to alert Gerry to a torso-scrubbing session with an airline-issue refreshing towel round the back of the livestock trailer; no reproach on my return, just a friendly reminder that body oil was an asset to be cultivated. When he now wordlessly disappeared into the towering pines and oaks, I took the chance to inoculate myself against those relentless horseflies with an illicit blast of bovine repellent in the chest and back. At once a voice called out from deep in the woods: 'Everything OK back there?'

Gerry returned with a modest smile and yet another reward for his eerie omni-sentience. A shard of sculpted obsidian, found in a distant clearing: part of an Indian axe-head, he casually announced, that would have lain undisturbed for perhaps 500 years. I marvelled at this mystical, gleaming artefact – now resident amongst the ringhead bodkins and flint hand tools in the shelf-bound museum to my right – as Gerry revealed his probable Indian ancestry, and that he'd done a fair bit of relevant re-enacting. Six months later, in the depths of a bitter winter, he emailed me a pithy resumé of his latest historical adventure, leading an Archaic Indian hunting party in the Kentucky hills: 'It was cold, but nobody starved to death.'

Ponderous but resolute, the oxen clumped on through the silent, humid endlessness of the woods. Occasionally we stopped by a dappled glade or stream, where the boys would rest and refuel as I arduously downed a palmful of sausage or refreshed myself from the canteen Gerry had lent me – a Mateus Rosé-shaped bottle expertly encased in a bespoke leather holster. Alone Gerry would have been refilling this in streams, but with an invalid, somebody else's young son and a Limey milksop in his care, he'd thought it best to load the pick-up with several dozen gallons of supermarket spring water.

After the third such halt, Gerry consulted the map, scratched his stubble and marshalled the boys through a challenging three-point turn. Eight miles out, eight miles back: with my feet separated from gravel and rock by no more than leathery cardboard, I returned to camp at a bruised hobble. Gerry – sixty-two and shoeless – could plainly have whistled onwards through the night.

The road gang were packing up once more, another uprooted tree ablaze on their malodorous inferno. When the foreman doffed his baseball cap and sauntered up, my overworked heart leapt: here it was, that flagon of overproof hooch. But his huge, well-used hands were empty, and all he had to offer us was another stream of amiable incoherence. 'He was saying how jealous they all were,' translated Gerry as their pick-up bucked away down the trail. 'Leaving us here with everything looking so pretty and peaceful.' Very soon afterwards, a shiny new SUV crunched to a halt in the car park, and a well-groomed father walked his pre-teenage daughter towards the firing range, one hand in hers and the other clutching the handles of a weighty holdall. The first explosive report cracked out a moment later, attributed by Gerry to a .44 semi-automatic pistol. Over the following hour, this unlikely pairing employed a variety of high-calibre weapons to shred the twilight several hundred times.

After the rigours of the trail and two bowls of Gerry's rice and beans, sleep came easy: one minute I was tracking the moon across the huge heavens, the next Jacob was nudging me awake for breakfast, telling me I'd snored all night 'like Big Foot'. 'In a jungle war, a habit like that would get you killed,' Gerry called out from the fireside.

The boys had got their own back on the wagon by once again trying to eat it: Gerry had replaced the leather hubcaps, but only two remained. It was now that I learned what a 'cow magnet' was – not just an unwise way to describe yourself in a lonely-hearts ad, but a finger of metal slipped down a grazing animal's throat, which then sat in the stomach attracting bits of ingested wire and so forth, thus preventing the misery of 'Hardware Disease'.

The afternoon before, letting a horsefly have it with an inadequately covert blast of spray, I'd wondered at the life that lay in store for an insect when coated in insect repellent: an outcast, shunned by its revolted brethren, and consumed with self-disgust. Rising from my bed, it was as if overnight I'd been slathered in human repellent. Marinaded in sausage-oil and cow crap, I had never felt more repulsively soiled; viscous with sweat and smoky grease, my hair could be shaped at will. Marching stiffly to the livestock trailer with my penultimate refreshing-towel sachet stuffed down the fetid front of my britches, I yanked a forelock tuft into a unicorn horn: it was still there, tenting out the front of my hat, when I saw myself in the pick-up truck's wing mirror an hour later.

I'd just tossed the blackened ball of tissue into the bin by the firing-range shelter when the wagons rolled. With a scrunching creak and a steady chorus of shepherding calls, the convoy lumbered into the car park; I stepped across half a Somme's worth of spent cartridge cases and other percussive detritus to join Gerry, Jacob and the boys for our final walk in the woods.

