The men-at-arms came clanking down the street amid the swirls of acrid smoke. Visors down, brandishing their swords and pikes, they strode past the Clock Tower and with ferocious cries, disappeared up the narrow street between the timber-framed tenements.

“Quick, get those fires out!”

…said the museum manager, who was standing beside me clasping two buckets of water, and watching in an agony of apprehension as the heaps of smouldering straw blew across the street and up against the nearby shop fronts. We ran about dousing the flames. Wrapping the parking meters with hessian didn’t exactly make them look medieval so lots of smoke was required to obscure their presence, but setting fire to a bicycle shop would not have made us popular. The men-at-arms reappeared grinning, their visors up.

“OK that time?” asked their leader cheerfully. He and his men were happy to play the scene over and over again, until everyone was quite satisfied. They were professional re-enactors and their hourly rate reflected it. Worth every penny.

Half an hour later, the street cleaned scrupulously in time for the shops opening, I was over at the cathedral, once a famous abbey, gulping mouthfuls of coffee between smearing my colleagues’ ragged costumes with a mixture of mud and strawberry jam to make them look like beggars come to pray for healing at the shrine of the saint. Though I say it myself (a colleague and I made the costumes), they looked most authentic. The jam was so cheap and horrible that it was better used externally anyway. They went off to huddle pathetically around a rusty cast-iron barbecue, among more artistic swirls of smoke.

When I signed up for a career in museums I didn’t foresee that one day I would be credited as co-Assistant Director and co-Executive Producer of a historical film, to say nothing of co-wardrobe and props mistress. One of the museum’s two sites had the standard short introductory film on the history of the site but the second museum, which dealt with the post-Roman history of the town, hadn’t got one. So we teamed up with the film studies unit at the local college to make an extremely low-budget ten-minute film summarising 1500 years of stirring events, including a famous 15^th century battle which featured in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

This project began with a bunch of curators spending many an hour arguing with the director of the film studies unit, a forceful lady with a well-deserved reputation in her own field, as she tried to keep the script short enough to fit into 10 minutes and snappy enough to engage the public, while we tried to stop it being oversimplified to the point of total inaccuracy.

Curators, front of house staff and film students were co-opted as actors. The film studies students practiced their skills as makeup artists, hairdressers, caterers etc. A small amount of money was allowed to pay for a few professionals like the soldiers, a real actor for the narrator, and the musician who provided the background music. A number of local groups like the lace-makers society and a men’s choir donated their services for free. We had to get permission from the various locations, from the police if we were going to hold up the traffic; find out where parking and toilets were available, and so on.  I became lost in admiration of the director’s ability to wheedle reluctant people into giving her what she wanted for nothing, especially when they had refused my request three times already.

I really had fun with that film. I enjoyed all the background research with my colleagues for the script, the locations, the costumes and props. We all pooled our knowledge of different aspects of different historical periods. It was a great feeling to see local events which I had known about for years come to life. But I also found pure pleasure in watching people with real expertise in a different profession do their job. The director and her camera-woman would quietly discuss the scene they were about to film, and then get everything and everyone organised to produce just the effect they wanted. One occasion I remember particularly was an evening when, after filming a scene which was supposed to be set in a 15th century shop in a small square room in a historic building, they proceeded to record another scene in the same room, but this time set in the 17th century, simply by turning the camera around to face the other way and altering the lighting so that it looked like a completely different place. It was extraordinarily effective.

The scenes I have described so far were perhaps my favourites, but they were run a close third by the totally incongruous scene which was supposed to represent a visit by Elizabeth I to a local manor owned by one of her courtiers. At the time of her most famous visit she was thirty-seven years old. The sight of a teenaged Gloriana sitting on a purple carpet on the steps of the now totally ruined manor, forking up sweetmeats (made by me) from a pewter platter held on her lap, was enjoyably ludicrous.

And finally, there was the men’s choir from a local church who sang plainsong for us one evening as a background to our monastery scenes. It was the most beautiful end to a long day’s filming.

Looking back on it, I still think that the script was pretty good, although some of the scenes, costumes and props were not quite what I would wish. But overall, it was an experience I shall always enjoy revisiting.

Title from William Shakespeare, Second part of King Henry VI, Act V, Scene II