Peter Porter, Chorale at the Crossing (Picador, 2016)

Chorale at the Crossing brings together poems written between the Australian-born Peter Porter’s last collection, Better than God, published in 2009, and his death in 2010 at the age of 81. This amounts to fifty-three pages of new work, and as such has the appearance of a final full collection, though it is unclear whether all of the poems would’ve made it into Porter’s final cut. Moreover, though Sean O’Brien’s introduction is warm and rewarding, it sheds no light on whether Porter is responsible for the ordering of the contents, nor on who served as editor, nor on why the book took five further years to appear. In any case, though it is inevitably uneven, this volume sparkles frequently with Porter’s highly readable wit and wisdom, and contains some outstanding poems made all the more poignant by the fact that, for much of the time during which they were written, he knew he was dying.

In the opener, ‘First Poem of the Last Book’, the poet challenges himself to be true and forthright and to keep a steady nerve: ‘no reaching for Last Things, / Not Nature’s, god’s, or history’s armature, / Just kitchen, garden, bedroom splinterings!’ The second – though, O’Brien tells us, the last of these poems Porter completed – seems to speak to us as an extended epitaph on himself:

The sound of speech, the voice of sense on earth,
In this adjunct seems carpentered of years.
My richness now is nothing but a dearth
Of tricks for the wiping-away of tears.

Death was always one of Porter’s recurring subjects, though here it is all the more central not only because of its imminence, but also because of, as O’Brien puts it, the ‘inevitable shrinking of horizons’ illness brings. (Porter’s native Australia, for example, is almost absent from these poems.) Another leitmotif is a self-questioning ars poetica, and the two aren’t necessarily kept apart. ‘A Perfect Suicide’ (‘I bungled my own death’), begins:

And here I will sacrifice all rhyme,
that is, I will avoid any of the beautiful
consequences which may intrude on patterns
infinitely more inter-calculable […]

Porter’s poetry is in fact often both formal and metrical, and no less lithe for that. ‘Lines for an English Heine’, for example, uses the constraint of tetrameters with interlocking rhymes to create a reflexively emotional, emotive prism:

Our monosyllables are fraught
With all the things we cannot say,
And feeling now is drawn to thought
While thought is threadbare with delay.

This also shows something of Porter’s rare skill at using abstractions in the service of verse that has real apothegmatic weight. An equal number of the poems, however, are riddled with odd syntactical inversions, wrenched metres, and trite rhymes in the service of keeping the formalist boat on course. This, from the same poem, surely asks us to forgive too much, and makes us work too hard for what it offers in return:

Germanic hopes by tongue-tied lake
In simple language trail the heart,
But English words cannot awake
From secrecy a speaking art.

The ambitious ‘A Toccatina of Galuppi’s’, a deferential nod to ‘A Toccatta of Galuppi’s’ by Robert Browning in Browning’s rhymed tercets, also echoes its predecessor by imagining layers of time in that most precarious of cities, Venice, and ends with Browning in the place of his death:

What hangs in minor keys and major lingers in the mind like lead.
“Those suspensions, those solutions – must we die?” and then we’re dead.
In the Ca’ Rezzonico, one Robert Browning climbs to bed.

The metre is seductively jaunty, and on the whole this is a superbly rich poem – but though it is clear what the first line wants to mean, the image is lazily illogical.

The collection ends on another high point, though. ‘Hermit Crab’ was written just six weeks before the poet died – and was dictated, as were all of his poems in his final illness, to his wife Christine, who typed it up:

I have no new shell to retreat to
Having scanned the beach (it has never
Seemed so wide and such a tympanum
For the thundering ocean) […]

It is a decidedly odd, clear-eyed, moving and memorable poem, full of thought’s chicanery, and complemented here by an afterword from Christine Porter, in which she calls it ‘a powerful hymn to death and the letting go of life’. That could serve as an epigraph for this humane, mordant and often consoling last book.

My blog post last week attracted a lot more attention than I am used to - about twenty thousand views. I think I then, on dread social media, got the bit between my teeth a little more than I like to - not that I don’t stand behind what I have said in that post.

But I’m a poet. I suspect most of my new followers will have little to no interest in poetry, like most people, and might not even have reached this sentence. Still, I’ve never posted one of my poems before, and I thought I’d do so now.

This poem is, I hope, to be read as a metaphor that isn’t tethered solely to my (in the grand scheme) insignificant, individual life. That was important to me when I worked on it. But its motivation was entirely personal: meeting and getting to know Francesca (I don’t call her that, but never mind), the woman in the photo below. That photo was taken on Fair Head, County Antrim, in precisely the setting I imagined for the poem nearly nine years earlier. She has now spent the last nine years in my life. She’s the best person in the world. And I’ve met everybody, so you can trust me.

Where to Build

I never thought I’d have a home
but then I’d built one up from the bay,
a shrub-scrubbed cleft half-hiding it,
a plunging stream behind the grate

and locals pointed up, or down,
to where I lived beside myself
for years, with all I’d wanted most,
building a greenhouse, annexe, shelves,

and made it all I knew to want
and drowned the voice that said I don’t
with all I’d always done for this
and grew tomatoes, seed to light

and ate them, happily, every night,
and fixed the leak that drew the rain
and fixed it when it sprung again.
Well, I knew of rock across the bay –

a skerry? – green-topped, curving round
to out of sight behind near rock.
But rain set in, the endless rain,
and through the sheet of endless cloud

a jet of sudden light cracked down
across that farther hunk of land,
which glimmered ginger. And it stayed
for seconds, minutes, hours, days,

the whole life of my house away.

My poetry books.

EDIT, 15 AUGUST 2026:

I wrote the article below on 1 August. On 5 August, having lost the backing of his employer, the professor resigned, and should then have faded from the story. Media interest instead grew astronomically, and stayed on the man until his death on 14 August. The New York Times then published this article, and the Guardian published this one. The most telling part of it, I think, is this: ‘After initially defending Arday as the victim of a smear campaign, as further questions arose about his academic career, the university began to temper its support.’

This is a tragedy with more layers than many people I’ve seen commenting on it in its immediate aftermath would like to admit, presumably because they are of one political persuasion or the other. It is not incumbent on anyone to present a reductive analysis that either crassly and unfeelingly blames a dead man who should never have been put in the position he was in for his own death (I’ve seen that several times now and it makes me feel sick), or blames only a commentariat that in many cases responded gleefully to the smell of blood, though it did.

Focusing on one or the other to the exclusion of everything else lets some very powerful people involved in academic headhunting, on hiring committees, etc, who should have known - and in fact must have known - better, off the hook they swam into. Those powerful people need to account for themselves. They have caused the most damage, and it is damage that will be felt far beyond this awful circumstance, and principally by people who already have unfair challenges. Excessively powerful people always do cause the most damage when they fear no repercussions: power corrupts, and must be held in check.

He had kids. A wife. Other family. He’d resigned. He shouldn’t have been the story, which is why I didn’t name him on 1 August. Rest in peace.

It seems that a Cambridge Professor – one of the most lauded in its recent history – is in especially hot water, following easily-assessed accusations of mass plagiarism and data falsification in his PhD thesis and across much of his slim scholarly output, and scepticism about many of his (in both senses) incredible biographical claims, some connected directly to his job. However, several senior academics (in addition to a fox-bashing lawyer, a couple of actors, and a handful of politicians) have signed an open letter claiming there to be ‘no evidence whatsoever’ of plagiarism in his work, and that all the allegations are ‘baseless’ and ‘entirely false’. A lot has been written about this horrible episode, which will do immense harm of various kinds, and if you are unaware of what has happened this is a good place to start, this is a good place to go next, and this, for now, is the place to finish. I wish instead to focus on the defenders of what seems indefensible, or at least those of them who really matter.

On 31 July, the professor in question spoke to The Times, and admitted to being a serial plagiarist and falsifier of data (or, rather, ‘did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism’ and accepted other ‘errors’ but does ‘not view them as discrepancies’). This inadvertently threw the signatories – including Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen (Borat’s cousin) of the University of Cambridge, Lord Simon Woolley, Principal of Homerton College at the University of Cambridge, Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, President of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, Sonita Alleyne, Master of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge, Professor Ricardo Sabates Aysa at the University of Cambridge, Professor Matt Houlbrook at the University of Birmingham, Lord Sir Michael Hastings, Chair of SOAS, University of London, Professor Kehinde Andrews at Birmingham City University, and Professor Robert Beckford at the University of Winchester – under a heavy bus. The Grauniad has (belatedly) published this excellent article about the affair, which should surely be the equivalent of putting the bus into first and slamming down a foot. But that rarely seems to happen to people called Lord Sir Professor Something-Or-Other, does it? They’ll probably all be fine.

I can forgive the open letter signatories outside academia who have assumed the apparent plagiarist is simply an innocent victim of the right-wing press: the left-wing press has in some cases presented that view, and most people who have come across it will have looked no further than a few gleeful social media posts, many of which have been stabbed into keyboards by bad actors with brains the size of pinheads. Perhaps these signatories should be more curious before responding thus to a story, but they are not, and being curious about the truth of such a matter is not in most cases a professional obligation. Moreover, the story simply has emboldened bigots, so that bit is true enough. The evidence of academic malpractice nonetheless seems obvious and extensive, as this post makes abundantly clear, though it only focuses on the prof’s PhD thesis and its cribbing of the thesis of another student six years earlier. The title of the offending document is ‘An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ [sic] to inform reflective practice within the context of action research’. The use of what should perhaps be referred to as the Cambridge superscript comma even seems to be a carbon copy of the source, where a possessive apostrophe is used correctly.

Quite a few academics have also taken to social media to say the accusations of plagiarism are baseless, or that an analysis of any academic’s work would reveal the same pattern of patched-together unattributed thefts – an insulting suggestion that the professor at the heart of the stooshie made himself when he was claiming to be a befuddled victim yesterday in The Times. Perhaps these academics are using a definition of ‘plagiarism’ wholly new to me. If not, either they know they are lying, or their own work should come under serious scrutiny; either they are selective ignorers of apparently incontrovertible evidence, or dangerously and jaw-dislocatingly ignorant about the basic standards expected in their profession. In either case, they’re certainly not sticking it to the populist right commentariat and its lackeys, as they seem to have thought they were doing, but instead are arming those people with what will be perceived as evidence, straight from their usually very horsey horses’ mouths. If this sort of theft were indeed normal and justifiable in academia, which it is not, then the social sciences and humanities, at the very least, would be every bit as pointless as the most ignorant, reactionary watchers of GB News like to say they are. These people are making us all look ridiculous and worthless to the general public at a time when the sector is under sustained threat anyway (though probably not at places like Cambridge where most of them do some sort of work). And as Lanre Bakare put it in his article for the Guardian, ‘prominent academics of colour that the Guardian spoke to said the claims of plagiarism were legitimate, and that Arday’s alleged actions risked undermining others who study race.’ Obviously. If what is arguably the most coveted academic position in a field of study can be given to an apparently exorbitantly fraudulent scholar with a crepe-paper-thin record of serious publications, and he is then protected by lots of Very Important People who might as well be promising that up is down and left is right and that only bigots disagree, serious scholars in aligned fields, with less coveted positions at less prestigious (and protected) universities - and I know several such people - all stand to suffer in perpetuity.

Perhaps some of their - our - more defensive, to my mind untruthful, mainly managerial-class, privately-educated academic colleagues have other, bourgeois reasons to want to defend the likes of Cambridge University from well-deserved criticism. Or to defend the sorts of people who (as reported by Retraction Watch) spend many thousands of pounds employing the services of Carter-Ruck – a firm famous for acting as a guard dog for Russian oligarchs and others of that sort – to dissuade journalists from Times Higher Education from doing their jobs. They’re certainly doing no favours whatsoever to scholars from disadvantaged backgrounds. I’ll be happy to look these people in the eye in public, and ask some extremely difficult questions. They’re welcome to get in touch.

Why does this matter so much? Because I think my profession matters a lot, or often does. And because a person with a professorial chair at Cambridge is not above scrutiny – but nor is an elitist system that looks after itself, or seeks to, however inadvisedly. The general public understandably assumes a much-lauded professor at one of the world’s elite universities is at the apex of his profession. League tables of ‘research excellence’ seem to reinforce this, because those institutions get more than their share of external research funding, and are the source of a disproportionate number of highly-regarded research publications. Those tables don’t really reflect inherent merit: simple, age-old prejudice funnels the bulk of funding to supposedly elite universities, to some topics over others, and to some parts of the country over others; scholars at supposedly elite institutions tend to do considerably less teaching and don’t have as many non-research obligations as their counterparts everywhere else. Nonetheless, the general public is bound to believe that a professor at Cambridge is an especially bright star in the firmament. If you try what you have been told is a chef‘s best dish and it tastes exactly like bullshit, you probably don’t want to eat anything else from the same kitchen, and will tell all your friends.

A few additional thoughts, not all strictly relevant.

1. Do the academics named above sit on student academic irregularity panels? Will they do so in future? I’m fascinated. I’d love to audit one.

2. Liverpool John Moores University, the prof’s PhD-awarding institution, admitted to giving him one (ONE) supervision during his PhD, according to his interview in The Times. Students of mine get about 12-13 supervisions a year. That is normal in my experience, at least where I work, and I have never had the sense that it wasn’t normal for any of the many PhD students I’ve examined externally. What’s going on?

3. If Cambridge really wanted to do something to tackle institutional inequality, it could always put a strict cap on home undergraduate admissions from fee-paying schools. That would probably batter the funding model though…

Whether The Stones of the Field is or is not a first collection depends on your definition. It was published by a vanity press, as was Thomas’s second book, An Acre of Land (1952); most of the poems in both were then included, along with newer work, in Song at the Year’s Turning (1955), published more salubriously by Rupert Hart-Davis. This later book bore an introduction by John Betjeman, which ended: ‘The “name” which has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public will be forgotten long before that of R. S. Thomas’. But I’m going to focus on the original debut, a book once printed by an outfit tucked in a room above a chippy in Carmarthen, which sold pitifully at the time and cost the author £60 – roughly two months’ wages – to print, and which would now set you back something close to £1500.

Thomas turned thirty-three in 1946, so it wasn’t an especially early debut, but perhaps we should be thankful that this relative benchmark didn’t come along earlier. His juvenilia, some of it printed in the Bangor college magazine under the pseudonym Curtis Langdon and in The Dublin Magazine in 1939-40, had been almost uniformly wistful and lightweight, the poems of someone who has not yet developed a voice of his own or found anything original to say, and who therefore sticks to generalities:

I know no clouds
More beautiful than they
That the far hills shroud
At the end of the day.

Good for you, Ronald. However, this is painfully trite and equally painfully contrived; the inversion ‘That the far hills shroud’ creates confusion about which is the subject, which the object, and has obviously been perpetrated to get a rhyme. It is a far cry from the stark impressions of local and personal life that were to make Thomas’s name a few years later. By the end of the Second World War this man, used to life in Holyhead and Bangor and at least passingly familiar with the company of scholars and theologians, was working as a priest in the tiny mid-Wales village of Manafon, and trying to fall in love with his country in the flesh as he had in theory. The villages of mid-Wales had a profound and deeply invigorating effect on the poems he wrote, and this is immediately apparent in The Stones of the Field: when the Times Literary Supplement gave it brief notice, the reviewer described not a navel-gazing fop, but ‘a Welshman steeped in the customs, traditions and feelings of his country’, and a new poetic voice with ‘a fearful intensity and reality’. None of the stuff in that earlier, faux-Georgian mode infiltrates the 1946 book.

