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.

Sub specie aeternatis (through the eyes of Eternity)

In a world where finance and economics override all other forms of intellectual activity, and where speculation is what people do on Wall Street, the name of Greece is linked in most people’s minds with words like “debt” and “crisis”. As for “austerity”, that today refers not to a restrained and dignified philosophy, but to brutal cuts in public expenditure aimed at appeasing the same bankers whose lending caused the debt crisis in the first place.

Personally, when I hear Greece mentioned, I like to think of Monemvasia, as it was when I discovered it by accident, over 30 years ago. Hitch-hiking and bussing around Greece with a girl-friend, we were dropped from a beat-up old Peugeot into the small and nondescript modern town on the mainland, from where a narrow causeway leads to a jumble of 3- to 400-year-old stone houses clinging to the side of a huge flat-topped rock. Some are piled on top of each other, some half-ruined and others half-restored, some painted in primary colors and others left in an “austere” gray which is still dazzling in that almost-white Peloponnesian sun. It’s a chaos of shape and form which seems to grow out of the ancient rock and is infinitely soothing to the eye and the soul – unlike, say, the jumble of industrial buildings, apartment blocks, warehouses and freeways that surrounds modern cities.
And then, as we wandered around those narrow streets, picking ripe figs to eat, we came across a path leading up to the top of the rock and to a third and even earlier incarnation of Monemvasia. This was the Byzantine castle, abandoned in the Middle Ages and with little left standing but this ruined church (where the devout from the town below still came to pray and to leave offerings of a few hard-earned drachmas), looking out over endless vistas of clear blue sea and uninhabited rocky coastline, seemingly perched on the edge of the world’s end.

Even at that young age, I was deeply moved by Monemvasia and its message of eternity – the seemingly vast gap between the Byzantium of 1000 years ago and the late 20th century compressed to a 20-minute hike, and all around the stillness of rocks, sea and sky; the changing and the unchanging set in the starkest possible contrast against each other. And there was an additional poignancy for me, traveling with a girl I was madly in love with but whom I feared (rightly) that I would lose once we got back to England – to see so clearly laid out before me that disjunction of people’s fleeting passions and ambitions with what little remains behind when they’ve gone.

Somehow, young as I was, Monemvasia helped me to see that the transitory nature of our hopes and desires doesn’t diminish their value, in fact that’s what gives them their value – but that, like stone walls, they quickly crumble and fade away, leaving only the rocks and the sea and the wind whistling through the empty sky. And the time it takes for this to happen, whether it’s a few years, a few hundred years or even a few thousand years, is a mere blink of the eye of eternity.

Greece, maybe more than any other country, allows us to glimpse the world through those eyes that aren’t ours, but which we can borrow for a moment to acquire some much-needed distance from the tiny concerns which tie us down from day to day. Lifting our eyes to the skies, we remember for a moment who we really are and where we really come from.