on Rory Waterman's Devils in the Details
‘Your grandfeyther would have known them!’

Rory Waterman’s absorbing new prose work has a subtitle: ‘On location with folk tales in England’s forgotten county’. Forgotten? A perceptive phrase in his introduction hits the nail on the head: ‘routinely overlooked’. More nails to come... First, ‘location’. On a map of the East Coast, find the long nick of the Humber. To the south, lies England’s second-largest county (by area). Welcome to Lincolnshire.

I am partisan. Like Waterman, I’m from Lincolnshire, and have published affectionate prose about my village. Our county can claim Tennyson. Born at the edge of the ‘Wolds’ (expensively pretty hills!), he loved Lincolnshire’s generous sands. John Clare lived just south of its flat Fenlands.

Rory Waterman does full justice to this variety. He gives academic definitions of a ‘folk tale’: ‘a scientifically unverifiable narrative [...] of anonymous or unverifiable provenance’. But his lively style is deliberately non-professorial. As he ‘rattles’ around Lincolnshire, his conversational voice moves easily, and humorously, between centuries.

Waterman explains that his is ‘not a book of tales’ but ‘about them’, boldly choosing thirteen (!) subjects. The merits of his method are clear from his first, best-known theme: the ‘Lincoln Imp’.

‘Twelve inches of inscrutable mischief’ is Waterman’s summary of this thirteenth-century carving, high inside Lincoln Cathedral. The Imp’s ‘tale’ is of a devil, turned to stone. Waterman reveals how a canny Victorian jeweller popularised its image. He is equally canny about later literature. Did Arnold Frost, who published an influential poem in 1897, really learn the Imp’s adventures from a man ‘of sixty years’? An old villager ...