The Green Man

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It seemed a day like any other. Or as much like any other as days had been for the past nine months. For the autumn and winter just gone had been two of the worst seasons in living memory.

It had started the previous August with tearing gales and lashing rain, ruining the crops as they stood, unharvested, in the fields, and not letting up until late October. But when the wind and wet finally died away, it was only to give place to early frosts so severe that they turned the ground to iron; and by Christmas heavy falls of snow blanketed the countryside. Vegetables rotted in the earth, and those that were, with Herculean effort and broken spade-handles, eventually lifted into the light of day, were so blighted by disease, and so stunted, as to be barely worth the effort. On the other hand, people had to live — or try to — and any effort was better than starvation. For, of course, it goes without saying that famine, blood brother to storms and subsequent bad harvests, stalked the land from north to south, east to west. Meat, too, was scarce, cattle and sheep having succumbed to the biting cold, dying where they stood in the open fields as they struggled to survive. What hay and grain herdsmen had managed to lay their hands on, soon ran out or was commandeered for the troops mustering somewhere — or so we were told — in Yorkshire and Northumberland, ready to repel invasion by the Scots.

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