I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (24 page)

'You are lately come upon the manor?'

It was a man I recognised as having sold me my spoon, now topless, and with a lute in his hose-covered lap.

'Yeah . . . yes . . . aye.'

He cordially introduced himself as Master Symon, and gave me a prompting look; I pulled down my jeans, swallowed hard and heard myself say, 'God give you good day. I am Master Wat.'

'And I'm Dr Who!' called out an unseen youth, accurately reflecting the now-regretted flippancy with which I'd filled in the 'Kentwell name' box on the final registration form. How glad I was to see Master Symon's avuncular smile falter only slightly.

As I grappled with my outfit he introduced me to the many maids, mistresses and masters milling about us in various states of undress; one of the fully clothed former very kindly came over to help with the thirty-odd fastenings – points, hooks-and-eyes, ruff strings – that preserved a chamberlain's modesty. The final touches: a Walter Raleigh-style pearl earring, and a Johann-sized white ostrich feather clipped to my hat brim. A moment later, studiously averting my gaze from the overwhelming magnificence of its façade, I jangled across the Tudor-rose maze bricked into Kentwell Hall's courtyard, ducked through a dark doorway in its west wing, and found myself in the small and gloomy stewards' room, home to half a dozen of my liveried young charges, and the beeps of their incoming text messages.

'Good morrow, pages,' I announced, delivering my debut contribution to
Tudors Say the Funniest Things
at the only youth curious enough to look up from his phone. 'I'm an under-steward,' he answered, wearily, 'and the rest here are grooms.' With that he returned his attention to the small screen in his hand. It was the first of a long day's countless humiliations.

'Yet I know not of these
Gresham
Pastons, Master Wat,' responded the gimlet-eyed noblewoman who enquired of my origins as I squeezed past her corridor-filling farthingale. In the previous half-hour of frenetic but unfocused activity I had snagged my hose on a door handle, thereby detaching one of its striplike woollen 'panes', dropped a wheelchair ramp on a housemaid's toe, and was now becoming messily entangled in my own back story. 'Perchance you are addled at this early hour?'

A big mistake to pick such a historically eminent East Anglian surname – the Paston family's medieval correspondence is a renowned period resource – and a bigger one to twin this randomly with the Norfolk village where I'd spent a family half-term week the previous year. There was nothing for it. 'Prithee, my lady, I must away!' And off I scuttled, hand on insecure hat, keys a-clanking.

I was alone on the moat bridge when the first school party emerged through our side of the time tunnel. For a grim eternity I tracked the jeering crocodile's progress across the sward, feeling a small thrill every time it entered a pavilion, sidetracked by a demonstration of some period art or craft, and dying a small death when it emerged. The entire weight of Kentwell's three-winged, mullioned bulk seemed to press down on me, and with it the burden of my looming responsibility.

What an awful, codpiece-shrivelling moment it was when the woman known simply as Wilmott – a white-faced, blackhatted veteran who had recently appeared on television as Queen Elizabeth's corpse – informed me that the chamberlain's principal morning duty was to greet Kentwell's young visitors with a welcoming lecture, then usher them through to the kitchen, first stop on the prescribed tour route. A welcoming
what
? 'Just, um, go on about the carp in the moat. "Know thee upon which day we do dine upon these fish?" That sort of thing.' She briefly surveyed the silent, carp-like motions of my mouth, then said, 'I'll send out Edmund to show you the ropes.'

Edmund, a sartorial mini-me but for his light grey doublet, swaggered up to my side as the children massed purposefully on the bridge. At twelve he was perhaps a year older than they were, but being of very modest stature he looked up at the majority. Though when he turned to me and delivered a big, freckled wink, I began to hope that things were going to be good enough after all.

'From whence come you this day, young maids and masters?' His strident, Artful Dodger tones rang out around the courtyard, silencing the juvenile jabber. 'And how many summers have you, childer of Romford, in the county of Essex?' For fifteen minutes I listened in awe as Edmund delivered his routine, a cocky, compelling amalgam of teacher-pleasing sociohistorical fact and pupil-teasing audience participation, honed over six previous days as an under-steward. Throughout this humbling masterclass, and the three that followed, my responsibilities were restricted to pacing about the courtyard having my codpiece sniggered at. Then Wilmott's Pilgrim Father hat shot out of the kitchen door, the mouth beneath it summoned Edmund away, and I was alone.