The most famous poem in this collection is perhaps the best-known poem Thomas would ever write: ‘A Peasant’. Here he begins his two-decade poetic relationship with Iago Prytherch, a ‘prototype’ hill-farmer somewhat akin to Patrick Kavanagh’s Maguire in ‘The Great Hunger’. At the start of the poem, Prytherch is presented in achingly bucolic fashion as ‘an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills, / Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud’. But there is a hint of what is to come in the pun on ‘pens’: in very different senses Thomas and Prytherch both ‘pen’ these sheep, but neither seems to know much about the working life of the other. Thomas is paving the way for a shocking close-up, for Prytherch does not remain a distant symbol but a reality like Maguire, and at close quarters any shadowy romanticism is suddenly and surprisingly blotted out by stark reality. This is a long way from the world of study, intellectual rigour, writing poetry:

[A]t night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact […].

At least he ‘gobs at the fire’, unlike Maguire, who ‘spreads his legs over the impotent cinders’. Just as Philip Larkin’s ‘The Card-Players’ presents the comically unsavoury Jan van Hogspeuw, who ‘Gobs at the grate’ and simultaneously seems eternal and truthful, so Prytherch appears to be (to borrow Charles Causley’s phrase) in his ‘fixed place in God’s universe’. ‘[S]eason by season / Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition’, he ‘Preserves his stock’, and being suddenly at close quarters with him we are forced to recognise both the depth of his bond to his environment and the shallowness of his mind – as though the two are necessary counterparts. It is a giddying juxtaposition and near-epiphany. Then, in the last line of the poem, after zooming so far in on the apparently uncouth existence of the peasant, the poem gratefully zooms back out to leave him once more a symbol of fortitude, ‘Enduring like a tree under the curious stars’, as fascinatingly strange to the poet as are celestial bodies – and in a sense equally far away.

In ‘A Peasant’, the farmer’s rancid clothes ‘shock the refined, / But affected sense’; there can be little doubt that they shock the speaker, and the enjambment immediately makes the two words that follow it seem bathetic on the part of those thus affected. In attacking this false etiquette and propriety, Thomas turns the tide of opprobrium on himself (and probably on the reader, too) in an instant. And what is more, Prytherch ‘is your prototype’: we have no right to our proud condemnation. Thomas is echoing Part IV of Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘Death by Water’, which recalls the demise of Phlebas the Phoenician, and ends:

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Though an uncouth idiot, Iago Prytherch is simultaneously an embodiment of belonging and endurance and, like Phlebas, a warning against hubris.

But while ‘A Peasant’ challenges readers (and the poet) to assess their own smug positions, as well as the true nature of the rustic hill-farmer, this is taken to a new level in ‘An Airy Tomb’. This poem, easily the longest in the book, describes in some detail the ‘long life alone’ on the moor of another named farmer, Twm, full of yearnings and failures that again call to mind Kavanagh’s Maguire. Near the end, however, the narrative voice sours abruptly, as the poem turns to attack the reader’s artistic proclivities and presumed sense of social superiority:

And you, hypocrite reader, at ease in your chair,
Do not mock their conduct, for are you not also weary
Of this odd tale, preferring the usual climax?
How dare he!

Thomas in his early thirties, then, is nothing like the same poet as Thomas in his mid-twenties. What on earth happened? It is hard not to feel that he must have read Kavanagh’s book when it came out in 1942, and that it had a profound effect on him; but the presentation of Prytherch is far more confused than that of Maguire, as well as being much more protracted. As Thomas moved further into the heart of Wales, following his curacies, there fermented in him a means for exploring the ensuing hurt, hope and discomfort he felt in his new environment. As he fell deeply in love with his small country and simultaneously found himself for the first time at close quarters with his rural country-folk, the ideal and reality did not always match up, and this antagonism invigorates the poetry, full as it is of naked love and loathing, despair and admiration. Nowhere is this truer than in ‘A Priest to His People’. Here, Thomas writes what, in spite of the poem’s title, he would never have proclaimed from the pulpit – perhaps safe in the knowledge that the considerable majority of ‘his people’ would not read it:

Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales,
With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females,
How I have hated you for your irreverence, your scorn even
Of the refinements of art and the mysteries of the Church […].

‘Wantoners’ are impervious to moral teaching. But ‘hate’, at least when misplaced, is a deeply irreverent and un-Christian emotion, and the irony of this is not lost on Thomas. Moreover, his powerful distaste raises serious concerns for the priest about his own earthly purpose. These ‘hated’ men and ‘sweaty females’ are in fact the people who belong in this environment: they are ‘of the hills’, ‘of Wales’ (my italics), and the speaker is an intruder in their midst. Thomas’s scorn is therefore rooted not only in disgust, but also in the jealous fear that he might be obsolete, that those he addresses are not ‘his people’ at all, and seem to be getting by quite well without more than perfunctory recourse to their local intermediary with God. His vocational and Godly duty is to serve ‘his’ people, but priest and people repel one another.

The recognition of this results in a sequence of thoughts that leads to an extraordinary volte-face, an unholy epiphany. The lives of the priest’s ‘people’ are not unhappy: though ‘curt and graceless’, their ‘sudden laughter / Is sharp and bright as a whipped pool’, and noticing this laughter and realising what it means alters utterly the priest-speaker’s perception. Suddenly he understands their lack of interest in the Church, their inability to see its relevance to their lives:

[…] your strength is a mockery
Of the pale words in the black Book,
And why should you come like sparrows for prayer crumbs […]?

What need have they for God, who have already in a sense inherited the earth and who live in harmony with their environment? Why should they be anything other than ‘indifferent to all that [the priest] can offer’? The poet is torn between feelings of admiring jealousy and loathing for these enigmatic beings that will, regardless of his influence, ‘continue to unwind [their] days / In a crude tapestry under the jealous heavens’, and who are, unwittingly, his muses, able to ‘affront, bewilder, yet compel my gaze’ (my italics again). Indeed, ‘jealous’ God seems to need them more than they need Him – and certainly the poet does. They might not be aware of the artistic flame they have ignited (or the ‘artistry’ of their dwellings ‘on the bare hill’) but they are illuminated by it nonetheless.

Thomas rarely names specific locations in his poems, as though doing so might have compromised the relative universality of his message about life in rural Wales. ‘Country Church (Manafon)’ is the only exception in this book, and here the location is significant:

The church stands, built from the river stone,
Brittle with light, as though a breath could shatter
Its slender frame, or spill the limpid water,
Quiet as sunlight, cupped within the bone.

It stands yet. But though soft flowers break
In delicate waves round limbs the river fashioned
With so smooth care, no friendly God has cautioned
The brimming tides of fescue for its sake.

The churchyard is wild with fescue grass and flowers; the building’s stones have been fashioned by an almost anthropomorphised caring river; the verse is couched in an ABBA rhyme scheme with feminine central half-rhymes, enacting a sort of gentle prosodic encasement. This is a romantic scene in which animate and inanimate intertwine organically, but more than that it commemorates a building in which sanctuary can be sought from the ‘brimming tides’ without: a metaphor for more than just the natural environment. The poem could describe any of scores of village churches in Britain, though, were it not for the bracketed subtitle; Thomas is reclaiming the village, or the part of it he is most attuned to, and tacitly commemorating its historic social and spiritual hub as a personal place of refuge from those without whom he found so inscrutable. The repetition of ‘stands’ is a quietly emphatic celebration of the church’s permanence and the sense of spiritual belonging it enables in this village community from which he feels estranged. This is not a poem of belonging to Manafon, but of surviving in spite of it – a leitmotif for the book as a whole.

There are none of Thomas’s ostensibly nationalist poems in this tiny book. Here, we experience a poet fraught with uncertainties, decades before he became so sure-footed. The Stones of the Field presents one of the greatest modern poets at his finest and most volatile, writing poems that have entered folklore and that, at the time of their initial publication, nobody wanted to print on their author’s behalf. To open it is to be confronted by a threshold.

Haxey

The Haxey Hood is a game, played annually on the twelfth day of Christmas. It involves a ‘lord’, a ‘fool’, eleven ‘boggins’ including a ‘chief boggin’ and anyone else who wants to join in. Their aim is to take the ‘hood’, a leather cylinder, to one of four pubs (three in Haxey and one in the neighbouring village of Westwoodside), without running with it, or throwing or kicking it, which means it ends up being transported in a big (and largely inebriated) scrum called the sway, which frequently breaks into folk songs, singing them as though they are football chants. The hood is then kept on display at the winning pub for the rest of the year. I have turned up on about five occasions over the past two decades or so, and it has got a little more media attention over time, but not much.

The only rules are pretty simple: don’t run with or throw the hood, and stop to pick people up when they inevitably fall over in a mass of what can be up to two hundred (almost exclusively male) bodies. The boggins help when that happens, and try to steer the sway away from danger and damage. The landlord or landlady of the winning pub must be passed the hood without stepping over the threshold, and must then give everyone a free drink. Such is the price of glory. A unique chant is bellowed by all at the end of the fool’s speech, before the game begins, and occasionally at other times: ‘Oose agen oose, toon agen toon, if a man meets a man knock ‘im doon, but doan’t ‘ot ‘im’, followed by a big cheer.

Here you can see The Fool being smoked over damp straw outside Haxey church and making his speech, just before the games begin in a field a couple of hundred yards away. The events have an origin myth, much discussed, including by me here. and believe me, I wanted to write a chapter about the Haxey Hood, perhaps a counterpart to Ethel Rudkin’s account of the day, written almost a century ago. It’s a folk game more than a folk tale, though, so I decided not to.

Stainfield

The Wild Man of Stainfield is the only extant wild man legend associated specifically with Lincolnshire. See here. In tiny St Andrew’s church, Stainfield, you’ll meet this uncanny rendering of him.

The book contains a chapter on wild man legends, their literary history, and the legacies of them in other cryptoids, all centred on Stainfield.

Bardney

Bardney Abbey was huge, and you can tell it was huge just by looking at where it once stood: serried ranks of pimples extend across a field. About a century ago, the site was excavated, then turfed over again. That garment is wearing thin in a few places, though.

One still popular and locally well-known legend, derived from Bede, is told about the abbey. I write about that in a chapter in the book called ‘The Valley of God’ - there were once more than twenty monastic houses close to the River Witham, between Lincoln and the fens, a higher concentration than anywhere else in England. I also briefly discuss the legend in this short BBC podcast recorded last year.

Bottesford

There is a Bottesford in Lincolnshire, but this one is just over the border in Leicestershire, and the photograph shows a monument in the church, which alludes to the most famous witch trial associated with Lincolnshire. The ‘witches’ were Joan Flower and her daughters, Margaret and Philippa, servants to the Earl and Countess of Rutland at Belvoir Castle near Grantham. They were accused of killing two young brothers, Henry and Francis Manners, who were heirs to Francis Manners, the Earl of Rutland. Joan apparently died in Ancaster, on route to trial in Lincoln, when she choked on a piece of bread: she allegedly requested it, saying that if she was guilty it would choke her, and this was taken as evidence, further incriminating the daughters, who confessed. Confessions in witch trials were normally encouraged by means of extreme torture, of course. These ‘witches’ were executed on 11 March 1618.

The monument notes that the earl and countess ‘had two sonnes, both wch dyed in their infancy by wicked practise & sorcerye’. It is the only reference to these women on any monument anywhere, which is unfortunate. I discuss this in the book, as a coda to the legend of Byard’s Leap, a few miles from Ancaster, which also concerns the vanquishing of an alleged witch.

Lincoln

This cadaver tomb is in the Angel Choir in Lincoln Cathedral. I write about it briefly in the opening chapter of the book, which focuses on the Lincoln Imp:

There are more obvious things to tempt the eye in this part of the cathedral, called the Angel Choir – including the twenty-eight sculpted angels that give it that name. The Imp is wedged where two arches meet, atop a giant black pillar of Purbeck marble, which is itself striking, at once dour and sparkly. Beside it, the perpendicular Gothic tomb of St. Hugh ostentatiously protrudes two modern metal spikes towards the heavens. Behind that, there is a fourteenth-century cadaver tomb: a sort of bunk bed, in which a stone effigy reposes in full regalia on top, and underneath an emaciated stone corpse counterpart reminds us that we are all mortal flesh – something I’ve lived with since I first toddled up to it about four decades ago and found myself eye-to-ribcage with the other end of life.

Markby

Markby church contains very unusual physical evidence of a tradition that is - or in some cases was - common in various forms across cultures in the northern hemisphere. The shortest chapter in the book, ‘Markby, Widdershins’, explores that tradition as manifest at Markby, and relates it to similar things elsewhere. But the chapter involves a summer visit, and this picture was taken in the dead of winter. I didn’t sit on the chair.

…and finally

Here I am with the folklorist Maureen James at the ‘Lincolnshire Lore: Stories and Song’ event at Grimsby Town Hall in September 2024. This was one of three events put on in partnership with Heritage Lincolnshire as part of my AHRC-funded Lincolnshire Folk Tales project. The performers were Kathy Hipperston and Simon Kirk from Time Will Tell Theatre, and the folk musician Mossy Christian. In each location, Mossy, Kathy and Simon developed a show focused on legends and songs local (or otherwise directly relevant) to that location, in ‘consultation’ with me. They were wonderful events, not least in Grimsby, where Mossy had everyone singing fishing songs.

Maureen’s book Lincolnshire Folk Tales reinvigorated my interest in local folklore when I read it a decade or so ago. I then read her forensic PhD thesis, on Marie Clothilde Balfour and the ‘Legends of the Lincolnshire Carrs’, which was recommended to me by my former colleague Katie Holland. Maureen has become a friend, as well as an inspiration. Without her previous work, my Devils in the Details probably would not exist. She’s also a dab hand at getting things done. That night in Grimsby, the ‘catering’ people left us with an immense quantity of tea, coffee and soft drinks, then buggered off home. There were at least 150 people in attendance. Maureen set about making drinks, even though she was there as a punter. She’s a super person.

Buy Devils in the Details from Five Leaves or from Waterstones or from Amazon, or from wherever you get your books.

Read excerpts from chapter 4, chapter 6, chapter 10, chapter 13.

My dad was a poet. That apple landed below the bough, at least. His poetry has faded from view somewhat, partly because that’s almost every writer’s destiny and he is not exempt, though also perhaps because he made so many enemies and blew up more metaphorical bridges in life than the current US President threatens to blow up literal ones on social media. Nonetheless, I loved him immensely - and I think he was talented, too. You can find his books and judge for yourself if you want to.

Lazy comparisons between his poetry and mine have often frustrated me, though I accept they are inevitable. A sequence primarily ‘about’ our relationship in the last year and a bit of his life is at the start of my most recent collection, Come Here to This Gate (Carcanet, 2024). I think about him almost every day.

This is the right place for my father’s funeral, though sadly he has never been here before today. His best friend, at least as far as my father was concerned – who was one of the kindest men I’ve ever met, and a true father and husband – passed away last summer, and had a very moving, well-attended funeral right here. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, my father was unable to attend it, for reasons some of you know about. But that evening on the phone, as my partner and I stopped in Kings Lynn on our way back home to Nottingham, he asked me to describe the funeral to him. My father had an excellent imagination, so I’d like to think he saw it anyway, in his mind’s eye.

My dad was born in London in 1940, just after the Phoney War had come to an end and just before the Blitz began. He was born to Irish parents, one of whom he later got to know and whom I called granddad. But he was adopted, and grew up mainly with his adoptive mother, my gran born in 1900, and then his younger sister – his wonderful younger sister. Until 9, he lived in Woodford, North London, with both adoptive parents, and then his mother moved with the two children to Croydon. He never saw his father again.

