I bloody love dressing up – most of the best nights of my life have unfolded while dressed as something ridiculous, like Mr Potato Head, or an armadillo – so I was excited about this one, and spent hours poring over the websites of numerous re-enactment groups around the UK in search of friendly-looking faces, and, more importantly, awesome costumes. I settled on an English Civil War re-enactment society called the Sealed Knot, the largest and oldest re-enactment group in the UK, with a membership of several thousand. Signing up as a member of the Royalist army, I would be fighting with Sir Marmaduke Rawdon’s Regiment of Foote (affectionately known as Rawdons) for a public re-enactment of the Battle of Cheriton at a multi-period event in Oxfordshire.
The weekend of the battle comes around quickly, and after the long drive I am met at the entrance to the camp by Chris, Rawdons’ PR officer and an instantly amiable chap who looks every bit the Scout leader he is, with a handsome, weathered face.
‘Hello,’ he beams through my car window before I have had the chance to wind it down, ‘you must be Lucy.’ He steps back, waves me on and directs me through the campsite to park in ‘Living History’ – an area devoted in its authenticity to the seventeenth century – where I make a 304-point turn to squeeze into a parking spot between two trees.
‘Lucy, this is Vic,’ Chris says as I sheepishly clamber out and shimmy around the trees.
Vic, in his fifties, with a sharp grey goatee and wide, friendly eyes, kisses me three times. ‘That’s Dutch,’ he says proudly, before pointing in the direction of a white canvas tent that is to be my home for the weekend.
‘It’s a replica of a seventeenth-century soldier’s tent,’ Chris explains, proud to be sharing his world with somebody new. ‘Vic makes them.’
I heave my camping gear into the tent and emerge to see Vic struggling past with a water barrel. ‘Can I help?’ I ask him. He grins and motions for me to join him, picking up an old-fashioned musket and passing it through the handle of the water barrel. He gives me one side of the gun and picks up the other.
‘Made that,’ he says as we stagger through the campsite with the heavy load, proudly pointing out various tents, chairs and awnings along the way.
‘Made that one too.’
When we return with a full and even heavier water barrel, we join four other members of Rawdons sitting on wooden chairs arranged around a fire grate. Chris hands me a silver tankard full to the brim with Old Speckled Hen while Vic drinks from a small, uneven-looking brown cup.
‘What’s your cup made of, Vic?’
He shuffles his head back on his shoulders. ‘You’ve never seen a horn cup before?’
I shake my head.
‘I can’t believe it!’ he says, his mouth like a fish gasping for air.
‘They might not be as popular in London circles, Vic,’ Chris says diplomatically.
Vic continues to shake his head in amazement, baffled at how somebody could breeze through one third of their life without seeing a cup made from a hollowed-out piece of horn.
Feeling increasingly conscious of my jeans and hoodie, I pop into my tent to try on the two spare costumes that Chris has brought for me to wear. First, the men’s kit: a pair of brown leather boots, a large pair of grey woollen britches that tie at the knee with a thick ribbon, a cotton shirt with an open neck, a yellow woollen jacket and a black felt hat.
The three fighting units in Rawdons are Musket, Pike and Artillery, and I will be fighting with the musketeers tomorrow, so I am also handed a leather ‘belt of twelve apostles’ – wooden containers that each hold a measure of gunpowder tied to a leather strap – a leather bag housing spare ‘match’ (rope soaked in Vic’s pee to make it more flammable when lighting the muskets) and a polished horn, which would be used as a funnel for the gunpowder.
Chris looks up as I emerge from the tent. ‘You look like you’ve been doing this for years!’ he says with a grin. Vic gives me an enthusiastic double thumbs-up.
My lady’s kit is less successful: a long green cotton skirt, a head covering (‘coif’), a white linen shift and a blue jacket. Chris had emailed me the week before saying: I think it’s only fair to tell you that the ladies usually go for a big-cleavage look when in women’s kit, so you may want to pack accordingly… Not sure if you’ll be able to borrow supportive corsetry, so I’ll leave that one to you.
