The Green Man keeps a house for comfort, but he’s seldom inside it. He has had wives in his time, maybe hundreds, and they have tried to care for it. One wife cannot have been long-since, for he has twelve sons and four daughters living, very sturdy. Of course they may be much older than they look.
The twelve sons are scattered about the world, as sons tend to be, but the four daughters visit regularly, as daughters are more likely to do. The house is like a lark’s nest lying low in the fields. The doors and the windows of the house are always open until the daughters close them. They visit, bringing bread and milk and lamb chops and shortbread, cleaning fluids, dishcloths and porridge. They flick about with feather dusters and say, ‘This place gets no better. Lord, how it smells of mice!’ They go looking for their father in the flicker of the poplars and down the marsh and across the fields near the sea.
The mice are not in the house at all on these occasions. Mice can smell daughters as daughters can smell mice. When they hear the daughters’ cars arriving, their noses twitch and they’re off into the bushes.
But when the daughters have gone away again, the mice creep greedily back.
The mice are fieldmice, but this is a misnomer. They should be called pantrymice or cupboardmice or pocketmice. They run in the Green Man’s chests of drawers and armoires, in his bags of meal and flour. They run among the dishcloths and in the Green Man’s little-used blanket. They lie, fat and lazy, in the fold of his folded deck-chair. They nestle in his boots and nest in his woollen cardigan and in the pocket of the mackintosh that hangs on the back of the kitchen door.
Do not imagine that the Green Man is a saint to these mice.
The weather one spring was cruelly sharp and perhaps the Green Man was feeling the weight of his two or three thousand years. He was using his house for sleeping every night. He was even occasionally lighting his dangerous paraffin stove which lit with a pop and a blob.
One day he lay down on his couch in the daytime, sneezing, with his cushion and his rug. He felt heavy with years and he coughed as he slept. And awoke to the mice running across his face like rain. He felt them running about in his blanket and snuffling at his toes. There was activity in his green-gold hair. With a roar he lit the lamp and found a mouse making off with a green curl to her nest in his boot.
‘This must end!’ cried the Green Man. ‘The time has come. Each to his element.’ And the next day he set off down the lane with his cheque-book and confronted the corn chandler’s in the High Street of the nearest market town. The corn chandler’s stands between the supermarket and the popso-bar, but it does a good trade.
How very strange the Green Man looked, holding out his cheque-book, demanding a writing implement. ‘Mouse poison,’ cried the Green Man: ‘a quantity.’
Someone ran out into the yard and called in others. ‘There’s a right one here.’
‘Who is it? What is it? Where’s it from? Is it human? Why’s it green?’
The old pale-faced corn chandler sat by the fire in the back of the office. ‘It’ll be the Green Man,’ he said.
‘Is it the Council? Is it political? Is it trouble?’
‘It’s the Green Man.’
‘He’s for killing mice. He’s no Green Man. Is he out of a fairground?’
‘Don’t thwart him,’ said the corn chandler. ‘Don’t thwart the Green Man,’ he said, poking the fire.
The Green Man walked back along the ice-rutted lanes and the cold air puffed from his mouth like a dragon. ‘Mice,’ he muttered, ‘mice. Each to his element.’
When he reached home he called, ‘This is to fettle you. Back to your fields,’ and he lifted the lid of the flour kist and saw fat, snoring, distended mice from weeks back lying like drunken skiers in the snow. They looked comfortable and in bliss.
These were the ones who were still sleeping and hadn’t realised yet that the more flour they ate, the less likely they would be to get out. There were a number of dead ones. The Green Man tipped the whole brigade out into the grass. The ones who could still snore woke up and made off, looking foolish.
The foolish look of the released mice amused the Green Man, and he liked them after all as they ran away. Then he looked with shame at the mouse poison in the great drum he had bought from the corn chandler. Where to put it for safety until he could take it back and swap it for seed?
He put the drum inside the flour crock for the moment and went off to the fields, where he stood planning the year in the March weather.
The Green Man can make mistakes, for he is a man.