His favourite childhood pursuits were things like: climbing trees in Epping Forest, and later playing tennis in Ashburton Park; inventing tinpot dictatorships and then going to pretend war with his friend Chris (my dad’s was Ludicrania, Chris’s was Plonkvitia); running long distance races (pretty well, I gather); and, briefly, playing in a skiffle group, though he freely admitted to having no aptitude for music whatsoever, much as he liked listening to it. (When I was a child he’d give me tapes of folk music that he’d made, and later blues, both faces of each cassette bearing his characteristic almost-illegible scrawl of song titles on a thick layer of Tippex.) He was always the sort of person who’d like to have a go at things. But his childhood was complex, and so was he. At 17, and being a troubled and troublesome adolescent, he was ordered by police to leave the family home, and began several years of working at various jobs: bank clerk, bookshop worker, hotel porter. He took A Levels in his early twenties, then went to the University of Leicester to study English. He then began a DPhil on the poet Edward Thomas at Oxford, but left without finishing, because he’d secured a job as a lecturer in English at the New University of Ulster – first in Derry, and then in Coleraine. He arrived in 1968, just before the Troubles began in earnest.

In 1974, he published his first book of poems, Living Room, with Marvell Press. It was the first of ten books: eight collections, a Selected Poems and a Collected Poems. My dad was talented with words, the sleights they afforded, the control they gave him. Often, he rewrote truths, making them more manageable, then believing them. But he could also be poignant, moving, and funny. In one poem about gardening, he wrote: ‘Concrete the bloody things over and leave yourselves free’. He might have said the same as a metaphor for the things he had done and seemed so capable of forgetting he’d done. But I think his reputation as a poet deserves to be higher than it now is.

He met my mother, his fourth wife, in 1980, when he was exactly the age I am now. Soon she was pregnant. His friends in Ireland hoped it would settle him, but it didn’t: he wasn’t one for being settled. She left him in 1983, and took me, a toddler, a wee wain, with her to Lincolnshire (thankfully). I think it is this distance that helped my childhood experiences of him to be so overwhelming, and they still are in my mind.

I’ll always remember with passion our short, intense access visits when I was a small child, in Lincoln and elsewhere – including often here in Norwich. Him hiding behind the statue of King George III in Lincoln Castle and pretending to answer my questions in a gruff voice. Us making paper boats, decorating them with silly pictures, and racing them between bridges of the River Witham, unless the swans got them first. Him scurrying with me through the canopies of trees in the treehouses in the grounds of Belton House near Grantham. And, though I didn’t then understand the implications, us sitting a while of an afternoon in the lounge of the Wig and Mitre pub in Lincoln, a pint on his side of the sticky little table, a glass of gloopy pineapple juice and ice cubes on mine, and a bag of cheese and onion crisps, dry roasted peanuts, or whatever gaping in the middle.

And we’d go to football sometimes. He took me to my first game in 1988, at Carrow Road, with his friend Chris. Norwich lost 1-0 to Liverpool, and Chris got me Kenny Dalglish’s autograph – but from that moment on, I was a Canary, and from that moment on, so was my dad. Have a little scrimmage, dad. Never mind the danger. He always wanted us to cram as much as possible into those special monthly access visits and he was, in that respect, an inspiration.

He also told me, very frequently, that Ireland was my ‘real home’. He’d put green t-shirts on me, emblazoned with the word ‘IRELAND’, and then take them back at the end of the weekend, because he said my mother would destroy them if he didn’t. He also taught me words: judge, social worker, affidavit. I was semi-fluent in legalese at a surprisingly tender age. And I remember him proudly showing me a newspaper report, after he’d had a punch up at work with the Dean of Humanities. I didn’t understand it, being about five at the time, but he assured me it was hilarious. This might not sound like excellent parenting. And it wasn’t. But, along with the force of his personality, it all conspired to make him my hero when I was a little boy. He belonged to another planet, and I wanted to go there, and he wanted me to go there, and wanting didn’t stop us from doing. Soon enough, I’d start to see him a little more as others did. And he didn’t like that.

At the age of 50, my dad was registered as a blind person, due to glaucoma. But he would downplay the blindness, telling people that – and I quote, I heard it often enough – ‘in practice, I’m partially sighted.’ How can anyone not admire that spirit? He didn’t let partial blindness stop him doing anything. We’d hurtle up mountains in England and Ireland together, or navigate villages and towns and ruins and coasts in various parts of Britain and later continental Europe, his hand hooked in my arm so I might guide him. He’d take solitary holidays when I was in my twenties, and once strode purposefully off a jetty by mistake, landed up to his chest in water, clambered out, and walked back to his hotel, where he stood dripping in the lobby, proffered his hand for his key, and went back to his room. He’d fractured a bone in the process, but he thought the story at least equal parts funny and annoying, and told it to everyone for a year, punctuated by his characteristic abrupt laugh, the laugh he would use in any situation he thought warranted it, whether justified or not.

He retired in 1998, by then a senior lecturer, and moved to Norfolk – first to Cromer, where we’d spent lots of time when I was a child, and then to Norwich, essentially because his friends Chris and Joan lived here. He never returned to Ireland, and kept no friends there. Having not ever travelled abroad until the age of 42, with my mum and baby me to Austria, and rarely since, he felt he had some catching up to do, so he began going to different parts of Europe, and decided to learn Italian. He carried on writing poems. He listened to England cricket test matches whatever time of day or night, which I’ll happily admit meant nothing to me, and to Norwich City games every week, after which he’d call and tell me excitedly what he knew I’d just seen or heard myself. It was a weekly ritual for decades, as the Canaries bounced around the leagues like a pinball. The last football match we went to together was about a decade ago, and he wore a radio headset tuned into Radio Norfolk, which I’d borrowed from my kind and beautiful mum. He could barely see the pitch, of course, even though we sat about three rows back so at least he’d get a shadowy glimpse whenever the ball came close. He was determined that it shouldn’t matter, just as always. (And we beat Forest 2-1 that day, which both of us regarded as particularly pleasing, because I’d recently become a resident of Nottingham and had taken a slightly dimmer shining to ‘the other NCFC’, Notts County.)

In 2018, having made some more characteristically unwise decisions, he turned in on himself for the last time. His friends worried, as he repeatedly took to bed with bottles of wine, fell asleep at dinner tables, and at one point slipped over on the way back from Tesco, bottle in hand, and ended up in hospital. And in April 2020, early in the first lockdown, overwhelmed with disappointments, he again found himself on his own. By this time, he was clearly unwell, and almost totally isolated. Eight months later, he was taken to hospital, diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, and given twelve weeks to live. But my father was built of tough stuff. He lived for thirteen months more, and for twelve of those at Twin Oaks Nursing Home. The staff there – Sonia, Sue, Bena, Eppie, and all the others – were superb, the sort of people who restore your faith in humanity in an instant. He wasn’t in a condition to show gratitude, but I like to think an earlier version of him might have done, at least if the care had been being provided to someone other than himself. The same is true of his friend Paolo, who always tried to give my dad sage advice and sincere help, despite the odds. Thank you for being a true friend to my dad, Paolo. And the same to you, Joan. He adored you. And he was right about that.

My dad lost his final optimism in October, when he discovered he’d been blocked from any prospect of going home. Going home was all he really wanted to talk about by that point, and the dementia caused by his alcoholism made him even more assiduous on that point. He knew I tried everything I could to get him live-in care at home, despite my reservations about how safe he would then be, and I hope that offered some comfort, however cold. Nobody could get through to him by telephone in his final weeks: he’d usually just croak ‘later’ when the receiver was brought to him, and yelp if it wasn’t taken away again. The last time I saw him, a few days before he died, a phrase from one of his favourite Philip Larkin poems came to mind: ‘that whole hideous inverted childhood’. His penultimate words to me that day were ‘lots of love. Best wishes.’ He died alone, having spurned food for weeks. Cancer would have killed him, but hopelessness got there first. His heart broke.

I loved him passionately, though it was not always easy. His alcoholism waxed and waned, and at times he fought it gamely. At others, less so. He made a great many mistakes, enough for several lifetimes. Even so, few thought he would make the mistakes he ultimately did, which I won’t name, and he deserves deep sympathy as well as other emotions: his life could have been so much more than it was. But for the moment I’d prefer us to remember him as the optimist he had often been throughout the preceding seventy-five years. In his later life, until recently when it was made impossible, we’d still talk all the time about a million things, then email one another at considerable length too. He kept up several detailed correspondences with others, as well. If he was interested in something personally, he’d talk and talk and talk. If he wasn’t, he’d let you know, and tut impatiently. But we liked so many of the same things that we always got by, and ours was the only close family relationship of his life that endured through decades. My dad was also supportive of my own early attempts at writing, about twelve or fifteen years ago: he’d want to see my drafts, and if I let him he would make suggestions, whether I asked for them or not. Some were terrible. But all were made with pride. He’d send me his own drafts, and no doubt some of my suggestions were terrible too – he sometimes thought so. But we were two writers. He liked that. And so did I. And I admired his talent.

But, as a folk song we both loved, puts it:

It’s not just what you’re born with, it’s what you choose to bear.
And it’s not how large your share is, it’s how much you can share.
It’s not the fights you dreamed of, it’s those you really fought.
And it’s not just what you’re given, it’s what you do with what you’ve got.

Good night, Dad.

In 2009, I had just started a PhD at the University of Leicester, under the supervision of Professor Martin Stannard (the literary critic, not the poet). Nick was my second supervisor, and initially I’d intended to write about Basil Bunting, so I read an essay he had written about Briggflatts. Very good it is too. Soon, Nick and I developed a habit of going for lunch or coffee and talking about poetry. I thought I knew everything, because I knew almost nothing, and Nick humoured me. We wondered what it might be like to run a magazine together, and set about doing so. Obviously it would fold almost immediately: nobody would subscribe, nobody would submit…

It did not work out like that. Several issues sold out. We ‘discovered’ a lot of excellent poets and published them alongside ‘famous’ ones (I won’t name names but you can look through a list on our website), embracing the love we both have for many kinds of poetries, and not caring at all about what was modish - which has only become more unusual since, believe me. We did everything on our own terms. We conceived of probing and provocative features, and published several outstanding essays and interviews. I’m proud of it. And we applied for no funding, but somehow kept our heads just above water, piling any surplus funds directly into magazine launches and other direct running costs, and occasionally absorbing surprise expenses, to the extent we could.

For the most part, our editorial selection process for the magazine was straightforward, and perhaps too obvious to describe here in detail. We’d choose most poems from slush, rejecting the overwhelming majority, sometimes regretfully. Occasionally, we’d suggest changes to the poems we selected. More often, we’d perceive flaws in poems that otherwise had considerable promise, and those would simply join the tidal wave of rejections that went out four or five times a year. Some of their authors clearly needed an editorial friend, but that couldn’t be us, at least not more than very occasionally. This made promoting good new poets a little more difficult than we had hoped. In other cases, we’d publish a poet and wish we could work with her or him more extensively. But we both had busy jobs by that point - Nick was still at the University of Leicester and I was by then a full-time Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University - so we decided we could only become pamphlet editors if we folded the mag. So that’s what we did, and since 2017 we have edited one pamphlet each every six months instead, conferring as we go along. New Walk Editions was born with the launch of Keine Angst by Zayneb Allak and A Different Key by John Mole, at an event in Leicester’s ‘Cultural Quarter’.

We’ve since been shortlisted twice for Best Publisher by the Michael Marks Awards, in 2019 and 2024. That 2019 shortlisting coincided with Declan Ryan’s New Walk Editions pamphlet Fighters, Losers being shortlisted for Best Pamphlet. On one occasion, we published a book: The Ghost Net by Alan Jenkins, which was (rightly) praised by the sorts of literary magazines that are not edited by people who might now be duped into accepting or acclaiming AI slop. Mostly, though, we’ve quietly got on with the business of editing and publishing the best work we can find, and building a list of regular subscribers, all while keeping to the same - ahem - business model: we make no money, and invest any surplus in ordering more copies of past pamphlets, organising more events, and so on. We often run at a loss. We occasionally catch back up. The train rolls on.

Our new pamphlets are Elaine Ewart’s The Professor of Transformation and Hilary Menos’s Vox Wah-Wah. Neither was solicited: very few of our pamphlets are. I edited Elaine’s, and Nick edited Hilary’s. We both wanted to work on both, but I know Hilary a little (though I don’t think we’ve met in person), so we thought it might be more fun and surprising all round if we divvied things up the way we did. An executive decision rooted in sheer genius.

Elaine’s poetry was new to me. Reading her submitted typescript filled me with the same excitement I used to get when I’d sit on the floor of Ottakar’s bookshop in Lincoln in my late teens, using it as a library and plucking poetry books from the shelves, and would happen upon something I Actually Really Liked but which seemed unfamiliar. Working with her on the pamphlet was nothing but a pleasure, as we went back and forth with edits, rearrangements, potential removals. One of the poems was a pig for this idiot to format in InDesign, but I got there in the end.

Hilary discusses Vox Wah-Wah in (on?) The Friday Poem: “It all started with the Gretsch. A 1967 Gretsch Double Anniversary – Sunburst, to be precise. Beaten up, scratched, scarred, bare wood round the edges, empty holes where knobs had once been.” One of the poems, ‘The King of Porthcawl’, even has its own, er, poem video, like a lead single. You really don’t need to know a lot about rock’n’roll in order to clamber joyously through the pages of Vox Wah-Wah. I don’t, not really.

Join us for the online launch on 28 May (i.e. next Thursday). We sometimes charge for launches, just to recoup the costs of a Zoom ‘webinar’ subscription, but we took the hit this time, so it’s free. Advance registration is required, though.

And please order the pamphlets, or subscribe. We’re nothing without the people who read the pamphlets we publish, and without the poets who have trusted us with their work.

Bigby

I suggested this image to my publisher for the cover, who thought it didn’t quite work. (I agree, and the image on the cover is instead from the reverse of a postcard - replicated in full in the book - that was sent in 1904.) The book includes a chapter about wild man (or wodewose) legends, which explores the literary and cultural history of the wild man and of humanoid cryptids, then focuses specifically on the Wild Man of Stainfield: a tiny village in the middle of Lincolnshire, still surrounded by chunks of ancient woodland. That story probably has origins in Bigby, near Brigg, about twenty-five miles to the north, where this wild man with simian fingers is trapped beneath armoured feet on a sixteenth-century Tyrwhitt family tomb.

Around the base of the tomb are depictions of the couple’s twenty-two children, arranged in order of birth. Seventeen are shown praying for their parents; the other five, who evidently died in infancy, are depicted as infants tucked into cribs. You can see it here. The church is usually locked, but you can look it up online and should then be able to obtain the key from the church warden if you plan ahead.

Navenby (and Burgh le Marsh)

In 2024 and 2025, I held two ‘Boggart Surgeries’, as we called them, at Mrs Smith’s Cottage Museum, Navenby. ‘What is a Boggart Surgery?’, I hear you ask. Well, I invited people to come and talk about local folk tales, and share stories and local or family lore. They were great fun. At one of these events, a man called Keith turned up with this first edition., which is far more attractive (and fragile) than my facsimile edition.

Jabez Good, of Burgh le Marsh, was a polymath of sorts: the town barber, proprietor of a small museum, wood carver, and antiquarian. His museum collection was broken up after his death, but you can see an impressive (if to my mind ugly) example of his carving if you go into the church in Burgh le Marsh and locate the lectern. That won’t take you long, though there’s a lot to else to see in the church, and the town. His book is an oddity, full of cattle tables and other things like that, as well as being a glossary of local words, most of which have now fallen out of use. It is referred to a few times in my own book, which isn’t the Good book, but is still, I hope, a good book.