I didn’t manage to find any and have resorted to wearing two bras to try and give me a bit more hoist, but it hasn’t worked at all. I just look fat.
Vic shakes his head when he sees me. ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘you look better as a man.’
This ‘muster’ is a multi-period event, attracting over 1,000 re-enactors from the Napoleonic Wars, the English and American Civil Wars and World War II, the last of whom have built a system of trenches behind our campsite. They also have a small pub that they carry with them on the back of a trailer, decorated to look just like a 1940s boozer, complete with period songs blaring from an old-fashioned radio.
As well as the Living History area, there is another camp designated for modern tents and motorhomes, set back from public view in a big field. Known as ‘Plastic’, this is where the majority of people camp, and is also referred to by everyone in the authentic camp as ‘the caravan club’.
‘You have to meet the others,’ Chris decides with sudden urgency, standing up to announce our departure. When we arrive at Plastic, I walk through forty other members of Rawdons Regiment – scattered around a circle on camp chairs – and take a seat next to Tweety, whose all-yellow outfit provides his nickname. Quietly self-assured, with long hair and a bushy red beard, Tweety was born into Rawdons Regiment, the third of now four generations to be members. His mum and dad met in Rawdons, his nan met her husband, and all of his sisters met their partners. He also has a goddaughter in the regiment, his godparents are in the regiment, and his sister’s godparents are – you guessed it – also in the regiment.
‘I’m trying to introduce a breeding programme,’ he jokes, after a brief introduction. ‘Every member of the regiment has to provide at least two kids, to keep the whole thing going.’
I am also introduced to Tosh, the commanding officer of Rawdons Regiment, so named because he joined with a chap called Mac many years ago. Tosh is a charismatic, good-looking chap in his early forties who has a high-ranking sales job in a large consumer-goods company. A natural leader who oozes confidence, he first joined Rawdons as a nineteen-year-old after witnessing re-enactors take over his local pub in Basingstoke.
‘We get together for a re-enactment about eight times a year,’ he explains.
‘What keeps you coming back?’
‘Well,’ he says, leaning forward on his seat as if to prime himself for a speech, ‘the thing I always say about re-enactment is that it’s a great leveller. You rarely know what people do for a living outside of these weekends, and you don’t want to. It’s a chance to escape from that. There is one guy in our seventeenth-century regiment who is very senior in the twenty-first-century army during his day job, but when he comes here, he just gets to be a pleb. It’s like a second life, another chance.’
It sounds like this could be the answer to all my problems.
I bury my hands deep into my woollen breeches. ‘So, if battle re-enacting got outlawed tomorrow, would you all still…’ – I search for the right phrase – ‘errr… hang out?’
He looks at me in disbelief. There is a pause. ‘God, yeah!’ he manages. ‘The battle side is a lot of fun, of course, but it’s the social side that keeps people coming back. The battle just gives the weekend structure, really. You could take that away, but not the social side; it wouldn’t survive.’
‘I met my ex-wife here,’ he continues, ‘but this is such a passion for people that if one half of a couple isn’t into it, it can really cause problems.’
The rain starts to descend, prompting Chris, Vic and me to head back to the quiet of the Living History area, where we sit under a canvas awning around a crackling fire, listening to the rain and telling our stories until the tiredness consumes us.
I wake up the following morning to the smell of sausages cooking in a pan over the fire. I take a seat in the sun and stare out at the rolling hills where the original Battle of Cheriton was fought, watching the shadows of the clouds streaming across the green fields. The birds sing cheerfully, their celebration breaking through the stillness of the morning. Vic produces thick slabs of brown bread and smothers them with butter, handing me a horn cup of water. There is something so romantic about living this way, re-enacting the past, as if trying to enchant it back to life. This must be why people do this, why people obsess over the past. The opportunity to recreate something, just the way you want it to have been. The escapism of immersing yourself in a forgotten time. I get it. I totally get it.
