The Tale of the Green Children

Woolpit is a pretty little village in Eastern England just off the highway on which thousands of huge trucks thunder each day between the cities of the Midlands and the ports of Rotterdam and Hamburg. Its origins are Saxon, going back to well before the Norman conquest of 1066, and the name probably refers not to wool but to wolves, and to the pits full of sharpened stakes with which villagers defended themselves from the wild animals that roamed England in those far-off days.

What distinguishes Woolpit from hundreds of other similarly picturesque little boltholes (whose inhabitants today think about data networks and stock prices rather than wool or wolves) is the legend commemorated on the village sign. Sometime around 1220 CE – we can only guess at the year, as the first written records of the events date from some 60 years later – some reapers in the fields on the edge of the village heard cries from the (by now abandoned) pit, from where they saw two terrified and bewildered children emerge.

The children – a girl of around 10 and a somewhat younger boy – were dressed in unfamiliar clothes and spoke a language which no one in the village could understand or recognise, and, strangest of all, their skin was quite green. They were taken to the house of the local squire, where the servants plied them with bread and meat and other foods – the children had given to understand with gestures that they were very hungry – but they refused to eat anything at all until, by chance, some green beans were brought in. Not even the peas in the pod, but the pods themselves, was all the food they would eat for some time.

The boy sickened and died not long afterwards, but the girl started to eat other food and lost her green colour. After a while she learned English, and told her story to the villagers: she and her brother came from a land called St. Martin’s, or Merlin’s, across the water or possibly under the ground (the accounts differ) – a place of eternal twilight where all the inhabitants were green. Hearing a bell ringing in a cave, the children followed a blinding light which brought them suddenly into our world – hence their terror and bewilderment.

In time the girl became baptised, married a local yeoman, and became a normal member of the community, apart from her “somewhat wanton customs”, as one of the chroniclers observes – but the story lives on, and has enjoyed something of a revival in recent years. It’s been a children’s book, an opera and even an off-Broadway play – thanks to its multiple resonances and its value as a litmus test of the way that we interpret and experience the unknown and the unknowable.

To start with, there are the “objective” explanations. The children had been subsisting on wild plants and leaves – hence their colour. They came from a distant village – in the 13^th century people rarely travelled more than a few miles from where they were born – and so spoke an unfamiliar dialect. Or they were Flemish, from what’s now Belgium, the orphan offspring of refugees from the wars raging just over the North Sea. None of these “explanations” is completely satisfactory, but obviously none can be disproved either at a distance of over 800 years, and with only half-remembered hearsay to go on.

The story also calls to mind the various accounts of feral children supposedly raised by wolves (again) or other wild animals, which are scattered across history and across the world – children who sometimes inexplicably failed ever to integrate into human society and sometimes, equally inexplicably, did so perfectly.

But what makes this legend so uniquely multi-layered, haunting and even disturbing is the colour of the children: green is not only the colour of growth and fertility, but also of decay and death – and the children not only were green but would only eat green beans, traditionally the food of the dead. Greenness also evokes a riotous and promiscuous fecundity which tramples over social norms and customs (note the “wantonness” attributed to the green girl): the traditional figure of the “Green Man”, a kind of vegetable deity, is a disruptive figure as much as a symbol of rebirth – evoking as he does an almost forgotten pre-civilized level of consciousness.

And, last but not least, green is the colour most commonly associated with the extraterrestrials whose sightings over the last 100 years or so are the modern legends which the Woolpit story immediately brings to mind. If it had happened 7-800 years later the children would have been described as aliens, and perhaps their story would have been recast and retold as a botched space trip (as a matter of fact, this is one of the “explanations” of the legend currently in circulation now).

However, the ultimate challenge of the Woolpit story is to our ability to accept the complexity and multiplicity of the experienced world itself, and of the consciousness with which we experience it. The current orthodoxy is a kind of brutal and levelling-down reductionism which seeks to nullify and devalue the moral, spiritual and aesthetic aspects of our mental life; “explanation” today all too often equates with dismissal – as if understanding the world (as if we could ever fully understand it!) took away the impulse to respect it or wonder at it.

Stories like that of the green children of Woolpit are gifts made all the more valuable by our ignorance of where they come from. Like all mythic gifts, they’re two-edged, showing us what we fail, or fear, to see in ourselves - even as they reveal the unseen wonders of the world.