I Was A Child Roundhead January 27, 2009

The smell of gunpowder that a recently discharged canon gives off has a particularly strong resonance for some. It reminds them of the weekends of their childhood; when mentally unstable adults forced them to don breeches, hose and jerkins in order to take part, against their will, in an act that is at best bizarre and at worst perverted: re-enacting the English Civil War.

Maybe I should let you know from the off that I was a victim of this crime, for too long wilfully ignored by social services, teachers and police. The editors have let me write this article to raise awareness, but also to aid a process that my therapist calls, ‘remembering, repeating and working through.’

It started with family outings. My parents, my brother and I were spectators, watching as grown men and women humiliated themselves and their families in public. We watched as an “accident” blew the hand off a man who carried gunpowder for cannons. I don’t think it started here though. It must’ve been following the fire (a stray spark which destroyed a whole corn crop) that my dad thought it would be a good idea to subject his family to re-enactment in a more intimate way.

Before I knew it I was kitted up. At the time I saw nothing wrong with this closeted transvestism: dressed from head to toe in coarse wool and hessian I was easily indoctrinated. I was bought a medallion bearing Oliver Cromwell’s warty image along with the words ‘For God and Parliament’, a slogan I was encouraged to shout constantly at the top of my lungs. I still scream these words in my sleep and descend into uncontrollable hysteria at the mere mention of Cromwell. This has been a problem, keeping me from University lectures on Paradise Lost and forcing me into therapy. When not engaged in sectarian chanting another one of my duties was to work a set of bellows for an old bloke who sat at a brazier for hours on end, melting lead to make musket bullets. After a shift of say four hours I received my pay: a small tankard of cider, watered down.

If I had worshipped Oliver Cromwell and worked the bellows satisfactorily I was allowed to amuse myself with a wooden musket and sword. Making the children mimic their fathers’ play covertly prepared them to enter their ranks, as pike-men2 or musketeers, whilst masking the abject misery that inevitably arises when people spend their weekends in exotic locations such as Ashby-de-la-Zouch and Nuneaton, camping in parks boasting no running water and only chemical toilets.

Re-enactment societies, like the armies they imitate, are divided into regiments, and (quite by accident I’m sure) my dad had enrolled us in the scummiest one. My mum still tells the story of when she found all the children being given a bollocking by a grown man. His son had run to him in tears, a boy from another regiment having soundly thrashed him with a wooden sword. This, the responsible grown up yelled, was not the way to solve the problem. Should a similar instance arise in future all of us kids were to find the offender and kick the shit out of him. Got it! Another boy would energetically tell me about all the stuff his dad was going to buy him when he received compensation for an industrial accident which, if the sums involved were anything to go by, had all but crippled him. This accident kept him out of work and in constant pain. This naturally excluded Saturday and Sunday afternoons, when he would run around a field happily hitting other men with the end of his musket.

The scumminess of our regiment was a blessing, however. My mum, an easy-going and uncomplaining person, hated pretending to live three and a half centuries ago, and it was our fellow roundheads who justified her complaint. The final straw came when her and my dad attended a party held by other re-enactors. Only on arrival did my mum find out that the party was being held in celebration of someone’s acquittal for a crime. What was the crime? Only attempting to murder a security guard during a warehouse robbery. Had he really done it? Of course he fucking had.

My mother, brother and I left the regiment; my dad remained. I can’t help feeling that my parents’ disagreement over the merits of Civil War re-enactment played a part in the break up of their marriage, but don’t worry about us, we’re all (slowly) moving on. Even my dad’s given up on it now. What I will ask you to do is spare a thought not for the mummies and daddies, but for the boys and girls, because they’re only children and don’t understand. If you witness their use as pawns whilst their parents act out various repressions and complexes, please contact social services.