After breakfast, I am taken over to Plastic for a musket drill. Donning my full (male) gear, I hide my camera, phone and sunglasses in a canvas sack before heading off. Members of the public will flood the site for the next two days, and it is a strict rule not to be seen with any anachronisms. The drill involves marching, wheeling, filing and learning all of the commands for the musket unit, like how to load it – although I will be using a dummy, unlike the others, because I don’t have a firearms licence – how to stand and how to lift it onto my shoulder in a three-part motion. It’s all very complicated, and it takes me an embarrassingly long time to pick it up. The guns are real, as is the gunpowder, but they only fire harmless wadding, so it’s all pretty safe, I am promised.
While we wait for the real battle, I sit watching Chris sew a red seam around the edge of his jacket. Behind us, the sound of the World War II demonstration cannons boom, shaking the ground and making me jump every single time. Vic and Chris don’t flinch.
As Chris sews, Vic tells me his story.
Vic heard about the Sealed Knot at a beer festival nearly thirty years ago and, being a self-proclaimed history buff, he signed up then and there. He took to it like a young boy to war games, and it has since become his full-time job, his hobby and the place he met his ex-wife and current girlfriend.
‘Do people ever get seriously injured?’ I ask, as he picks up a shirt to begin some sewing of his own.
‘What, fifty to a hundred strong pike blocks smashing into each other?’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘Course they do! In the seventies and eighties a few people did die. You can imagine a load of men in their late thirties: “Put this wool jacket on, wool socks, metal helmet, pick up this blooming great telegraph pole and off you go.” They’d drink lots of beer, go out on the field and…’ He makes a choking sound, drawing his finger across his throat.
‘The last person to die on the battlefield was in our regiment. Darren. He was thirty-eight. Big lad. Road worker. Smoked like a chimney. Strong as an ox. He just keeled over on the battlefield. Second or third push he went down and they all shouted, “Man down!” They did CPR on the field, but he was gone. Artery burst open in his chest.’
Chris looks up from his sewing. ‘Remember his funeral, Vic?’
Vic leans so far forward he nearly falls off his stool. ‘It’s always full drums and colours at funerals. We pull out all the stops,’ he says, fidgeting from side to side. ‘Hundreds of people went to Darren’s funeral. Eight of us from the regiment carried him – pallbearers we were. He was such a big chap his coffin wouldn’t fit in the lift, so we had to put him into the furnace ourselves. As soon as it opened, the coffin burst into flames and we just had to push him in – “Bye, Darren” – weeeee, and off he went.’
With that, he pulls a tarnished silver pocket watch on a chain from his pocket, ‘Right-o,’ he says, ‘time for battle.’
We meet the rest of Rawdons Regiment dressed in our full gear, gather behind Tosh in formation and head down to the field below to meet the rest of the Royalist army, just in time for a medal presentation to a Sealed Knot veteran who has been a member for forty years. The crowd all yell, ‘Hip-hip… huzzah!’ at the end of the speech – thankfully loud enough to drown out my over enthusiastic ‘Hooray!’ – before gathering into a huge block to march down for battle.
‘Shoulder your muskets,’ Trefor – known in the regiment as ‘Christmas’ because he accidentally knocked a girl’s front teeth out with his musket during his first battle – commands as we march in time with the tin whistles and pounding drums. I allow myself a little smile that flinches up and down as we march along, balancing conflicting emotions of embarrassed self-awareness and joy.
Rain begins to descend in thick sheets as we march for ten minutes up a steep country lane to the battlefield. By the time we arrive, most of the public are taking cover in the beer tent. The ground is sticky, and our woollen clothes soak up the water like a thirsty sponge. The grey vista gradually turns to a sea of red as the Parliamentarians flood in from the other side, holding pikes and muskets aloft. They line up in parallel to us – a battlefield of about five hundred soldiers, and eight mounted cavalry members stretching the length of a football pitch – faces scowling through the downpour.