I can't remember too much about the first few parties, except that I didn't detain any for long. Having mumbled out what little I remembered of Edmund's spiel, I'd find myself reduced to wordlessly flourishing a hand at the courtyard, or a swan, or my own outfit, like a mute hostess displaying the prizes on
Sale of the Century
. Then someone would ask a question, and with an abrupt and deranged grin, I'd semi-frogmarch the whole group off towards the kitchen, like Basil Fawlty co-ordinating a fire drill. The suspicion that my performance was being monitored was confirmed when Mistress Joan, a history teacher who as head housekeeper was my female counterpart, gently called me in and sent out a couple of grooms to take over.

I spent the rest of the morning skulking in the dark and claustrophobic stewards' room. Every so often a jostle of schoolchildren trooped in from the kitchen, received a swift lecture on the room's modest contents by a pair of well-drilled grooms, and trooped out into the housemaids' chamber, next stop on their tour. In between, I learned a great deal about my fabled predecessor, Master Joshua, and the impressive extent to which I was failing to live up to him.

'He was brilliant at putting on a show,' said George, another of the more sympathetic under-stewards. 'Kept us on our toes, entertained the public.' A show? My ruff suddenly felt much too tight. 'Ticking us off, shouting orders. "Clean those knives, idle page," all that stuff.'

'Oh, and he let us work up this nice routine with the garderobe,' piped Edmund, nodding his velvet-capped head at a curtained enclosure on the far side of the stewards' room. They gave me a demonstration when the next group filed through: Edmund rushed towards the garderobe, clearing a path with a desperate cry of 'Prithee passage!', and once behind the curtain issued a long, straining grunt which culminated in a repulsively evocative spattering splash, procured by slowly releasing a handful of pebbles into the moat below. For the junior visitors, this was unalloyed comedy gold.

Twenty-four hours later, after enduring one eulogy too many in honour of Master Joshua, I attempted to conflate his collected dramatics into a single performance. Because this ended with me screaming 'Toilet!' as I forced a confused and alarmed page backwards into the garderobe at the point of my eating knife, nobody laughed. But on the plus side, nobody ever mentioned Joshua in my presence again.

Gentry dinner (it would be 200 years before anyone had 'lunch') was the big set-piece ceremony of the day, one in which I suspected the chamberlain would play an extremely prominent role. Not yet ready to face this, or the Paston-of-Gresham-type conversational awkwardness that was sure to accompany it, as soon as the under-stewards began lining up outside the kitchen, I turned on my flat leather heels and walked smartly off, right across the courtyard, over the bridge, and out on to the now very lively front sward. I had run away, and how glorious it felt.

For long minutes I waited for this sensation to diminish, either abruptly with a bejewelled hand clamped to my shoulder, or through creeping insinuations of guilt and inadequacy. Instead, the following half-hour of freedom was characterised only by a deep and burgeoning sense of gleeful wonderment. Striding around the grounds, past grubby limners boiling up their dyes amidst the venerable oaks, past a straw-hatted milkmaid skipping winsomely after a bleating goat, past whistlingly industrious potters and gardeners and laughing barefoot urchins, I found myself cast back into the poor-but-happy age of collective joy. Just like old times.

So this was the Kentwell Effect – the defining sensation, so often mentioned at the open days, of finding yourself in a living snapshot of Tudor England. The period rush of being there as a nation went about its daily business 500 years ago. I remembered Bella stressing the importance of 'having someone check your rear view before walking through the time tunnel', and now I understood why: it wasn't the postcard pomp of the great-hall gentry that made this whole thing come to life, but that half-glimpsed snatch of a woodsman striding into the trees with an axe over his sweaty shift, or two basket-bearing goodwives waddling distantly through the frame.