Kirkstead

The chapter ‘The Valley of God’ explores legends associated with the Witham Valley, in which up to twenty monastic houses were once situated - a higher concentration than anywhere else in England. Little of any of them remains standing; this jag of masonry at Kirkstead is perhaps the biggest remaining hunk, apart from a long bit of Tupholme Abbey and a wall at Barlings. The farm track cuts across where the nave and cloisters would have been, then runs past Kirkstead’s small village church, which was a chantry chapel.

I discuss a legend associated with the site in this short BBC podcast, and go into a little more detail in the book, before moving on to other things.

Holbeach

According to legend - quite a few people believe it, but there’s no evidence it happened - three friends drunkenly played cards in here ‘with’ the corpse of a coeval in the late eighteenth century. Several poets, including Eliza Cooke, then wrote poems about it, all apparently believing what they’d heard. The windows are said to glow at night, on occasion, when the ghosts of the card players are reenacting their sinful deed. I discuss all of this in the book.

In the summer of 2025, I was in Holbeach for the night to watch Ryan Gilmartin’s excellent play Henry VIII Used to Hate Us. On the way back to my digs, I bought some chips and sat on a bench outside the church, from where I took this photo of an apparent glow from within. The glow vanished as soon as I stepped up to the glass, then reappeared when I retreated, and for a moment I almost believed it all.

Sutterby

This church allegedly bows to a passing knight. Read about that here. On one visit, these vintage tractors (and many more besides) groaned and whined past, and I was put in mind of R.S. Thomas’s poem ‘Cynddlan on a Tractor’, and especially these lines:

He is the knight at arms breaking the fields’
Mirror of silence, emptying the wood
Of foxes and squirrels and bright jays.

There is another tottery church tower at Dry Doddington, and others in Pinchbeck, Quadring, and a few other places. But I don’t mention any of this in the book, so the photos stayed on file.

Doddington

Imagine the body of Tom Otter, the last man to be gibbeted in Lincolnshire (in 1806), rotting in tar in these irons. One is a leg brace, the other a cage for the head. Birds once nested in that head. These items are casually on display in Doddington Hall, sometimes on a mantelpiece and at others on the dining table.

Otter’s gibbeting was big news, and led to many legends, which I discuss in the book. I said a little more about that in last week’s post.

…and finally

I nearly used this for the book’s author photo on the back flap, and now wish I had. The Lincoln Imp is the subject of the book’s opening chapter.

Buy Devils in the Details from Five Leaves or from Waterstones or from Amazon, or from wherever you get your books.

Read excerpts from chapter 4, chapter 6, chapter 10, chapter 13.

Crowland

The above picture looks through the west door and down the nave of Crowland Abbey, in the very south of the county, a few miles from Peterborough. The quatrefoil depicts scenes from the life of St Guthlac. The town’s parish church, which is as beautiful as you’d expect, occupies the aisle to the left; the bulk of the building is this ruin. You can find a little more information about the folklore associated with the site here and here.

I took this picture in the summer of 2022, and didn’t begin writing the book for another 18 months. Initially, I’d intended to have a big section on Crowland at the end of the chapter called ‘The Valley of God’, but then decided to avoid including too much about religious miracles. I do think miracles constitute folk tales, at least if they’ve come free of those religious moorings to some extent and entered secular tradition too in some other form. But I have vague future plans for work on that sort of thing. I make an exception with Bardney and Bardney Abbey, for reasons you’ll understand if you read the book.

Alkborough

And now to the north-western extremity of the county. This is Julian’s Bower, the only surviving turf maze (in fact a labyrinth: you can’t get lost) in Lincolnshire, and the only remaining turf maze in England still known by that name, which was once common. From it, you can see two counties and three big rivers: the Ouse and Trent enter the Humber, carving through the meeting points of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. The photo isn’t great, but I’d intended to go back with a better camera and try again.

Why didn’t I? Well, I assumed folk tales of some kind must still exist around here, or must have been recorded in books and/or archives, but could find nothing of note - nothing that really counts as a folk tale - despite extensive searching and chatting. The book isn’t an exhaustive catalogue of folk tales, but Anna Milon and I also didn’t include it on the AHRC Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project’s folk tale map, for the same reason. It’s still fascinating, folkloric, and beautiful, though, of course.

Skegness

There is a chapter in the book on Skegness (and the smaller inland town of Burgh le Marsh), which discusses various local legends (and extraordinary true stories), and Tennyson’s trips to what would become Skeggy, but mainly focuses on the story of an exciseman being murdered and his body being hidden in a bricked-up alcove at the Vine Hotel. You’ll have to read the chapter to find out what I think of all that, and why, but suffice it to say that the history that gave rise to the story is fascinating, and not widely known.

You can imagine what I think of the ‘local’ MP.

The chapter begins with a description of the prom and pier, and includes mention of two men swooshing metal detectors across the dry sand. I think this photo sums up some things about the town, for better and for worse.

Saxilby

In 1805, Tom Otter (or Thomas Temporel) pulled out a hedge-stake on a lane near Saxilby, which is now named after him, and smashed his heavily-pregnant second (and concurrent) wife to death with it. He was subsequently hanged and his body was displayed in a gibbet close to the scene of the crime. Tall tales soon arose, and these were added to substantially in 1859 when Thomas Miller wrote an article for the Lincoln Times which claimed to include the death-bed eyewitness testimony of one John Dunberly (or Dunkerly). Some of the least unbelievable of those stories are repeated as fact even now; various authors have discounted the taller stories, but taken their source, at least, at face value. This tells us something. I talk about that in my book.

Tom Otter’s name, and the gibbet, are remembered in the names of several places (the aforementioned road, a bridge, a wood, a farm, some cottages, etc) and ‘his’ story is retold over and over, but his victim, Mary Kirkham, has essentially been forgotten. It was ever thus. A memorial would be nice, wouldn’t it? In one chapter, I go in search of Mary’s final resting place in Saxilby. These gravestones in Saxilby churchyard are mentioned in the book, but I didn’t include a photograph of them, because they weren’t why I was there.

Redbourne

This is the Red Lion, Redbourne’s very fine old pub. The village pond is just out of shot to the right. Ducks are stupid.

Marie Clothilde Balfour - budding novelist, doctor’s wife, and cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson - lived in the village for two years in the 1880s, and collected folk tales from local people. Ten of them were published in three instalments of the journal Folklore in 1891. She implies that several of her tellers were drinking copious amounts of gin and in some cases openly eating opium, which might be reflected in some of the stories I discuss in the book.

Redbourne is a very beautiful village, but no photograph of it made the cut for the book: my chapters on the tales collected by Balfour, which include ‘Tiddy Mun’, ‘The Dead Moon’ and ‘Yallery Brown’ (you can read my own version of that in this), mainly focus on the village’s environs and on interpretations and retellings of the stories.

Nocton

I include mention of this place in the book: ‘A full-scale hospital, RAF Nocton Hall, later developed in the Hall’s grounds, and closed when I was a child, so as teens we used to go there at night sometimes to scare ourselves among discarded operating tables and beds, ignoring the GUARD DOGS ON PATROL signs, which we knew were bollocks. It still rots away, our of sight behind a million unwieldy bushes, like a single-storey Chernobyl.’ There are lots of legends associated with Nocton village and its environs, and it is where I lived between the ages or two and fifteen, so it seemed like the right place to end the book.

This photo was taken in 2019, when I visited with my friend and colleague Andrew Taylor. A quarter of a century after my teenage years, it had become a far less interesting place, with almost all of the abandoned equipment, fixtures and fittings gone, and half of the ceilings on the floor.

And finally…

My mum with a story she wrote in the 1980s, which lends its name to the last chapter in the book, and perhaps inspired the whole adventure.

Buy Devils in the Details from Five Leaves or from Waterstones or from Amazon, or from wherever you get your books.

Read excerpts from chapter 4, chapter 6, chapter 10, chapter 13.

‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’, wrote Philip Larkin, at the end of ‘I Remember, I Remember’, a poem about finding himself passing through Coventry, his childhood hometown. Larkin’s speaker ‘leant far out, and squinnied for a sign / That this was still the town that had been “mine” / So long’, but he doesn’t find one.[i] Typically glum Larkin, you might think, and maybe so – but Larkin left for university in 1940, shortly before much of Coventry was turned to rubble and then to concrete, and (like Coventry itself, perhaps) he never really came back, so maybe that is why he didn’t recognise it. No bombs dropped on the leafy little-but-growing village of Dunston, where I went to primary school, excepting occasional social, metaphorical bombs. In the poem ‘Zeps’, written from the home front of the Great War, the dialect poet Bernard Gilbert, from the nearby village of Billinghay, has a wife complaining that her husband shouldn’t ‘mek sich a bloor’ about ‘them Zeps passin’ over; / Them Jarmins!’, and them Jarmins in newer flying machines did nothing more to Dunston than pass over it in the Second World War either.[ii]

Nonetheless, war changed Dunston. My mother, who grew up here, remembers the cockney former land-girl who had married a local dairy farmer and who delivered the milk in big churns. She stood out, apparently happily, but ‘not that much’. A secret giant beech on a country lane nearby – less than six miles from what were the Second World War air bases of RAF Metheringham, RAF Coleby Grange, RAF Waddington, RAF Wellingore, RAF Digby – is wounded and healed with the scars of the date 1943, a blocky aeroplane, an apparent initial, and a vertical line. Perhaps this commemorator lived, and settled round here, and his grandchild who was born because Hitler had invaded Poland is drinking coffee down the road in a corporation-built identikit house on what used to be a meadow. Perhaps the vertical line is the beginning of a tally that might, in a different life, have grown to show a completed thirty-operation tour, and some people in Dresden, Berlin, Dortmund, are drinking coffee this morning because it doesn’t. Perhaps the scar below the port-side wing represents the mythological gremlin that pulled it prematurely to earth. Perhaps a sweetheart carved this in hope, or in memoriam. I’ve gone to look at it a hundred times, and whenever I do it tells me a different improbable story, but one of them might be true. From my perspective, it has always been there, presenting its mystery to a field of wheat.

I can testify that nothing of great import seems to happen in Dunston – which was never quite home to me, because I lived a mile away in a lodge house closer to Nocton, the next village, which also wasn’t quite home. But I walked the bridle path between the two every day on my way to and from school, so it was home as much as anywhere else. I’ve been informed by two locals in their seventies, both of whom wish to remain anonymous because (as one put it) ‘times have changed’, that, back in the era of milk-carts that briefly post-dated the Second World War, ‘one or two’ children in Dunston were known to have older sisters who were also their birth mothers. ‘No great fuss was made’, I was told, the passive voice throwing this further into a mistily bygone age that has in fact only recently ended. Even by the sisters, the mothers? ‘The village was very isolated’, apparently, and I believe it.[iii] My mother wasn’t sent to the village school because some of the boys were strongly rumoured to like touching the girls inappropriately, and seemed to be getting away with it. She has frequently pointed out to me where all the different shops used to be, back when the village had a population about half of its current 800 and needed to support them. When I was a child, there were still three shops: a Post Office that had previously been a hairdresser’s salon and is now a house, a den of sweet jars behind curved shopwindows on what is now another house, and a prefab hut full of bread and magazines that has long been cleared away. Dunston hasn’t had a shop for over a quarter of a century, a minor inconvenience that literally isn’t worth remedying.

I walk around the village, a wobbly ring of lanes with a few road-strings coming off it, and take in the former sights. Timmy, who shared his dumper truck with me at playgroup in the Village Hall, lived in that house. David, my first best friend, lived in that boring modern house, on a plot that Mum said was once a pig farm, with his rug-rat brother and military parents. Here, on this corner by the school, I waved him off when his mother came to collect him and take him to a new life in Germany, then I went back to playtime. Here’s the Red Lion, still smelling of the same sweet pub lunch as always, where one hot pre-school summer day I learned that prawn cocktail was my favourite food, apart from the lettuce bit. There’s Alice’s house, up against the church, where her dad tried to teach me guitar every Thursday after school for a manila-enveloped £4 a go, by a window that looked out directly at grave-height. That blocky house by the Village Hall was Andrew’s house, and I knew it had been Mum’s house once. I walk down Front Street, which still feels like it is round the back, past what was Alana’s house. That whitewashed cottage on the bend was Barry’s house and, a few doors down, that was Aimee’s house, and about fifteen years ago I heard they got married. Tuckered out, I sit on a bench on the Green. Behind me: Hayley’s house, where someone I’ve never seen before is mowing the lawn like he’s taking part in a time trial, and Robert’s house, outside of which soapy water dribbles from shining Saxo to mucky drop-kerb. Do any of these people ever come here and look and go away again? Do they still have family here? Do some of them still live here? I wouldn’t recognise most of them. A Tesco delivery van trundles down Fen Lane, then trundles back five minutes later. I wave, but the driver doesn’t wave back. It’s Saturday. I used to kick a ball around this patch of grass most Saturdays. The tree that served as our one irrefutable goalpost has been removed without trace. I haven’t seen any children. An old man appears from nowhere and lets a collie off its lead on the other side, and it runs straight to the beck. I hear a bit of muffled disgruntled quacking. Then man and beast have gone, so I pull a hard heel of bloomer from my pocket, rip it to bits, lope beckwards, and throw it in. How pleasant to watch mallards pull handbrake turns as manna falls from heaven.

Nobody here seems to have heard of it – believe me, I’ve asked – but in 1861, the minor folklorist and poet Edward George Kent wrote what he calls ‘Billy Shuffler and the Lincolnshire Witches’, a tale he swore to be true, and which features this thin thread of near-invisible water that runs west to east for five miles from heath to Witham.[iv] Kent was the archetypal dilettantish folk tale collector of his day: well-educated (i.e. not of the same class as the common people), desirous to impart stories, as he put it, ‘from whence a lesson may be learnt or a moral may be drawn’, and enthusiastic about putting ‘his’ tales into doggerel verse (occasionally blended with long-winded prose), as though to move them into a respectably elevated register.[v] However, Kent’s is the only source that exists for this tale – assuming there was indeed a prior source, and he didn’t just make it up. He certainly claims not to have done so, though that is a common feature of storytelling, and Kent certainly did a lot of reinventing elsewhere, as noted earlier in this book. His contextualising note is endearingly ridiculous: ‘This remarkable occurrence took place’, he writes, when Lincolnshire was ‘the favourite resort of wraiths and witches’, and he tells us that the story was relayed to him by an ‘old veteran’ who had once been told it by his ‘old uncle’:

An aunt of one of his acquaintances once knew a man who had a cousin who knew a boy that was carried away by [witches] and boiled in their infernal cauldrons; and on the very spot, he told me, the spirit of the poor boy was still to be seen wandering about, with a broomstick growing out of his neck and a tin pot in his hand’.[vi]

So, to the story. One night, ‘lo! a fearful shriek’ arouses the butler in a country house, who is too afraid to investigate until he hears ‘alarming sounds from his master’s chamber’ and discovers ‘her ladyship […] fainting in the arms of her husband’ as they stand over an empty cot: ‘the child and heir was gone!’ Billy Shuffler, the gardener, then takes over as the lowly person deserving his lowly status: he surmises that witches have stolen the child, as well as the horses, and promises to ‘sattle ‘em, that I will’, but when the lord and his servants set off on foot to the witches’ den, Shuffler, so ‘brave before’, hears the witches’ howls and decides to fall behind.[vii] The rest of the party makes it to the cave, and his stoical lordship duly saves the day for his swooning, blubbering, helpless wife back home: he finds the baby unattended and scoops it up, and the party heads back on the recaptured horses. They meet Shuffler en route, and give him a nag called Old Simon. Then they notice the witches coming after them, and all but one gallop to safety,

While Billy screamed with all his might,
Which only made his horse’s fright
The worse, for like a fiction’d sprite
He stood.[viii]

‘Silly Billy Shuffler’ (that is a quotation).[ix] Luckily, though, Old Simon eventually starts galloping ‘fast and strong’.[x] One of them has his wits about him, at least.