The drumming units on both sides bring their patter to a crescendo as we are briefed by the head of the Royalist army, the lord general, who wears a hat with a big white feather that is bent double by the pounding rain. I can’t hear a word he is saying, but the atmosphere becomes decidedly electric as he makes what I can only assume is a rousing speech.
A booming cannon, positioned just behind our unit, announces the start of the battle. My stomach starts its progression up into my mouth, and my hands begin to shake.
‘Maaaaaake ready!’ Trefor hollers, as those with licences load their weapons with gunpowder. ‘Prepare to fire!’ We lift our muskets onto our shoulders and take aim. ‘Aaaaand fire!’ The world flashes yellow and white as the deafening guns explode around me.
Matches keep going out, causing the guns to misfire as everything on the field becomes increasingly sodden. With the muskets failing us, Trefor calls for our unit to press forward into hand-to-hand combat. I turn my dummy weapon around in my hand, as I had been taught in drill this morning, and march forward, leading with the butt. The closer I get, the more it becomes apparent that my hand-to-hand combat partner is a tall man with a long grey beard. He looks mean, roaring and glaring at me as he breaks into a jog. Shit.
Caught up in the moment, I decide the only way to come out of this alive is to be meaner than him. I fix my face into a glare and charge at him with a guttural growl, surprised by the sounds coming from inside me. We are face to face within moments, grappling awkwardly with the butts of our guns and pushing with our shoulders. After a few seconds he winks at me, opens his face into a grimace, and shouts, ‘Ah, you got me,’ collapsing onto the floor dramatically. I can’t help but laugh as relief disarms me, and I finally remember this is all pretend.
As per the script – which is at a regimental rather than individual level and basically says which side will win and which will lose, in line with historical accuracy – after half an hour of shooting and grappling, we lose the battle and ‘run away’ back to the campsite.
Once there, we sit around a crackling fire and pass bottles of port around the circle. Soaked to the core and relieved it’s all over, I lean back on my canvas chair and lift my sodden feet up to the fire.
‘Do you think we’re all a bit… strange?’ I am asked by a woman with windswept grey hair, dressed in a much better version of my Civil War women’s kit, who sits down next to me.
Strange is not a word I would use to describe this community – for some reason the word conjures negative connotations for me, and I love everything about this group of people. I love the geekiness of it all. I love the lack of judgement. I love the mix of old and young. I love all of the different characters and the way they banter together, bouncing off each other but always remaining patient and kind.
‘Well, it depends what you mean by strange,’ I answer. ‘If you mean “not mainstream” then I guess you are.’
‘All of my colleagues think I am strange,’ she goes on. ‘They say, “What are you doing this weekend?” And I say, “Being a lady of the Napoleonic Wars.” They never know what to say then, so they just walk away. Conversation over. When I get back, they never ask me about it either. It’s like they’re afraid of it. Like it’s so far outside of their comfort zone, they just want to shut it out and pretend it doesn’t exist.’
‘That’s a shame.’ We share a resigned nod.
I do a quick poll and discover I am surrounded by architects, actors, a brigadier general, consultants, salesmen, cleaners, dustmen, doctors, craftsmen, teachers, cowmen, military-aircraft fitters and horse-riding instructors.
‘We’re just weird and nice, really, aren’t we?’ Vic says, looking around at the group after everyone has finished introducing themselves. We laugh, and raise our tankards in a toast: ‘To being weird and nice.’
Before long, an old accordion emerges, and the stories turn into folk songs about buxom wenches and eunuchs. The group teach me the words and we sing for hours before heading over to the beer tent, where Tweety hands me a pint of Skull Crusher and I dance with an old man who looks like he has stepped straight from the set of Les Misérables.
I stumble back to the camp with Chris at two in the morning – narrowly avoiding falling down a World War II trench in the process – and decide to treat the sleeping masses to a full-lunged rendition of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ before collapsing into a dreamless sleep.
