Dressing up was a big part of my childhood.
I still have the plastic helmet and tabard that marked me out as a Knight of the Round Table, and the cowgirl outfit that Dad brought back from America when I was five, but dressing-up got serious when I first entered the Annual Winchester Guildhall Fancy Dress Competition.
The competition was taken very seriously, by me or Dad I can’t remember, but I do remember the thrill of discovering that spray paint cut lovely but toxic swirls in polystyrene, and the discomfort of wearing a genuine WWII German helmet. In all the years I entered, I only won once, and I only won a box of jelly sweets, but I treasured those jelly sweets. They were my just reward for hours of standing very still in uncomfortable costumes.
When I was eight, my tiny school held a pageant in the garden. Hannibal’s elephants (the fifth years) broke through the Alps (first years) and jumped on the Romans (third years). Two of us were chosen to represent Carthage. We stood under an apple tree waiting to be battered and defeated by the resurrected Romans – which we did spectacularly, moaning and groaning and throwing ourselves on our plastic swords, while chewing fake blood capsules. It was probably the best fun I ever had at school.
History was a big part of growing up for me. It went along with riding bikes and swinging in trees. Not only did we dress as Saxons, we hung out wherever we might catch a whiff of history and the stories that went with it. Winchester Cathedral was especially rich, with its chests of kingly bones and stories of hearts buried in walls, alongside Victorian diving helmets and tattered campaign flags. With my friends I dredged the river for King Alfred’s lost crown, paced huge fields in search of mosaics and ancient animal teeth, and sat on walls watching archaeologists scrape away at the chalk surrounding ancient skulls.
When I learned to drive, I accompanied Dad all over what he called Wessex, and he introduced me to wonderful things and atmospheric places in distant churches, museums and battlefields. Some of them, like the Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, were significant, many were not – they were just interesting, personal, they belonged to people: a spoon that a Roman lost near Cirencester, a nit comb that survived the shipwreck of the Mary Rose, and a leather boot, said to have been lost by Charles II.
I have continued to absorb the stories in museums. For this book, I visited the British Museum and used the stone tableaux there to decide whether the Aztecs or the Incas were a better source of drama. I chose the Aztecs because they were definitely bloodier, more incomprehensible, and almost certainly more terrifying.
A few years ago I visited the National Museum of Ireland and saw the boat from the Broighter Gold hoard. It is probably the most fragile and beautiful thing I have ever seen. If you have the chance, go and see it; if not, you can find good pictures online.
But although it’s not remotely precious, and by no means beautiful, one of my all-time favourite historical objects is the lump of Egyptian bread in the Cairo museum.
That, to me, is real history.