You might think the tale could end here, but Shuffler would not be seen to have learned his lesson if that were allowed to be the case. Sadly, they’ve only gone and fled in the wrong direction, up to the infernal cave. Old Simon has the wherewithal to bolt upon sight of his erstwhile prison, and the two set off back across the wilderness, witches in hot pursuit. One settles on Old Simon’s back, and Shuffler grows a pair and hits her with his club. They almost make it home: all finally goes well,

Until he came to Dunston Beck,
When he bounded o’er the stream.
But Simon, wearied with the chase,
Fell backwards in the flood.

Oh the woe of poor silly Billy. A witch makes off with Old Simon, discarding the hapless Shuffler, who falls ‘into a slumber deep’. He is eventually woken and taken to safety by a villager, who finds him slumped, humiliatingly, with ‘A broomstick wound, deep in his rump’ that ‘let in the clear daylight’.[xi] Patched up, he lopes home, where order has been restored – and then St. Kent of Lindum presents the epigrammatic moral lesson of his parable, in case you might have missed it:

And may old Shuffler’s narrow squeak
A warning be to all
Who are so brave, when there’s no fear,
For they are sure to fall.[xii]

This is wholesome gibberish, apparently taken like bread from the mouths of those who may have told it any number of ways and filtered through a gentrified Victorian disposition. In Kent’s rendition, people demonstrate their respective worth as men and women, and as representatives of the upper and labouring classes. Tradition is ratified. Good overcomes evil, so Divine providence is ratified also. I am reminded of the third verse to Cecil Frances Alexander’s ‘Maker of Heaven and Earth’ (1848), which became the Anglican hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.[xiii]

I imagine Kent singing this heartily from his pew on a Sunday morning.

More down-to-earth (and possibly subversive) counterparts to Kent’s ‘Billy Shuffler and the Lincolnshire Witches’ may once have existed orally, but those can only be guessed at. However, the story has much in common with the legend of Byard’s Leap, set only about twelve miles away: there is again a witches’ den that may be a cave, a baby, a male makeshift paladin who attempts to meet a surprising challenge, and a witch grasping the behind of a fleeing horse – an encumbered, unlikely equine hero that dies nobly, having played a significant role in the rescue.[xiv] And, of course, as in some versions of the much more famous Byard’s Leap story, it takes a person of elevated social standing to save the day. The two stories have too much in common, surely, not to share an origin, and it is possible that the old legend of Byard’s Leap travelled here on a horse and became something else, with local characters. No other comparable narratives have been recorded in Kesteven, this south-westerly quadrant of Lincolnshire, but there is no reason to think they didn’t once exist. We are left to guess, and your guess is as good as mine, or as anyone else’s.

A pair of teenagers that resemble rain-soaked Troll dolls are now blundering across the Green, then they shuffle over the footbridge near what was Ian’s house and enter what was my first teacher Mrs Wilson’s house. Billy Shuffler means nothing here now, and perhaps never meant anything. We have that in common, and it is time for me to go.

I walk past the house that used to be Jenny Tickner’s shop, where I’d get my 20p of penny sweets every day after school (and usually a few more, because she was nice), then along the perimeter of my old school which now has a huge blue roof and the sort of fence you might expect to see around a Russian Embassy, and start down the bridle path to Nocton. Part of this track was once traversed by a branch of a thirty-mile narrow-gauge rail network, the ‘Nocton Potato Railway’, built in the 1920s and finally done away with about thirty years later, following a billion potato-spilling derailments, and upgrades to the lanes around the estate and the spud-hauling vehicles that used them.[xv] A rusted standpipe prodded skywards at a bend in the path when I was a kid – it’s still there, I discover, though now the fragile top has been lopped off and what remains has been painted. It is now complemented by an information board about the railway that probably gets read something like once a month. Soon I’m at the crossroads where one track leads left, up to my old house, and another heads down to the wood. This is where I promised to build Mummy a home for us to move to when I was four. ‘Do you want windows?’ I said, slightly worried. ‘Because I can’t do windows.’ That has entered family lore, the family comprising my mother and me, the childless end of a line stretching back 3.7 billion years to the first microbes. I look left, a little longingly, then proceed to the village, past the meadow pinstriped with ridge and furrow earthworks, in which we stood every Bonfire Night to watch about five rockets and two Catherine wheels whoosh and plop and spin and fizzle as Nocton’s discarded furniture went up in flames. Then I’m spat into the village, near Mike’s old house, where, as perennially frustrated early teens, we listened to Iron Maiden, Skid Row and Metallica and made futile plans to usurp them all. Mike lives a few miles away now, and I’m here to meet him, to traipse with him round Nocton, to rummage through the woods that were our playground, to see what’s left of Nocton Hall, to share reencounters with our ghosts.

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[i] Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived (Marvell, 1955), p. 38.

[ii] Bernard Gilbert, War Workers and Other Verses (Erskine MacDonald, 1916), p. 44.

[iii] Conversation with author, 1 May, 2024.

[iv] I asked both haphazardly in person throughout 2024 and early 2025, and on the private Facebook group ‘Dunston, Lincolnshire’, which has 1000 members, where my request (1 May 2024) yielded two likes from people I know anyway, and no comments. Edward George Kent, Lindum Lays and Legends (Simpkin, Marshall, and Co, 1861), pp. 221-31. ‘Lindum’ is taken from the Roman name for Lincoln, and points at the author’s misty eyes more than it does at the people from whom he apparently collected, and the things those people might have said.

[v] Kent, p. iii. A very short synopsis of the tale is included in Eliza Gutch and Mabel Peacock, Examples of Printed Folk-lore Concerning Lincolnshire (London: David Nutt, 1908), pp. 87-8. Gutch and Peacock describe it as ‘prolix’.

[vi] Kent, pp. 221-22.

[vii] Kent, pp. 123-4.

[viii] Kent, p. 125.

[ix] Kent, p. 123.

[x] Kent, p. 126.

[xi] Kent, p. 228.

[xii] Kent, p. 231.

[xiii] Cecil Frances Alexander, Hymns for Little Children (1848) (Herman Hooker, 1950), p. 27. This verse is now almost always omitted.

[xiv] The legend concerning the hamlet of Byard’s Leap is discussed in detail earlier in the book.

[xv] Sheila Redshaw and Sue Morris, Nocton: The Last Years of an Estate Village, Volume I (Tucann, 2007), pp. 56-7.

Balfour’s ‘Legends of the Lincolnshire Cars’ (1891) is a challenging read, and always would have been for those most likely to encounter it, because its ten tales are written in an outsider’s approximations of thick accent and dialect. The prefaces to its three instalments give small insights into who some of the supposed tellers were, but otherwise often read like introductions to wild animals in their natural habitat:

With the barren Cars of the older times is connected a peasantry that is changing as the soil itself has changed, only more gradually, for the sluggish current of their life and habit is but slowly beaten back by the impetus of modern innovations. […] Many an old woman eats opium openly, and I fear all the men who can get it will drink gin. But the days are gone by when the one or the other was in constant and daily need, to still the shaking or deaden the misery born of the fever-mists and stagnant pools. Nevertheless, whether it be due to the climate, or the scarcity of railways, or the character of the people themselves, civilization seems a long way behindhand in North Lincolnshire […]. Here, in this bleak and lonely tract, scarcely yet won over to civilization, has dwelt for ages a people, ignorant, poverty-stricken, weakened by malaria, and strongly affected by their wild home.[i]

Opium use was indeed widespread among the labouring classes in much of Lincolnshire, and elsewhere, in the mid-nineteenth century, though by the 1880s it was in sharp decline. Reverend Robert Ousby, of Kirton in Lindsey, near Redbourne, noted in 1834 that opium consumption had in the past few years ‘become very common’ locally.[ii] However, as the researcher of addiction Virginia Berridge points out, while ‘it may be true that the sale of opium pills and laudanum in large quantities was a development of the early decades of the century […], conditions in the Fenland make it probable that some form of narcotic consumption had been common before that date.’[iii] This is partially because of the ague, which afflicted people in swampy areas such as the Carrs, and then afflicted them even more in the immediate aftermath of drainage, which left rotting vegetation for mosquitoes to feed on, and an absence of animals that predated on mosquitoes and their larvae.[iv] Symptoms of the ague include shaking, cramps and headaches, and these were alleviated by opium; but as shaking, cramps and headaches are also symptoms of opiate withdrawal, the self-medicating who went cold turkey would potentially believe the ague had returned and relapse.

Opium-rich preparations such as poppyhead tea were easy to make from poppies strewn across the Ancholme Valley and common in cottage gardens.[v] Commercially-produced opiates were also cheap to buy for much of the nineteenth century, due to the exploits of the British in India, the British victories over China in the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, and huge imports of cheap opium from Turkey. For a time, opium-rich medicines were robustly marketed as cure-all painkillers for children and adults, and pushed especially at women, partially for obviously sexist reasons.[vi] Opiates also helped overworked men with tedious, muscle-straining obligations to make it through the day. As Maureen James notes, by 1867 the British Medical Association estimated that Lincolnshire and Norfolk combined were responsible for half of all imported opium consumption in the country, and Berridge points out that in ‘the low-lying, marshy, ague-ridden Fens, it was accepted that the sale of the drug in large quantities was commonplace.’[vii] The authorities quickly realised the problem, but (as we still see in the 2020s) the economic imperatives of bad medicine can be perniciously stubborn stains.[viii] The 1868 Pharmacy Act only slightly hampered sales of opiates, but did at least belatedly reflect growing official caution about a medical scandal. Further restrictions followed, but the Dangerous Drugs Act, outlawing the possession and unlicensed import or export of opium (plus heroin and cocaine), would only come into effect in 1920, so in the late nineteenth century Balfour and her tellers simply could have bought some from an apothecary and quaffed or munched it at their leisure, if they’d wanted (or needed) to.

The effect of opium on the senses is, among other things, to enhance perceptions of audible and visual stimuli. It causes euphoria, encourages relaxation, in turn reduces and elevates anxiety, and impairs reflexes, as well as being a powerful pain reliever.[ix] It is easy to see how, to the remaining addicts in the Ancholme Valley, most of whom by the 1880s were older women, the lonely Carrs with their long and mysterious waterways and clumps of brush would have had the propensity to seem even more intriguingly otherworldly than they were – even though most of these people rarely travelled far and often knew every corner of their parishes.[x] Balfour implies that, in addition to the simplicity of life and absence of outside influence in this Victorian English equivalent to a flyover state, opium consumption might have reinforced their credulity, and hence helped to encourage or preserve the tales. Of course, there is no way to ascertain that, and the specific opium (and alcohol) habits of her tellers is left unrecorded aside from that vague mention of it in the preface. There is no hard evidence that these are, to use the sociologist Andrew Fergus Wilson’s term for them, ‘opiated tales’, but it would also be wrong to rule that out.[xi] The truth, like the swampy Carrs themselves in former times, is neither one thing nor the other.

We do not know whether Balfour left out other tales she had collected when she assembled her selections for publication. It is, however, clear that she was primarily interested in preserving what she thought socially (or sociologically) valuable. She is folklorist as social scientist more than literary scholar or critic, but clearly also none of those things, really: her notes on the tales’ tellers are infuriatingly insubstantial, and she shows little critical discernment. Indeed, the disparities in narratological quality and completeness between the tales is stark, though the least successful three stories are reserved for her final instalment, and presumably only saw the light of day because the previous two instalments had been modestly successful. It seems likely, therefore, that she might have left other tales or fragments as offcuts on her workshop floor, but if she did, history has long swept them away.

Balfour acknowledges that the tales in the third instalment are less accomplished than the others, and moreover that she ‘did not write them out fully’ from her ‘short notes taken at the time’, implying that their comparative lack of complexity and sense might have been further contributed to by failures of her memory. They are ‘drolls’, she writes, ‘less effective as stories’ than the others, though she promises she ‘endeavoured to keep strictly to what [she] heard’, despite ‘all their inconsequence, and even incoherency.’[xii] Though these tales are where Balfour ends her triptych, they make an intriguing place for us to begin a discussion of it, because they suggest such wild imagination. I’ll start at the moral and narratological bottom, with ‘The Flyin’ Childer’, which she claims was told to her by a man whose name she forgets ‘in a small inn some distance from where I lived’, and which reads like something a rural Victorian Dennis the Menace invented in a hurry. Legends, as usually conceived, tend to provide heroes, and this little story is a legend in Balfour’s designation only: it certainly doesn’t have a hero. Legends are also, by strict definition, rooted in historical fact, and certainly many of the things that happen in the tale also happened and happen in the real world, and are reported in newspapers and recounted in dark histories. Nonetheless, it is gibberish. Here is a summary.

A lad sees a girl washing herself, and offers to marry her if she follows him. She agrees, but tells him that if he rescinds his promise she will put a spell on him, and he says that if he lets her down the worms should eat him and their children should develop wings and fly away. (How they already have children remains a mystery, and it is possible Balfour’s teller jumbled whatever story he had heard.) They search, unsuccessfully, for a church with a sober vicar, and eventually reach a cottage, where they find an old man sleeping. The lad swiftly kills him with an axe, and chops off his hands and feet. They lob the body out the window and light the fire, but then notice a wisewoman attempting to make off with the corpse. She wants to bury it, she says, but the lad says he’ll do it later, and she goes away. He does then bury the corpse, but leaves one arm sticking out of the earth for some reason, then throws the hands and feet to the pigs, and goes to hunt rabbits, leaving the young woman in the house. She hears the hands and feet (somehow) calling out to be buried with the body, so obliges. The lad then returns and asks where their children are (see parenthetical aside above), and she says they’ve gone foraging for berries, then that they have gone fishing, then that they have flown away. Naturally, he responds by killing her, and pops her body under the bed, but soon the children fly back and ask where their mother is. He confesses, so they kill him. Dead, he asks for thunder, fire, water and an axe to kill him (again), but nothing happens, until a great worm with the young woman’s head eats him.[xiii]

At this point I’d like you to imagine a well-heeled and -mannered Victorian woman, in a village inn distant from her temporary home in Redbourne, sitting opposite an eager makeshift storyteller who is full of gin, and attempting to commit this narrative to memory. That thought perhaps bears lingering on more than the story he came out with, though it is fair to suggest the teller was probably misremembering and combining aspects of several tales. Certainly, it appears that plenty has been left out, and that much of what remains has been mangled. All the same, it is easy to read this ‘legend’ as a vulgar warning against flouting Christian teachings. They have children outside of wedlock, which sets the ball rolling: a sort of gateway sin. Then they commit murder. The punishments for such transgressions are absolute: she is murdered in turn, and he has to be killed twice, presumably before both arrive in Hell, where any desire to be killed yet again will go unanswered. Is it all her fault? Is she a temptress who lures the hapless boy from the righteous path? She is ultimately the worm, after all, perhaps a synonym for the serpent and hence the Devil. She might equally be regarded as a dire and dirty counterpart to Eve. But now I fear I am giving this considerably more attention than it deserves.

The next tale in Balfour’s third instalment, ‘Fred the Fool’, is only slightly less bonkers, makes only a little more sense, is (as Balfour puts it) equally ‘grim’, and was apparently told to her by the same bumpkin.[xiv] Indeed, Balfour suggests it might provide a conclusion of sorts to ‘The Flyin’ Childer’.[xv]

Hwæt.