The following morning I wake up, wrestle down a stale piece of bread and a sip of water that does nothing to ease my parched throat, put my gear on and head over to Plastic for my pike drill. The rest of the pike unit crawl from their tents when I arrive, rubbing their heads as they stagger over to join me, most still dressed in their pyjamas.
While under the influence of Skull Crusher the previous evening, I had been convinced to give pike fighting a go, despite being warned against it by everybody who isn’t in the unit. I am handed a six-metre-long weapon that looks like a sharpened telegraph pole. ‘Shoulder your pikes,’ Tweety shouts. I try and lift my pike off of the ground, shaking with the effort. It is heavy and unwieldy, and I wonder how the others make it look so easy. This is when I realise that I am the only girl in the unit and that most of the men here are at least twice my size.
The pike is used for charging and skewering the opposition to protect the musket unit from a distance. But that’s not the hard part. Once you have missed each other, which happens every time, you launch yourself into the opposition, forming a tight unit like a scrum. In a moment of foolish bravado, I declare to the unit that I will be totally fine because I used to play women’s rugby, so they promptly assign me to the place where you feel the most crush in the second row.
We rehearse the action. ‘Close,’ Tweety shouts as we squeeze in tightly together. ‘Closer.’ We squeeze even tighter, pushing with all our might. ‘Advance.’ We drive forward, bending our knees, keeping as low as possible while the front row sit back onto the rest of the scrum to keep it upright. I am exhausted already, an increasing dread for this afternoon’s battle making my already pounding headache even worse.
Apparently, the push isn’t historically accurate, because if the pike units were that close, they would have probably hacked at each other with swords rather than just push for ground. But we didn’t have swords, and even if we did, hacking chunks out of each other just wouldn’t be in the spirit of the weekend.
‘Are you sure you want to do this in the battle?’ Tweety asks me at the end of the drill.
‘Sure. Why not?’ I lie.
I am a stubborn idiot.
I’ll tell you why not, I thought to myself back at Living History, because every single person I’ve told about this plan on the way over here has looked at me as if I’m completely mad.
‘Oh, God,’ Vic says when I return to camp, ‘are you sure?!’
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you!’ Chris says on the march together down to the battlefield a couple of hours later, ‘I think your regimental name should be “Have a go Rawdon”.’
I’ll take it.
I comfort myself that if I do end up dying on the battlefield, at least I will have full drums and colours at my funeral, and this is probably my only opportunity to have an epic funeral like that. I hold on to this thought ten minutes later as I charge into my first contact, when all of the air is squeezed from my lungs, and I don’t have space to fill them again. I try to focus my attention on pushing with all my might, simultaneously trying to hold on to my pike and stay on my feet to avoid the whole unit falling on top of me.
My chest is crushed between two sheets of metal armour, and I get hit so hard in the chin that my head snaps back and I think I am going to pass out. The studs on the shoes of the row in front of me drag down my shins as we are pushed backwards. I scream and grunt, trying to sound brave when really, I’m terrified that any moment now I am going to get something sliced off, or my teeth knocked out by flying pieces of metal.
I have to force myself to keep trudging on as I get pushed and pulled closer and closer into the front section of the unit. I just don’t care whether we win or not; all I care about is coming out alive. I would make a terrible soldier.
Every time we come out of a push, I get that euphoric feeling you get when you step off a roller coaster and realise you are still alive. But within seconds we are being screamed at to ‘re-form’, and the whole thing starts all over again. It’s relentless.
After another forty minutes of continuous ‘pushing’ in thick woollen clothes and a metal helmet, soaked with sweat in the baking sun and panting like an overworked sheepdog, all I can think is, when will this torture end?
It ends rather abruptly, minutes later, when my thumb gets caught between a piece of armour and my pike. I hear a crunch, and a stabbing pain shoots through my hand and up my arm. Unable to hold my pike any longer, I sit out for the final five minutes and nurse my broken thumb.