Yet there was something else, something more personally gratifying, and it was this: almost everyone who saw me was instantly reduced to a state of fawning, unworthy terror. If they were doing something, they dropped it to bow and scrape; if they weren't, their idle hands grabbed desperately for tools or baskets. As I ambled through the walled garden, hands behind my back, an elderly goodwife leapt off her stool and bid me please to take my ease. To those who recognised my livery I was the big boss foreman, the
capo di tutti capi
, and to these I was master. To the many who did not, I was a feather-hatted, quill-bearing emissary from the semi-mythical realm of impossible privilege that was The Big House, and to these I was my lord, my liege and even – to one gardener's boy rushing towards the kitchens with a trug of herbs – your majesty.

Our open-day guide had stressed that we were all in the service of the manor, and to these toiling unwashed masses, that meant me.
Le manoir c'est moi
. Inclining my head graciously at the genuflecting peasantry, I began to feel rather more than comfortable in my skin. My robes of office, a source of craven embarrassment as I shuffled about the courtyard that morning, seemed now a richly magnificent expression of my importance. I strutted back across the moat bridge, jutting my codpiece proudly forth like a Holbein made flesh. In thirty momentous minutes I had grown to love old Wat Paston of Gresham, king of the collective age of joy.

'Whence come you, Master Wat?'

It was Wilmott, standing in the kitchen doorway with her thin eyebrows arched and her black arms folded. I never quite established our relative positions in the domestic hierarchy, but this was no time for deference. Nor, I found, explanation or apology. 'God give you good day, Mistress Wilmott,' I breezed, and marched into the stewards' room to bawl out some schoolchildren. This was
my
time.

'I like
Scooby Doo
, so I got
Scooby Doo
pants on.'

There was always an unsettling adjustment from our daytime realm of linen and oak to the brashly synthetic campsite 300 yards distant where we took our nocturnal ease – 'decompression', the regulars called it – and the first night proved the most jarring. With my glad rags on a hanger in the overcroft, I was just some bloke in shorts putting his tent up wrong. I went off with my toothbrush for a quick flail at the daddy-long-legs colony in the toilet block, then returned to my rude bedchamber, one ear assailed by the campsite chorus of swishing zips and the other – well, what the hell – plugged into commentary of Ukraine's World Cup encounter with Switzerland. It was a funny sort of relief to be awakened at dawn by a shrieking commotion, and find myself squinting through the zip-flap at two peacocks duking it out on a caravan roof.

Breakfast was Marmite on toast, despatched in full regalia in the overcroft courtyard. Just time for a quick linguistic warmup – 'A most wondrous volley did Zidane strike upon the yester, Master Wat!' 'Er, aye' – before I repaired to the courtyard to do battle with the first school party.

'Gather forth, childer!'

After the fumbling idiocies of a score and four hours gone by, I found I was very nearly enjoying myself. Though I would never master the lingo – any attempt to veer away from Edmund's script saw me mired in 'proceeding in a northerly direction' model policeman-speak – I felt genuine pride watching those smirks and scowls dissolve into gawps of wonderment. Because of me they would go home to tell their families of their journey to a time when children their age had been in back-breaking physical employment for many years, when crows were lunch, when men wore trousers with dinkles sticking out the front. From my lips they learned that 'a square meal' derived from the wooden trencher boards that were the era's most common eating surface, and that 'upper crust' referred to the top half of a loaf that had not been in contact with the sooty, grubby oven floor, and was thus reserved for the master of the house. And if sometimes the response to all this was a prolonged expression of dismissive scorn, then perhaps those high-pitched jeers and hoots were an act of denial, one born of a reluctance to accept that they had all once lived such grim and filthy lives. Or perhaps it was because they still did, and in Essex.

'Marster Wart?'

I didn't need to turn around to know who was pacing across the courtyard: our transatlantic nobleman, a round-faced fellow in period specs, whose speech content was always flawlessly authentic, but whose chosen accent suggested Loyd Grossman impersonating Mel Gibson in
Braveheart
. In consequence, it took three repeats of his subsequent address before I understood what he was saying. If not what he meant: where in the name of Good Queen Bess were these coppicers, what was the 'wand for the clouts' I had been ordered to demand from them, and who were 'those that would dine without', the group which apparently required this worrisome instrument? Dine without what? Clothes, by the sound of it. But lacking the linguistic tools to formulate even a basic request for explanation, and unable in the midst of so many young visitors to drop out of verbal character, I thought it best to nod purposefully, then stride off over the bridge in a state of total ignorance.