A wayward lad, Fred Baddeley, who is thin yet greedy, gets a job at a farm on the other side of the Wolds (which run north-south through much of eastern Lincolnshire). The farmer has offered Fred employment on the assumption he will be cheap to feed and clothe. Unfortunately, he eats the house bare, and if the farmer beats him this only increases his appetite. One day, the farmer finds Fred with his head between the bars of the storehouse, so he thrashes him and pulls off his thumbnail. Later, Fred steals the farmer’s best coat, so he chops off one of Fred’s hands with an axe and threatens that if anyone is told what has happened he will report Fred to the police for stealing. Fred steals again, the foolish boy, and this time the farmer breaks his arm so badly it must be amputated. Worried that his local lack of popularity might lead to his hayricks being burned, the farmer then orders Fred to keep watch all night, without giving him time off his day work. Fred inevitably falls asleep, and the farmer finds his ricks ablaze. Incensed, he lobs Fred into the fire, where he is immolated.

The other tale Balfour includes in this third instalment, Sam’l’s Ghost’, was apparently relayed by a nine-year-old girl called Fanny, who didn’t seem ‘interested in it’.[xvi] Here, we learn about a ‘de’ad man’ called Samuel who (like Fred) has burned to death, but his spirit rises, and hears a voice tell him to enter the earth, so a big worm can eat him and he can rest in peace.[xvii] He (or, rather, his spirit) somehow then does as the voice instructs, and finds himself in a stinking hole where a great worm is coiled on a flat stone. The worm asks him to fetch his body, so he goes to the fire and returns with a sack containing his own ashes. The worm sniffs it and asks where his arm is; Samuel says a doctor had removed it, and is told to retrieve this, so he does. Then the worm asks where one of his fingernails is, and sends Samuel to find it. But he can’t – and for that reason his spirit still roams far and wide, searching. Balfour doesn’t make the connection, and neither does James, but as ‘Sam’l’s Ghost’ has both a lopped arm and a gobbling worm, surely this might also be read as a variant of a missing part of the same tale as the other two, each a bastardised part of a long-lost and presumably more cohesive whole, with ‘Sam’l’s Ghost forming the ill-fitting conclusion. The three tales overlap so much, in fact, that this seems likely.

In the form they seem to have come to Balfour, though, these three stories are farcically weak, full of narratological dead ends.[xviii] We might consider them meditations, of a sort, on eternal punishment and on purgatory. Or we might consider the association of another flat stone or ‘strangers’ table’ with a malevolent otherworldly being connected to it: in the case of ‘Sam’l’s Ghost’, above it and immediately in control; in ‘Yallery Brown’ [discussed earlier in the book], below it and having therefore to coax his release from a benighted human. Perhaps we could consider the fires in two of these tales, and the ‘worm’ (or serpent) in both, as manifestations of Hell on earth, fully earned by the protagonists. We might be reminded of Jesus saying ‘their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched’ three times in quick succession, implying sinners will live on in eternal torment.[xix] Or we might simply determine that they are products of a credulous (if uninterested) small child, and a man who was frequently either pissed out of his head on gin or off his tits on opium.

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[i] Marie Clothilde Balfour, ‘Legends of the Cars’, Folklore 2.2 (1891), pp. 145-70, at p. 147. Balfour changed the name of the three-part contribution for its subsequent instalments, adding ‘Lincolnshire’.

[ii] Quoted in Virginia Berridge, ‘Fenland Opium Eating in the Nineteenth Century’, British Journal of Addiction to Alcohol and Other Drugs 72.3 (1977), pp. 275-284, at p. 275.

[iii] Virginia Berridge, ‘Victorian Opium Eating: Responses to Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England’, Victorian Studies 21.4 (1978), pp. 437-461, at p. 442.

[iv] See Darwin Horn, ‘Tiddy Mun’s Curse and the Ecological Consequences of Land Reclamation’, Folklore 98.1 (1987), pp. 11-15.

[v] Sadly, this word used for the title of this chapter probably has nothing to do with poppies. From the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘poppekak, literally “doll’s excrement”’ in Dutch; the first documented use in English was in the 1850s, in the USA. However, the OED also notes that ‘no such word appears to be attested in Dutch’, so perhaps the poppy has something to do with it after all. <www.oed.com/dictionary/poppycock_n?tab=etymology> [accessed 27 March 2024].

[vi] Laudanum, comprising opiates mixed with water or alcohol, was common in Victorian households, and was indeed an effective painkiller. Women were particularly likely to become addicted, because medications containing opium were heavily marketed at and prescribed to them for menstruation, childbirth, mood swings and depression. It is easy to see how this appealed to husbands wanting to quieten uppity wives, not least in a time when calls for women’s rights were increasing. Many opium-containing products were also marketed at the mothers of infants, such as Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, which ‘soothed’ teething babies with a wholesome blend of opium, alcohol, morphine and heroin.

[vii] Maureen James, Investigating the Legends of the Carrs: A Study of the Tales as Printed in Folklore in 1891, PhD thesis, University of Glamorgan (2013), p. 98; Berridge, p. 442.

[viii] This can be applied to matters other than opiate use, though that has again become a significant problem in the US, where prescriptions of opioids recently became common. See, for example, Owen Amos, ‘Why Opioids Are Such an American Problem’, BBC News (25 October 2017) <www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41701718> [accessed 1 June 2024].

[ix] ‘Opium’, Alcohol and Drug Foundation <adf.org.au/drug-facts/opium> [accessed 19 March 2024].

[x] James, p. 98.

[xi] Andrew Fergus Wilson, ‘As Above, So Below: Bogs, Fens and Liquidity’, paper delivered at the ‘Lincolnshire Folk Tales and Folklores of Place’ symposium, Nottingham Trent University (11 April 2025).

[xii] Marie Clothilde Balfour, ‘Legends of the Lincolnshire Cars, Part III’, Folklore 2.4 (1891), pp. 401-18, at p. 401.

[xiii] Balfour, pp. 403-8.

[xiv] Balfour, p. 401.

[xv] Balfour, pp. 402-3.

[xvi] Balfour, p. 403.

[xvii] Balfour, p. 415.

[xviii] Nonetheless, two have provided sufficient intrigue to encourage some subsequent writers to attempt elaborated rewritings. Alan Garner included a version of ‘The Flyin’ Childer’ in Collected Folk Tales (Harper Collins, 1986), as did Neil Philip in The Penguin Book of English Folktales (Penguin, 1992). Kevin Crossley-Holland includes a version of ‘Sam’l’s Ghost’ in which Samuel is (or was) ‘only a lad’ who burns to death when his cottage catches fire. See Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Old Stories (Colt, 1997), pp. 150-53.

[xix] Mark 9.44, 9.46 and 9.48 (KJV).

I survey the shore from the prom. Wavelets slide in, turn over, rake out, slide in. It’s a clear summer afternoon, but a bit fresh, and only a handful of windbreaks have already been planted for the day. On the sloppy shoreline, a couple walks as one while a dachshund follows its nose in a squiggly line, tail going like a maniacal counterpart to the wind turbines that have sprouted offshore. I start to count them, tiny at this distance, and give up at one hundred. A seagull laughs overhead then alights on a bin. Two blokes are swooshing metal detectors across the dry sand: human seagulls. A few figures move along the pier. Up close, a little lad throws a handful of sand downwind, to see what will happen, and his mum tells him to pack it in. Somewhere behind us, Shania Twain faintly makes plain that it don’t impress her much, and a mechanical voice laughs and invites nobody in particular to come and have a go, as it has been doing for years – during opening hours, anyway.

Skegness. Skeggy. Skeg. It sounds as glamorous as it is. ‘Let’s go to Skeg’, we’d occasionally say as teenagers in the 1990s, then we’d stand in a stuffed double-carriage sprinter as it limped across the Fens from Sleaford, full already of people from Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, Grantham. I remember an irate dad in Botton’s Amusements imploring his toddler to ‘just eat your fucking cheeseburger’, and a cuddly toy machine brimming with every-angled grinning golliwogs. In 2014, the website Destination Tips listed Skegness as the ninth worst travel destination in the world: ‘a pile of dirt bordering the North Sea with a run-down amusement park idly resting on the land’ that it disfavoured only slightly less vehemently than Pyongyang and Mogadishu.[i] A couple of years later, The Sun provided an impassioned riposte, in which Skegness pier manager Gabriella Wilkinson pointed out that ‘generations of the same family keep coming year after year. They wouldn’t come back if it was as bad as a war zone, would they?’[ii] Fair point. But in 2024, a Which? survey of 3,000 people ranked Skegness again as the worst seaside town in the UK. ‘We’ve heard it all before’, wrote Peter Hennessy, witheringly, in the Nottingham Post. ‘Every year a different poll or survey comes out, and it’s always seemingly pointed towards Skegness, painting the town in a negative light.’[iii] Middle-class people of all political stripes and self-identifications love to take the piss out of what working-class people like to do, of course, and they’re certainly conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps they only know it’s the worst seaside town in the UK because they’ve read that it is.

The name Skegness is Norse, and refers to a headland (ness) and possibly to the personal name Skeggi, meaning a bearded man: ‘Skeggi’s headland’.[iv] There might once have been the remains of a Roman fort here, and certainly in medieval times it was a small port of some importance, sheltered by that southwards-pointing sandy headland. A series of protective barrier islands out to sea, and then the promontory, were slathered away by storms and tides between the twelfth and the early sixteenth centuries, and by 1540, a new village had been rebuilt back from the headless new shore, several hundred yards west of the old town’s increasingly watery grave.[v] The few locals in this much less significant new Skegness fished and (mainly) farmed, grazing sheep on marshy pastures, which were still ‘well adopted’ to the purpose in the 1820s, if also ‘desolate’, the coast beyond them ‘in a state of waste’.[vi] In 1811, 132 people lived here in a scattered settlement, though a few visitors were now also making the journey. By 1851, the population had more than doubled, as people moved in to cater to a gently increasing influx of gentrified tourists in search of healthful sea air – Alfred Tennyson among them.

Winds of change were blowing, however. In 1873, a branch railway line to Skegness opened, and a few years later the principal local landowner, the Anglo-Irish Richard Lumley, Earl of Scarborough, decided to revive his fortunes by turning Skegness into a seaside resort of the kind that would encourage the gentrified types to go elsewhere. In 1871 – the year the Bank Holidays Act gave workers several new public holidays, including the first Monday in August – the population of Skegness was 349. A decade later, it had 1,338 residents, the fourth longest pier in England, and the amenities of a town, built on a grid plan centred on two roads named in the Earl’s honour – Lumley Avenue and Scarborough Avenue – with a grand Anglican church, St. Matthew’s, at their crossing.[vii] John Hassall’s rotund, pipe-smoking, apparently flight-attempting Jolly Fisherman first appeared on a Great Northern Railways poster in 1908, above the slogan ‘SKEGNESS IS SO BRACING’; the tourists kept coming from the factory towns of the Midlands, and the conurbation kept growing. Billy Butlin’s first holiday camp opened just north of town in the 1930s, by which time Skegness had a population of over 9,000. Butlin’s was soon commandeered for the war effort, becoming the training ‘ship’ HMS Royal Arthur, and the Nazi propagandist William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, broadcast that it had been sunk.[viii] Then, after the war, the caravan parks that now cover considerably more land than the town started to spring up on its northern outskirts. Even the late-twentieth-century shift towards overseas package holidays did Skeggy’s fortunes as a destination relatively little damage, compared to many other English seaside resorts. However, the town has also long been blighted by deprivation, which still rubs up awkwardly against the cheery chintz on the shore – the combined product of isolation, the perpetual exodus of young adults with prospects and ambitions, and the proportion of employment in low-paid, low-skilled seasonal work.

But there has also been a perpetual influx. Retirees who buy static homes, yes, but also some big characters attracted by the tourists’ propensity to exchange coins for adventures. The most notable is perhaps Harold Davidson, the self-styled ‘prostitutes’ padre’, dubiously implicated in sexual scandal in 1932 while rector (delightfully) of Stiffkey, Norfolk, and defrocked. He took to exhibiting himself in a barrel on Blackpool seafront and denouncing his accusers, like a holier than thou Diogenes. Then, in the summer of 1937, and with interest in his performances having waned in the west, he moved to Skegness, where he played the lead role in a sideshow run by one Captain Fred Rye. Davidson’s gig was to enter a cage containing two lions, armed only with a stick, and to rail against the injustices that had befallen him in much the same way as before. On 28 July, one of the lions disagreed passionately and mauled him to death. Rye immediately grasped victory from the lion’s jaw of defeat: within days, he was tempting would-be punters to come and ‘See the Lion That Mauled and Injured the Rector’.[ix] The year before, one of Rye’s lionesses had escaped his small zoo and made its way across the road to the North Shore Café, the door of which ‘had been closed in the nick of time by Mrs. Vincent the proprietress’.[x] Rye was a chancer, he got away with it, and Skegness provided the opportunity.

The town has also allegedly attracted a less easily identified and captured beast. In 1960, five day-trippers from nearby Wainfleet, perhaps suffering the hallucinatory effects of too many toffee apples, reported seeing what was initially referred to in the press as ‘The Thing’: a torpedo-like marine creature moving ‘about 40 or 50 miles an hour’ up the coast.[xi] Perhaps it was on its way to play with Nessie, interest in which had been revived a few months earlier following the broadcast of film shot by Nessie hunter Tim Dinsdale, showing a little blob of alleged sea serpent swimming away from the shore of Loch Ness.[xii] In any case, there have been infrequent sightings of the Skegness equivalent ever since, and in 2012 a video of a very upright-seeming apparent sea creature, labelled ‘Skegness Monster’, was posted on YouTube and viewed over a million times before it was revealed eight months later to have been a hoax. ‘Why would anyone go to Skegness?’, asked one of the hoaxers. ‘To be honest, we couldn’t think of a reason, so we decided to create one.’[xiii]

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[i] Katie Rosbottom, ‘11 Worst Travel Destinations in the World You Should Skip’, Destination Tips (5 November 2014) <www.destinationtips.com/advice/11-worst-travel-destinations-in-the-world-you-should-skip/9/> [accessed 24 June 2024].

[ii] Oliver Harvey, ‘Ready, Skeggy, Go!’, The Sun (25 January 2017) <www.thesun.co.uk/uncategorized/2698214/skegness-hits-back-after-seaside-fave-is-named-among-worlds-worst-tourist-destinations-alongside-terrorist-hotspots-war-zones-and-pyongyang-north-korea> [accessed 24 June 2024].

[iii] Peter Hennessy, ‘Skegness Has Been Named as the Worst Seaside Town in the UK – I Challenge Anyone Not to Enjoy Themselves There’, Nottingham Post (26 May 2024) <www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/skegness-been-named-worst-seaside-9297676> [accessed 24 June 2024].

[iv] Kenneth Cameron, Dictionary of Lincolnshire Place-Names (English Place-Name Society, 1998), p. 110.

[v] See Caitlin R. Green, ‘The Drowned Villages and Eroding Coastline of Lincolnshire, c.1250-1600’ (10 May 2015) <www.caitlingreen.org/2015/05/drowned-villages-of-lincolnshire.html> [accessed 3 December 2024].

[vi] Skegness U3A Local History Group, Skegness Through the Years (Skegness U3A, 2016), p. 16, quoting Edmund Oldfield, A Topographical and Historical Account of Wainfleet (1829).

[vii] In 1978, a storm destroyed most of the pier, leaving the theatre on the undamaged pierhead looking a bit like an oil rig. In 1995, it burned down. The pier now advances 118 metres from the prom, about a fifth of its original length, its toes occasionally tickling high tide. ‘Skegness Pier – what a great idea!’, declares a sign at its entrance, as though the rhyme bakes truth into the statement. (‘Gonorrhoea – what a great idea!’).