Shuffling footsore through the heavy, dank shade of those towering pines and oaks, I realised what a disappointment I had been to the grizzled, learned übernactor beside me. That morning, he'd tackled my niggling pointlessness by bestowing upon me an appropriate character history: I was an Irish emigrant, recently released from twenty-five years of indentured service, out looking for farmland and a place to build a homestead. It was a thoughtful gesture, and for a few painful minutes I'd endeavoured to get into character, calling attention to promising fields in a funny voice, and closing every pronouncement with 'to be sure'.

I couldn't hold my own in the eighteenth century, and even in the twenty-first Gerry had to hold it for me. Our early conversations suggested he'd imagined our time together as a transatlantic congress on the philosophy of re-enactment. Finding the British delegate's contribution limited to long, wondering hums, he'd moved the debate on to Anglo-American history, one downgraded to a lecture after I confidently identified Paul Revere as 'the Pony Express bloke'. Yet not once did Gerry emit even the tiniest tut of reproach, and as Jacob darted about the wagon like a restless puppy, he embarked on another genial, roving soliloquy.

Drawing parallels between the Roman invasion of Britain and the British colonisation of America, he thoughtfully connected my debut re-enactment experience with my most recent. After delivering a brief history of philosophy, Gerry's musings fast-forwarded to the near future, with the 'lazy and complacent' US and Europe eclipsed by China and South-East Asia, in a world ultimately dominated by huge EU-model regional confed erations. 'Assuming we get that far without bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age,' he said, with a cheery wink.

Gerry had earlier apprised me of Mark Twain's intention to flee to Kentucky when the end of the world came, 'because there it will come twenty years later'. His words were no more than a jibe at the expense of a behind-the-times backwater, but here in these untamed, unpeopled woods it was easy – and oddly appealing – to imagine us as motley refugees crossing a post-apocalyptic wilderness, the frail veneer of fossil-fuel technology stripped away, back to basics, living off the land and on our wits. But how terrifying to picture this scene without Gerry in it: an upturned cart made from pallets and pram wheels; beside it, an emaciated man with a pipe in his hat, prostrate and giggling in a puddle of fermented apple juice and earthenware shards; a barefoot boy leading four animals away down the trail, shaking his head sadly.

At what, with a practised skyward squint, he judged to be lunchtime, Gerry parked up by a stream and untethered the boys. Then he squatted down and swiftly got a fire going with a technique I'd last seen successfully employed at Cinderbury, almost 2,000 years previously: a flint striker, a small square of scorched linen and a pinch of 'punk wood' – flaky tinder harvested from rotten, dried logs. Once again, the moment of combustion had me laughing in disbelief: it seemed more witchcraft than bushcraft.

Gerry stoked his fire with twigs, leaned a flat stone against it, and presently anointed this with a golden slurry of ground maize and water. A moment later, on the tip of a smutted knife, he passed me a floppy, lightly singed biscuit: his famous Johnny cake. Slathered in butter it was almost delicious, like giant, flattened popcorn.

An hour later, back on the road, a gleaming swish of ebony right in front of us stopped the boys in their tracks: 'Black racer,' murmured Gerry, 'one of the fastest snakes in the world.' Scanning the trailside with renewed diligence, shortly afterwards I spotted one of our leather hubcaps, evidently shed the day before and subsequently blamed on bovine cannibalism. In the heady aftermath of this, my debut act of useful participation, I embarked on a hat-swatting massacre that left twitching oxen flanks besmeared with horsefly purée.

I thwacked and splattered my way through Gerry's life history. He was the son of a wealthy, old Virginia family – 'fancy Richmond tobacco types', Butch later called them – who had first disappointed his parents by enrolling at art school, then dismayed them via the seismic life shift that still haunted him in flashbacks: he couldn't sit in the back of a car without reliving the murderous moment the VC's gunners let loose on the helicopter carrying half his platoon. He had lost one wife to cancer, and divorced three more. Children had been accrued along the way: at the age of thirteen, his daughter announced her intent to spend her leisure time as an eighteenth-century pickpocket, a role she trained for by stealing state troopers' wallets at public events; now a Maths Ph.D., her current character was that of a travelling magician. Gerry's son – a Navy Seal with thirteen years' service – pitched up at period-weapon crack-shot tournaments and was invariably triumphant.