‘I wish I could divorce you,’ George says. ‘I wish you had a pre-contract, but Jesus, no chance of that, the fields were black with men running in the other direction.’
— Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
What is the meaning of the bold sentence?
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Sign up to join this community‘I wish I could divorce you,’ George says. ‘I wish you had a pre-contract, but Jesus, no chance of that, the fields were black with men running in the other direction.’
— Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
What is the meaning of the bold sentence?
'Black' in this case means that there are so many people, you can't even see the ground beneath them - there's no 'free space' between them. I can't find any references right now, but we have a similar saying in Dutch.
If there are so many people running in the opposite direction than you want to go, you have no chance of achieving your goal. You might know the idiom uphill battle, which seems to be a weaker version of this.