[viii] Winston Kime and Ken Wilkinson, Skegness Past and Present (History Press, 2012), p. 7.

[ix] James Morton, ‘Into the Lion’s Den’, The Law Society Gazette (31 August 2007) <www.lawgazette.co.uk/analysis/into-the-lions-den/2233.article> [accessed 24 June 2024].

[x] ‘Escaped Lioness Thrill at Skegness’, Nottingham Evening Post (29 May 1936), p. 1.

[xi] ‘Mysterious Object Sighted’, Louth Standard (12 August 1960), p. 8.

[xii] Probably a boat. The footage can be viewed at <www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdQUbLKwCvQ> [accessed 20 June 2024].

[xiii] ‘“Skegness Monster” was James May TV Show Hoax’ (26 April 2013) <www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-22307271> [accessed 21 June 2024]. See also <www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQxbkBgTyl8> [accessed 21 June 2024].

On the dead-end road to little Dragonby, you crest a small hill and a view of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire’s only big industrial town, opens to the south in shades of grey. There is even a bench on the verge here, so you can rest as you take in the chimneys and tower-blocks at your leisure. And then you descend into the one-street hamlet that feels a bit like a mining village, named for its only striking feature, the Dragonby Dragon.

I know that dragon is round the back of the houses somewhere, but can’t find a way through, then a woman appears with a spaniel and asks me if I’m lost. Always. She walks me up to the dragon: a twenty-metre-long strip of snaking limestone, the slowly accreted residue of a natural spring, that breaches a little hillside, apparently petrified in the act of slouching towards town. We stop at its brittle snout and admire, as she tells me how a wizard cast a spell and turned him to stone, having found him drinking from the wizard’s spring after midnight.[i] ‘Go careful’, she says, but only because ‘it’s slippy up the hill’, and then she pads on across the flat part of the field after her frolicking pooch.

The ‘tail’ has snapped. One ‘wing’ is above the turf, forming a little rutted ledge. A line has clearly been scored along its dorsal, a long time ago. Close to where the creature’s bum must be, there is a natural fissure, in which someone has rested a porcelain bowl containing a daffodil head. Above, a pylon – the Eyeful Tower of Dragonby – hums as it transports invisible fire to or from Scunny. The dragon rests, and rots.

The Dragonby Dragon hasn’t long been thought of as a dragon, it would seem. From at least the seventeenth century, until at least the late nineteenth, it was known as ‘the sunken church’, allegedly having been pulled into the bowels of the earth due to the preaching of Catholicism, and taking the congregation with it. It was claimed the bells could still be heard ringing on the anniversary of this ‘divine’ intervention. William White, in 1882, described it as ‘a mass of stone, called Sunken Church’ that was, according to tradition, ‘a church attached to one of the monasteries in this neighbourhood’.[ii] In 1696, Abraham de la Pryme, a staunch Anglican, recounted the same legend, having been told the church ‘sunk in the ground with all the people in it, in the times of popery’. However, ‘I found it to be only a fable’, he notes, ‘for that which they shew to be the walls thereof, yet standing, is most manifestly nothing but natural rock, which lifts itself out of the ground about two yards high, in a continued line, like the wall of a church’.[iii] How unsatisfactory that a wayward flock of Catholics wasn’t buried alive here! In their 1908 book of printed sources of local folklore, Eliza Gutch and Mabel Peacock quote much of this, and add a note of their own: ‘Sunken Church at Saucliff [the nearest large house, now Sawcliffe Manor] still exists, and is known by that name.’ However, ‘There has clearly been no church here. The stone is certainly natural.’[iv] That much is indeed obvious, though the legend persists, and in 1998 a local newspaper claimed (without substantiation) that ‘some historians believe it may have been the site of a sunken church’.[v]

I’ve never seen a church with such a crooked apex or bendy walls, and it certainly looks more like a dragon to me. However, there is no mention of the dragon legend in Gutch and Peacock’s book, implying it is a later invention and appellation. Local folklorist Ethel H. Rudkin even leaves out the dragon legend in her notes from 1930, referring only to the ‘Sunk Church’, and recounting (or misremembering, as she is the only person on record to mention it) a belief in a ‘buried town’, the bells of which could until ‘some years ago […] be distinguished, or so it was said’.[vi] Despite competition from the new serpent on the block, the church fable still prevails in some imaginations. Michael Wray, writing in 2003, tells an elaborate version of the sunken church story, in which the greed of landowners and financiers ruins the formerly peaceable nature of a village.[vii] The church then fills with these people, and the Devil, overjoyed by ‘a crowd of hypocrites singing hymns’, sits on the roof with all his imps and joins them in song, weighing the building down so much that is sinks into the earth, trapping them all inside. Wray seems to have been inspired by the petrifaction in the Lincoln Imp legend, with which this book began: imps, in Wray’s story, get like-for-like revenge on behalf of their famous (albeit unmentioned) coeval. Generally, though, it is the dragon legend that perseveres now at Dragonby, though this is possibly no more than a romantic early twentieth century invention, bestowed by landowners. It was, at least, the inspiration when, in 1912, the hamlet of Dragonsby [sic] was built and named by the landowner, Lady Winifride Elwes, to house workers at the then-expanding steel-manufacturing town over the hill.[viii] Is Wray’s rendition of the legend a pointed attack on the bourgeoisie bestowing a modern legend on the place, and stamping their chosen name on it?

While Dragonby allegedly sunk into the earth, towards the Devil, other hefty rocks are purported to have moved the other way, towards both the human and divine. An old belief, apparently still being described as true in Staffordshire as recently as the 1960s, had it that stones ‘grew in the soil then rose to the surface’: Mother Nature’s gallstones, or pellets, passing out through the membranes of farmed acres.[ix] Moreover, many legends from Lincolnshire, and elsewhere, concern stones that seem to have a will and force of their own – or of whoever or whatever put them there – and express that will by being particularly difficult or easy to move, depending on what they want. For example, the tallest stone at the Neolithic Rollright Stones stone circle in Oxfordshire was said to have taken twenty-four horses to drag down a hill, where it was used as a bridge, and allegedly killed two men in the process, but only two horses were required to return it to its rightful place. I was there last summer, surrounded by tourists slurping ice creams, taking selfies and talking loud enough to scare wood pigeons half a mile away. I walked to the Whispering Knights nearby: taller slithers of stone, leaning together, allegedly petrified while plotting treachery. They were behind a ring of high railing, where a man was also leaning, in a leather cowboy hat, perhaps plotting dinner. ‘There’s a real energy here’, he said to me in a studied whisper, as his Labrador bounded around like it had just licked up a line of cocaine.

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[i] 20 March 2024. This detail of the legend is only given in two written accounts that I have located, both from the same author: Nick Cole, ‘What a Wizard Plan for Fonaby Rock!’, Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph (5 July 1996), p. 17; ‘Waiting for a Fairy Tale to Come True’, Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph (28 October 1986), p. 8. In the latter, Cole tells how the beast was cursed by a witch after eating her sheep, then entered a mutually beneficial arrangement with the manager of a local steelworks: ‘in return for an endless supply of coke, the dragon kept his blast furnaces hot.’ One night, after waiting his turn behind a queue of thirsty unicorns, the dragon drank from the spring after midnight, and the witch turned him to stone. This is far more elaborate than what I heard in and near Dragonby, where I asked seven locals about the dragon and was told nothing beyond what I’d been told by the dog-walker who pointed me to the rock. They all knew this story, though.

[ii] William White, White’s History, Gazetteer and Directory of Lincolnshire (1882), quoted in Eliza Gutch and Mabel Peacock, Examples of Printed Folk-Lore Concerning Lincolnshire (David Nutt, 1908), p. 351.

[iii] Abraham de la Pryme, The Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, the Yorkshire Antiquary, ed. Charles Jackson (Andrews, 1870), p. 106.

[iv] Gutch and Peacock, p. 352.

[v] I doubt it. See Hayley Gyllenspetz, ‘Dragon in Danger of Disappearing’, Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph (17 August 1998), p. 4.

[vi] Ethel H. Rudkin, ‘1929-1930 General Notes’, Ethel Rudkin Collection, North Lincolnshire Museum, Scunthorpe.

[vii] Michael Wray, 13 Traditional Ghost Stories from Lincolnshire (East Coast Books, 2003), pp. 32-5.

[viii] The hamlet is ‘Dragonsby’ on the 1947 Ordnance survey map, and later ‘Dragonby’, the current and apparently settled name. Ordnance Survey Lincolnshire Sheet X.SE (1947) <maps.nls.uk/view/101587118> [accessed 17 November 2024].

[ix] Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 344.

A while ago, when his next (and, as it turned out, last) collection was due to be published by Broken Sleep Books, I was commissioned to write an essay about the poet Geoff Hattersley (1956-2024) for a poetry magazine. I’d always wanted to do so. However, and for various reasons ‘beyond my control’, that article didn’t end up in print. I forgot about it, and as it had been written to coincide with the publication of the book anyway, its moment seemed to have passed. Still, I stand by the piece, and by my appreciation of Hattersley, so maybe one day it’ll appear in full somewhere. Below is an extract from the middle of that essay.

If you’d like to read Hattersley’s poetry, it’s easy to get hold of the new Collected Poems (Broken Sleep, 2025), or Back of Beyond: New and Selected Poems (Smith Doorstop, 2006). His final collection, Instead of an Alibi (Broken Sleep, 2023), is very uneven, in my opinion, but contains several gems. The poems discussed in the below extract are all in Back of Beyond, I think - and also in the Collected, of course. He’s good, and I want to encourage you to read him.

What sort of poet is Geoff Hattersley? Vernacular, unsentimental but often moving, irreverent at times, mildly surreal at others, demotic always, and wholly clique-averse. Given half a chance, he will be condescending towards the condescenders, with a comedian’s eye for detail and sense of absurdity, fallacy, and fatuity. In ‘He Was Certainly an Intellectual’,

He’d be there, poised with red pen
over the latest collection of Steiner essays,
eager to underline
Everything obvious to you or me.

Who is this man? I’ve met him, anyway, because I am an academic. Perhaps – gasp – I’ve been him. Hattersley rarely seems to take himself too seriously either. Consider ‘At This Table’, for instance, which begins:

I stare at the letter. It’s from a young poet
who wants advice on how to get gigs in New York,
as if I could help him, barefoot and hungover
at this table in Huddersfield, up to my neck in shit.
This was meant to be my way out.
I’m laughing my head off the more I think of it.

The first line tangentially evokes Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, whether by accident or design, but the poem pivots instantly and comically away from that sort of philosophising – which is no more than Hattersley’s ‘young poet’ had done, of course, because he wants to know how his ego might be given a lift, and not his intellect. In ‘Threatening at Any Moment to Blush’, a ‘girl’ who evokes ‘glimpses of a party / I reckon I’d be happy to gatecrash’ tells the speaker ‘she doesn’t like / poetry, not really, not much, only / Brian Patten, John Cooper-Clarke, Joolz // and now me.’ At times, this little list, however wryly compiled, puts Hattersley in apposite company: he is, in spirit and timbre, a little of the Yorkshire Liverpool Poet, the Yorkshire Punk Poet. Always he is clear, easy to read, not at all ‘difficult’ – but only a fool could fail to notice the intricate subtexts and layered ironies that keep his best poems interesting.

This is true of many of his poems that extend to other lives in other places. ‘Shadows on a Beach’ resembles a sonnet, at least superficially – and a reader is almost certain to notice that resemblance, and with it a composite of connotations. Here is the first and longest of its two stanzas:

On the beach at Dahab, the sand was hot.
It felt good to sit there, to be naked
and take things easy, to glace out to where
the women plunged shouting into the sea.
On the radio, Jim Morrison wanted
to be loved two times, Ba-by, loved twice today.

We are in an idyll, fifty miles up the Sinai coast from Sharm El Sheikh with its shoebox hotels and acres of sun-loungers. Perhaps we haven’t heard of Dahab and need to look it up (I did), and maybe, fleetingly, we then wonder where the vacuous sun-soaked idealism of the first stanza might be leading; perhaps the title hints at something misplaced, and certainly the parroting of Jim Morrison has the same heavy dose of irony to which any reader of Hattersley is quickly attuned. The second stanza:

A small Bedouin girl approached,
a shadow on the pages of my book.
I looked up, smiled. Shyly, she asked
if she could eat the apple-core
I’d just dropped in the sand.

Ah, so she is the ‘shadow’, or at least the poem’s primary literal shadow: that is all we are allowed to see of her, and she is metonymy and symbol for the typical visitor’s understanding of this erstwhile Bedouin village now largely given over to tourism. This second stanza is a slightly shrunken counterpart to the first: five lines instead of six, all typically proportionally shorter, both rhythmically and visually. The poem turns on a sonnet-like volta, then collapses into itself a little, as though shying away, perhaps in sudden shame: at how the speaker can afford to ‘take things easy’, which now takes on a new if conventional texture, but also because it presumably no longer ‘felt good […] to be naked’ when confronted by a small child begging for scraps.

Let me tell you about Yallery Brown. He is a boggart a few feet tall, is obviously old, sports a long and unruly beard, and is made of mud, earthly matter, and possibly some excrescences too. Perhaps you’ve encountered him. One summer day, a young and feckless farm labourer called Tom is walking to the farm, and taking the long way round through various fields, when he hears what he thinks is the cry of a baby coming from a spinney. He soon discovers that, instead, it is Yallery Brown, supine and pinned down by a big flat rock. Tom removes the rock, and Yallery offers to do him a favour in return. What would Tom like, asks Yallery: does he want ‘the liveliest lass in town’ for a wife? Would he instead appreciate great riches? Or would he like to have help with his work? He opts for the latter, thanks Yallery, and is told in no uncertain terms never to thank him again. He has no cause to do so, trust me, and of course everything soon goes tits up.

We do not know the origins of the tale, but its first written retelling was collected by Marie Clothilde Balfour, and published (in Lincolnshire dialect – think lots of extra vowels, enough to make Farmer Wink sound like Jeremy Vine) in the then-burgeoning journal Folklore in 1891. According to Joseph Jacobs, who retold the tale in his 1894 book More English Fairy Tales, the story had been relayed to Balfour by a farm labourer called Tom, who gave his name to the story’s hapless protagonist. Jacobs suggests the storyteller was ‘adapting a local legend to his own circumstances’. More recently, Maureen James, in her 2013 PhD thesis Investigating the Legends of the Carrs, has impressively, and plausibly, traced this man, suggesting he was probably a labourer called Thomas Lamming, who worked at Staniwells Farm, near the village of Hibaldstow. Some people (James is firmly not among them) think Balfour might just have made it all up, because the story has no obvious direct analogues, which is unusual for a folk tale.

This is all very fascinating if you’re interested in such things, and I am. But I also don’t believe folk tales should be in aspic, regarded only as fixed documents from the past. They’re not then living folk tales, in one crucial sense, because they can no longer move with the ‘folk’. Adaptations of folk tales are, as far as I’m concerned, not really adaptations at all: they are mutations, different and new counterpart versions of the real thing, with equal rights. Folk tales must live in order to remain alive. (They also need to be told, transmitted orally, away from the worlds of copyright and perfect binding, but that’s a blog post for a different day – and, as Alan Partridge says, I’m making a point about something else.) There are several versions of ‘Yallery Brown’ in print, all in prose, and some are wonderful. My favourite is probably Alan Garner’s, published in 1969. Garner was a highly skilled, atmospheric storyteller, and lends much of his own spirit to his version of what he described as ‘the most powerful of all English fairy tales’. Otherwise, though, he stays very close indeed to the earliest extant version. My least favourite is this cloying American thing, which is apparently – and I quote from the YouTube channel page – ‘for teenagers’, though I remember being a teenager and I’m not convinced the authors (I assume it was written by committee) do. In any case, I have no problem with them altering the original almost beyond recognition. Mick Gowar wrote a superb version of the story for primary school children about twenty years ago, and he gives them a lot more respect. He also invents or ‘alters’ many details, including the tale’s ending, making it gruesome in a way that might have given Roald Dahl pause for thought. He makes no acknowledgment of this ‘change’ in his wee book – and why should he?

