Free I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History by Tim Moore Page A

distant memory. I'd been cheerily invited to join the Legio VIII bathers, and accepted with an apparently convincing display of enthusiasm: no casual observer would have guessed that the man in the non-period pants had never before voluntarily entered a body of water he couldn't see the bottom of.
    They did not speak Latin, and though none but the grizzled, Gainsbourg-eyed Jean-Luc spoke much English, the hostly willingness with which most gave it a shot was touching and entirely unexpected. ('I pree-fair le rugby,' replied Vincent, the chap I'd first approached, when I mumbled some football-related ice-breaker in my hopeless French. 'No acting, more . . . men .' Though I'd rather he hadn't emphasised this last word by punching himself very hard in the chest.)
    Laying out my wardrobe for their inspection as we dried ourselves afterwards, I'd faced no worse than modest ribbing for my Startrite caligae , and only a dash more for the billowing mainsail of a tunic my wife had hand-stitched using Jean-Luc's measurements and a hemp/linen bedsheet purchased from French eBay – pre-1920, as advised, and thus woven on handlooms, which imparted the requisite rough-hewn, unbleached look. ('Be aware it was surprisingly large,' he'd advised me, though judging by the conspicuously less generous cut of his and everyone else's more dapper tunics, I alone had faithfully adhered to the authentic dimensions.)
    To marshal the torso-swallowing capaciousness of this sleeveless, knee-length workwear staple, Jean-Luc had lent me a belt.
    'This is really something special, the best in the legion,' he'd told me, handing it over with grave ceremony in a small tented pavilion just outside the camp walls. This accommodated both his private quarters and a craftwork stall selling ancient knickknacks, most conspicuously a fertility symbol in the form of a winged erection. The proprietor was an auburn-haired German woman, Ira, whose workshop, Aurificina Treverica, had produced the belt in question: lavishly decorated with hand-worked tinned-brass rivets and plates, and finished off with a sort of clanking sporran – a curtain of five medallion-studded leather strips that hung down before the groin. This splendid accessory elevated my appearance above that of a failed trick-or-treat ghost, and when teamed with a borrowed pair of well-seasoned, properly hobnailed old caligae – three sizes too large, and thus worn with a great fat pair of Hadrian's Wall-issue socks – imparted a look my new comrades seemed to find very nearly convincing. No less importantly, walking about in all this stuff felt much less blaringly daft than expected, particularly once they'd shown me how to make sense of the leather spaghetti that was my caligae lacing.
    At this fledgling stage of my re-enactment career, I could not have wished for a more welcoming group of time travellers, nor a happier compromise between hardcore historical accuracy and contemporary reassurance. A barefoot legionary had pressed upon me a honey-smeared slab of some sort of bread-pancake hybrid he'd prepared by baking dough on a flat rock extracted from the fire, then handed over a bottle of Heineken to wash it down. Linen drawn over a convoluted framework of wooden poles, the tent was self-evidently of period design, though jumbled in the straw amongst the armour and swords and leather-sheathed drinking vessels lay the odd Nike trainer and custom-car magazine.
    Squeezed together on benches in the fly-happy heat of what I'd come to know as the mess tent, we effected more detailed introductions over an incomprehensible Roman dice game. Vincent was by some distance the most flamboyant of our number, an archaeology student with an unshakeable passion for roll-ups and the bellowed lyrics of Led Zeppelin. Ex-commando Renaud, an ever-smiling prop forward with calves the size of my waist, and a waist the size of a water-butt; goateed wisecracker Jean-Charles, a younger military veteran whose evidently uncanny