Since 1760, my birthplace of Westerham has held an annual dinner with battleground theatrics in my honour. Sophie finds this hard to believe, but I eventually convinced her. In 2015 I travelled back to England and attended undetected even while dressed as myself so I might apply for the position of dramatizing what the brochure called my “pious and immortal memory.” I didn’t get the job.

“How could they not hire you?” Sophie marvelled. “You are the image of James Wolfe, and you actually believe you are him.”

I bought this uniform from the classified section of a British recruitment magazine called The Locker. It was the best I could manage and I spent nearly a hundred pounds on it that I’d won from Boum-Boum Larose in a game of poker at the Bucket of Blood. It’s far from the real uniform any Redcoat wore in my Quebec campaign, but it is better than the costumes of some men who get jobs on battlefields during important reenactments. Some of those fellows…I have to look away.

I found Westerham overwhelming that year I attended as myself. I shied away from the Wolfe statue with its well-meant inscription. I’d barely entered our old house—it had become a museum preserved with our bee skeps and even my canteen with my old spoon still in it—before I realized the building had grown a new soul. Its alien smell forced me outside. I retreated quickly to my camp near the festival fields and darkened my hair with walnut oil. Then I signed up not as Wolfe but as Ruadh Mackay, a lad I slaughtered at Culloden.

There were tents and a hog roast. There were choirs and dignitaries. There was even a ballet.

I endured the spectacle of a lout named Tim playing myself, too short by six inches yet at least two stone stouter. Instead I earned less than seven pounds an hour standing in for a Jacobite soldier in a skit put on by the Royal Society of Medicine, the College of Surgeons and the Society of Apothecaries, who wanted to compare medical care on battlefields now and in 1759. Then some woman named Mountjoy commandeered a team to set watermelons one after another across the lawn outside my beloved George Warde’s house.

I have nothing against watermelons.

There were hundreds perched on their ends and prevented from toppling by the use of string and dowels from the U-Do-It hardware shop on the main road. My job was to fire a musket and demonstrate for the surgeons, and for a straggling audience of grandmothers and aunts and children and their schoolteachers, how musket balls split the watermelons, which stood in for human flesh, so that red pulp exploded, spurted, oozed and dripped, melting in little piles and globules on George Warde’s meadow in the ruthless sun.