In all cases, though, these versions return us to an otherwise romanticised, unmechanised, bucolic past none of us has ever really experienced. Come Here to This Gate contains four versions of Lincolnshire folk tales – ‘Yallery Brown’, ‘The Metheringham Lass’, ‘The Lincoln Imp’ and ‘Nanny Rutt’ – in a section that comprises about a fifth of the book and is in some senses quite a departure from everything else in it. Two of them otherwise almost exclusively exist orally – though in truth they’ve all largely been forgotten, and I don’t think I know anyone from ‘back home’ who knew them before I started jabbering on about them. Mine are all set in the modern world of smashed Red Walls, drive-thrus on roundabouts, moral panics, despoliation, casualised labour, rampant commercialisation and global catastrophe. Initially, I’d intended to title the section of the book that contains them ‘Lincolnshire Folk Tales Redux’, but I removed that last word, and why not? They’re mine, and they’re also yours. My protagonist in ‘Yallery Brown’ isn’t Tom, he is Will: my poem is (he’ll kill me for this) about my friends William Jackson and, to a lesser extent, Sarah Durrant, and their two kids, Emrys and Francis. William is responsible for the images used on the covers of my first and third collections, Tonight the Summer’s Over and Sweet Nothings, and the four of them live a long way from Hibaldstow, so I’ve changed the location too. I only hope this all annoys some purse-lipped (fellow-)academics somewhere. In most cases they’re rather more removed from the ‘folk’ than I am, whatever the people in their academic networks might tell them.

I could turn onanistic literary critic here, and discuss the ways in which ‘Yallery Brown’ is a clever cautionary tale, and how I’ve worked with that. It is, and I have keenly tried to do so, but I’ll leave you to decide out for yourself. My version certainly isn’t for children, though I suspect a lot of them would like its impishness. Here is an excerpt:

Then he said, ‘What you let out beneath

that tombstone, my lad, you can’t understand,
and whether you take it or leave it,
that much will stay true. But think: your poor hands’ –
he wank-waved my way – ‘they are yet

to have some time off. I could give you a wife
who will love you, somehow. Or your job:
it could all do itself while you sit in the grass,
or stay home and twiddle your knob.

Just say which you want.’ It was tempting. I mulled:
love? There’s enough time for love
to sort itself out, so I thought (I was young),
but no work to do? Lord above!

Maybe I’ll go home and surf the net
for ladies, or go down the pub
and she will be waiting for me, so I thought.
‘Work, please.’ He nodded, then rubbed

his billiard-ball belly, then nodded again.
‘It’s granted!’ ‘Well, thank you’, I said,
though not with conviction. He flew in a rage.
‘You must never thank me! No shred

of a thank you I’ll hear, you grateful young sod!’
He was flailing and gritting his teeth
and pounding the clods with his clod-coloured boots.
‘Okay!’ I cried. Then, with relief,

I saw he was turning to trog on his way,
and he bounded from molehill to molehill,
but his voice carried back, bringing with it a laugh:
‘Just call when you need me, young Will:

I’m Yallery Brown. Say my name, and I’ll come.
But’ – and at this, he looked back –
‘don’t thank me again, or I’ll leave you for good.’
Then the sprightly sprite danced up the track

and out of my life.

And into yours, if you buy Come Here to This Gate, which I have divined that you are certain to do.

This article was first published (with some differences) on the Carcanet blog in 2024.

Buy Come Here to This Gate here.
Pre-order Devils in the Details here.

I enjoyed myself, and it was wonderful to be surrounded by so many friends, colleagues (from NTU and elsewhere), former colleagues, students, former students, and members of my family. Those aren’t mutually-exclusive categories.

An ‘inaugural’ is a rite of passage, and is supposed to be several things at once: a research lecture, but also a public event; a formal occasion, but also a celebration. I attend as many of them as I can - typically one or two a year - and usually come away thinking I’ve learned something useful about psychology, or healthcare, or molecules, or whatever. But I’d never put much thought into what I might talk about, should the vague possibility become a requirement.

I chose to focus on a folk tale. Most people who know me won’t have expected that: my focus has always been on poetry above all else. However, I recently led the project ‘Lincolnshire Folk Tales: Origins, Legacies, Connections, Futures’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, so it seemed sensible to focus on an aspect of that. Besides, as a friend said to me in January, when I was working out what I might talk about, ‘focus on the folk tales - more people care about those’. (He has recently retired from an academic career dedicated to poetry.)

If you would like to read a book about this sort of thing, click here, or on the image below. This book will be published in May, but can be preordered now for just £12.99. Over the next month, I’ll share a few excerpts from it on this new Substack, then I’ll probably go back to writing about poetry, places, and the various things that wind me up (also not always mutually exclusive categories).

Finally, here are a few photos of friends and family, taken on the day of the lecture. It is rare for me to see so many people I care about in one place.

In 2022, I was a visiting writer at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. It was an exceptional experience - or, rather, an exceptional set of disparate experiences. This article juxtaposes two of them. It was first published in PN Review in 2023.

I’m a wacko from Waco, ain’t no doubt about it.
Shot a man there in the head but can’t talk much about it.
He was trying to shoot me, but he took too long to aim.
Anybody in my place woulda done the same.
I don’t start fights, I finish fights, that’s the way I’ll always be.
I’m a wacko from Waco, you best not mess with me.

That’s not me embracing a new poetic direction, nor is it about gun-hoarding and
-slinging cult leader David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, names synonymous with Waco worldwide since the Waco Siege in 1993. Rather, it is the opening verse to a hypermasculine, apparently autobiographical barnstormer by the late Texan country singer Billy Joe Shaver, recalling an ‘incident’ in 2007, when an argument broke out in a bar after another man flirted with his wife. (Shaver, who claimed to have shot the would-be lothario ‘right between the mother and the fucker’ – face tattoos, perhaps – was acquitted.) In any case, in September last year I spent a couple of weeks in central Texas, with this song lodged in my head thanks to a friend who had sent it to me via WhatsApp on my first day in town.

My happy duty in Waco, before I was to have some time to myself out in the wild Texas Hill Country to the west, was to spend a few days at Baylor, the world’s biggest Baptist University, to give a reading and a workshop, and attend a class for students who had been set my third collection, Sweet Nothings. Professor Kevin Gardner – one of those people we occasionally hear about, who buys and reads poetry but doesn’t tend to write it – was my host, and a very affable and entertaining one, too. Kevin is a John Betjeman specialist, which must be a lonely pursuit in Texas. After a friendly classroom interrogation by his students, there were several hours to kill before the reading, which was to take place in the Armstrong Browning Library. We had a big Texan lunch, peered into the Baylor University bear enclosure (‘My university’s campus has pigeons and wagtails’, I told him), and then Kevin presumably tired of my enthusiastic naivete and left me with his equally affable colleague Professor Sarah Ford at the front of the Library, so that we might look around. Okay, fine. I’d never heard of it.

Neither have many of the citizens of Waco, I suspect – perhaps even including some of the students at Baylor. They ambled along the bosky paths outside, slurping iced coffees and clutching books and gazing into phones, like extras on an excessively perfected campus-based film set. The library, pointedly in what locals think is ‘Italian Renaissance-style’, loomed like the all-American attempt at elsewhere that it is. It was built in the late 1940s, to house what was already at the time the world’s largest collection of artefacts related to the lives and writing of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. How Dr A. J. Armstrong, then chairman of Baylor’s English Department (once housed in the same building, before the expanding collection evicted it) acquired the wealth to do this remained mysterious to me throughout my visit, but in 1912, when the Brownings’ son Pen died, his possessions were auctioned by Sotheby’s in London, and Armstrong raised the final paddle.

We entered the sudden dim, glad to escape the sun, but were then prompted by a sprightly guide (‘Hi!’ – big outstretched hand – ‘I’m Caleb!’) to step back out and inspect the huge bronze doors through which we’d come. They are modelled on Ghiberti’s famous Gates of Paradise in Florence, though here the ten panels depict scenes from Robert Browning’s poems. It is a fitting introduction to what is effectively a cathedral-sized secular shrine. Back inside, we sauntered across the empty entrance hall, our footsteps rebounding from the marble floor, the marble walls, the frescoes depicting more scenes from Browning’s poems, and some of this building’s many heavy stained glass windows glowing with yet more scenes from Browning’s poems. Most of them were obscure to me, and remained so, because Caleb didn’t know what they depicted either – and I don’t blame him, because they are so bountiful, and so evidently the product of a deep, narrow devotion. Across from the door, a huge painting of Robert, by Pen, stared down like a beneficent saint, over his final writing desk, placed on a dais at the back, as though it were an altar.

Next, we followed Caleb to the Foyer of Mediation, the inner sanctum. A giant chandelier hung tiny from its shallow dome, which glinted away dully in 23-carat gold leaf. An Italian garden scene with Classical adornments covered the upper walls, along with a few quotations from even more of Browning’s poems, some tempting awkward comparisons:

Man’s work is to labor and leaven –
As best he may – earth here with heaven;
’Tis work for work’s sake that he’s needing.

We were then pointed towards a little apsidal alcove at the back, the ‘Cloister of Clasped Hands’, presumably named thus for its alliterative properties. And there, on a little plinth, was Harriet Hosmer’s famous bronze sculpture from 1853, made from a plaster cast of the couple’s hands gently gripping one another, hers on his, each lopped cleanly at the wrist, homely and unheimlich. ‘There are no contemporaneous portraits of the two together’, said Caleb. ‘This is the closest we’ve got’. So near and yet so far.

Walking around these grandiose rooms, it is obvious Elizabeth has lost the battle for wall space. ‘So Elizabeth has the upper hand, but only literally’, I quipped, feeling clever and then wondering whether this gets said at least a couple of times a day. The dynamic changed a little upstairs, in the comparatively cosy Elizabeth Barrett Browning Salon, the five stained glass windows of which depict five of her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Her writing chairs, tables, cabinets, were dotted around. A fat silky rope kept us at a polite distance.

‘Do you have many, er, books or manuscripts?’ I asked. Oh yes, and there are also very quiet reading rooms in which to consult them. The library is proud to have 25,000 visitors a year, but that’s fewer than 70 a day. Electrons in an atom, not sardines in a tin. We stopped a moment at a sleepy reading room, the sort one imagines the British Library might have until one has actually been into any of its bustling counterparts, but I hadn’t prepared myself for this place, wouldn’t have known what to ask for nor why I wanted to see it, and besides, we were running out of time. Some manuscripts are displayed in the hall where I was to read that evening, though most of the ample cabinet space there is given over to a bricolage of first-rate curios: illustrations of the Pied Piper by the ten-year-old boy for whom Robert Browning wrote the poem; the Brownings’ carriage clock with ‘Bates Huddersfield’ engraved on it; and what is Robert’s last known bit of versification in his own hand – ‘Here I’m gazing, wide awake, / Robert Browning, no mistake!’ – beneath a pencil sketch, and dated ‘Nov 24 ’89’, two and a half weeks before he died.

Of course, the Brownings had no idea their personal items and jottings would ever be on display here – nor, surely, that ‘here’ existed. When Robert died, Waco had only just started to outgrow its role as an outpost for cattle herders on the Chisholm Trail, the Wichita Indians having been forced out of the area a generation earlier. When Elizabeth died, it had comprised only a cluster of wooden buildings. ‘Italy / Is one thing, England one’, wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in ‘Aurora Leigh’, and that played in my head, but Italy and England have far more in common with one another than either does with Waco, even though the meagre Texan towns of Windsor and Milano and Clifton and Italy (and Eulogy) are each within an hour’s drive.

On my final morning in Waco, a poet friend in New York sent me a message: ‘Are you going to visit the Siege site before you head out of town?’ I’d looked it up, of course, and had briefly considered doing so. A significant proportion of those who died during the Waco Siege had been recruited by the Branch Davidian leadership on a visit to England; several came from Nottingham, where I live; some of their relatives still reside within a mile or two of where I write this now. The victims were exactly that, whatever you make of their religious beliefs: victims, often inherently vulnerable ones, who had in most cases done nothing more malignant than seek a meaningful life, and who ended up instead dying in a manifestation of hell on earth. They deserve to be remembered, but does one ever visit such a place only to remember? And what could I gain from going to look at a plot of earth? In any case, I traced my way through the raggedy suburbs of Waco and down country lanes through nondescript prairie, towards where the New Mount Carmel Center complex had been until it burned down and destroyed nearly eighty people in the process, many of them children, some to the extent that their autopsy records read ‘sex undetermined’. I am not a believer, but this is sacred ground.

The long driveway up to where the Center once stood is lined with sparkling granite memorials, some donated by Texan militia groups. Perhaps unfairly, I am reminded that white supremacist Timothy McVeigh murdered nearly two hundred people in Oklahoma City, two years to the day after the tragedy here, in supposed revenge at the government. What had happened to the Branch Davidians quickly became not just a rallying cry for those of all political persuasions who questioned perceived governmental overreach, it also became a white supremacist cause, though the Branch Davidians unceremoniously killed in that compound had had no such affiliations; in fact, a high proportion of them were black. A simple little clapboard chapel now stands where the building was, a ‘TRUMP 2024’ flag fluttering above it. Inside, Alexa Pace, the wife of the current pastor of the now greatly diminished Davidians, was very excited by my furtive entrance – I was the only visitor, after all, and she soon discovered I had ‘an accent’, which is all it usually takes in smalltown America. She pressed a bullet casing from the initial raid into my palm and asked me to take it home. ‘Oh, my son used to dig them up all the time.’ Snatches of bible prophecy, eye-watering anti-government propaganda and photographs of those who had burned to death all around us covered the walls like posters in a very odd teenager’s bedroom, as David Koresh’s music (he’d once dreamed of being a rock star) thumped from a speaker at the volume of shopping mall muzak. Horses cropped grass beyond the open double doors. She guided me past them, past the former swimming pool where turtles appeared and vanished in green water, across the scrubby lawn where the Center’s vault had been and where several bodies had been recovered from among the cinders, and into a former storm shelter, now just a weed-strewn concrete pit with butterflies jinking in its stillness. A huge iridescent dragonfly landed on a big bloom I can’t name. I opened my palm and looked at the little nub it cradled. It would have been gauche to cry. Why did I come here? Why was I glad to have done so? And more lines from ‘Aurora Leigh’ came to mind, more or less, although I had to wait until I was back in the car before I could look them up and remember them properly, out of context in every way and perfectly apt for all that:

‘And see! is God not with us on the earth?
And shall we put Him down by aught we do?
Who says there’s nothing for the poor and vile
Save poverty and wickedness? behold!’
And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped,
And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.

In the beginning when God called all good,
Even then, was evil near us, it is writ.
But we, indeed, who call things good and fair,
The evil is upon us while we speak;
Deliver us from evil, let us pray.

This article was first published in PN Review 273 (October 2023), and then in my book Endless Present: Selected Articles, Reviews and Dispatches, 2010-2023 (Shoestring Press, 2024).