The Green Man stood in the fields. In the darkness of winter he was only a shadow.
People going to the tip to throw away their Christmas trees noticed the shadow as their cars sped down the lanes. ‘That shadow,’ they said. ‘Over there.’
Later, in January, the shadow looked like a stump or a post. ‘Tree struck by lightning over there,’ they said as they rushed along to work at the power-station across the fields. ‘Unsightly-looking thing.’ If they were local people who had lived here some time they said, ‘Look, there’s that stump thing again. Strange how you never seem to notice until it’s back.’
When blowy March came and the days seemed to lighten over the dunes, and you could hear the sea tossing and see it spouting up, people on their way to early holidays across the water and beyond the Alps would say, ‘Well, someone’s been planting seeds. There’s a scarecrow. Spring will likely come.’
For the Green Man would now be standing with arms astretch and head askew and all his tatters flying, blustering grey and black and dun against the dun fields and the grey sky and the black thorn-bushes. There was beginning to be something rakish and reckless now about the Green Man.
Then in April the Green Man stood forth in cold sunshine, his hands folded over the top of his hoe and his chin on his hands, and in the dawn light of Eastertime people talking or jogging or riding by, eating things and laughing, quarrelling, shouting and singing, saw him there clearly, and bright green.
His old black clothes looked green and his winter skin looked bronze-green like a Malay’s. His eyes were amber-green and one minute you saw him, and the next minute you didn’t.
‘Did you see that Man!?’
‘What man?’
‘That Man over there in that field. No—too late. It’s gone now. Like a statue. Gold. No, green.’
‘It must be advertising something.’
‘Did you see that man?’ the children cried, looking backwards from car windows, and the grown-ups went on talking or didn’t bother to answer.
The old country people would say, ‘Maybe it’s the Green Man.’
‘What’s the Green Man?’
‘Nobody knows. He’s some man that’s always been around here. I used to see him when I was little. I’d have thought he’d be dead by now.’
‘The Green Man?’ the granny would say. Then: ‘Never! It couldn’t be. I used to see the Green Man when I was a child and, even then, there was talk of him being as old as Time. He had other names, too. He lived hereabouts somewhere.’
Then a leery, queery old voice from somebody wrapped up in the back of the car among the babies—it would be something after the nature of a great-grandfather—would say, ‘I seed the Green Man wunst when I were in me bassinette in petticoats. We called him Green Man or mebbe wildman. And my old pa, he said his old pa seed the Wild Green Man one day. It was the day my old greaty-greaty-grandpop went marching long this lane in his cherry-coloured coat, to the field of Waterloo.’
‘The only Green Man I know,’ the Dad would say as he drove the car, far too fast, round corners of the lane that, after all, were once the right-angled bends round the fields, ‘is a pub,’ and he’d rush them along towards the motorway that joined up with the Channel Tunnel or the ferry.
‘If it was the Green Man,’ the children would sometimes say as they stood on the deck of the ferry and looked back at the sparkling white cliffs with their grass-green icing, ‘however old can he be? He could be a hundred.’
Nobody knew.
And nobody knows.
Under different names the Green Man may be a thousand years old. Or ten thousand. But his eyes are young and bright and by the time it’s midsummer he is looking dangerously attractive and permanent. He has never had a grey hair in his head. In his sea-green eyes of July is a far-away magical gaze, if you can get near enough to see it. But it is hard to get near. Now you see him, now you don’t. The field is empty and you’ll be lucky to catch a glimmer of a face between branches, down the coppice. Did you see a figure at work with a bill-hook by the blackthorn in white bloom? Maybe you didn’t.
Or he may pass you silently on the dyke above, when you’re fishing the field drains. In the warm dusk at the top of summer he is like the nightingale and gone for deep woodland places. At dawn he is like the skylark, a speck on the blue sky.
Do not imagine that the Green Man is soft and gentle on his land. For all his stillness he is given to rages. He likes to observe and see things right.
‘Get off your backsides,’ he has been known to roar. ‘Keep to your element.’ He shouts this at seed-time and harvest, yells at those—there aren’t many—who know him well.
Sadie and Patsy and Billy, the next-farm children, know him well, and they hang around him and huggle his legs and ankles. They tickle the bare place between his boots and his trouser bottoms, they tease him with teazles.
‘Get off your backsides and out of this drill,’ yells the Green Man at these babies. ‘This drill!’ he yells.
A drill is a long straight furrow in the earth into which the seeds are trickled and then covered up. The Green Man makes thousands of drills across the earth until it looks like corduroy cloth. The seeds grow and turn into one thing or another. They whiten with tendrilly peas, they turn green-gold with barley. Barley whiskers are the colour of a princess’s hair.
‘Get off my land,’ bellows the Green Man as he sees the cat coming, on tiptoe, paddling and playing, chewing at the barley stalks in the heat. ‘Get off my back,’ he thunders next, as the cat comes lapping and weaving and purring and winding around him, growling like a motor, springing up, all claws, to land like needles on the Green Man’s shoulders and even his head. Very bad language follows then. ‘Get off, you filthy scat-scumfish cat. Each to his element.’
The cat drops off the Green Man and lies on its back and shows the Green Man its fluffy white stomach and grins up at him. All animals are interested in the Green Man, but he by no means treats them like pets. And he doesn’t treat people like pets.
As the year passes, the Green Man keeps away from people more and more. In high summer, deep in the trees he watches, very stiff and silent.
He will watch in secret. You can see carvings of him in churches like this. Watching you. It has always been so. He has always been there. Sometimes he is a leaf-mask on a frieze. Sometimes he looks like leaves only.