Tired of listening to them talk about me and things they didn’t understand, I resigned myself to another scolding and stepped into the scullery.
Mummy was onto me like a cat onto a mouse. “Oh, Frances. Look at the state of you! I’ll be scrubbing at those skirts for days to get them clean. I’ve a mind to set you to the task yourself. Honestly.” I said nothing, holding my tongue, although my cheeks burned with a sullen temper. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you. You are not to play at the beck.”
It was then that I saw Elsie listening at the door on the other side of the scullery. Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur sat at the table in stony silence as Mummy grabbed the rolling pin from Aunt Polly, taking her anger out on the pastry.
“I don’t understand you, Frances,” she continued. “Fancy, playing all those hours up the beck by yourself when you could be out on the street with the other children, making friends. Well, there’ll be no more of it. You are forbidden from playing at the beck for the rest of the summer. Do you hear me? No more.” She thumped the rolling pin back and forth across the table before banging it down, making everyone jump. “Why do you insist on playing there anyway? It isn’t good to spend so much time alone. No wonder the other children call you names.”
The room fell into a shocked silence. I had never seen my mother so cross. It frightened and upset me. I stood in silence, pressing my fingernails into the palms of my hands. My nose prickled with the urge to cry as I blinked back hot tears. I could feel it coming, rushing through me like the water on the mill wheel, unstoppable. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. The words I had promised never to say came tumbling out.
“I don’t play on my own,” I cried. “I play with them! I go to see the fairies!”
I had never answered back to my mother. I had barely ever raised my voice in temper at her. I trembled in shock and swallowed hard, and for the second time in as many weeks I wished I could take back my words, wished I could gather them up like wool and wind them carefully back into a ball.
For what felt like an age nobody spoke. A blackbird sang at a branch near the window. Uncle Arthur coughed. Someone whistled “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” in the street outside. Time stopped, and in those silent moments I knew things would never be the same. There would always be the time before I said I saw fairies at the beck, and the time after.
I watched helplessly as my words slipped out through the open window, drifting away with the dandelion seeds.
Mummy placed her hands on her hips and glared at me. “And now we are to have fibs as well as sodden stockings, are we?”
“I’m not telling fibs. I see them. I really do.” My words came out in gasps, choked by my heartbroken sobs. I felt like a silly little girl telling tales. All I wanted was for Mummy to believe me.
Seeing Elsie lurking at the door, Aunt Polly turned on her in a flash. “Well, Elsie Wright. What do you have to say about all this? I suppose you’ve seen fairies at the beck too?”
Elsie stepped into the room. Her eyes flickered toward mine, wide and searching. I stared back at her, tears streaming down my cheeks. I stood, frozen to the spot, as she picked up a scrap of pastry that had been trimmed from the pan. I had no idea what she was going to say.
“Yes, Mummy,” she said, without a care in the world as she popped the scrap of pastry into her mouth. “I have seen them.” I stared at the floor, my heart pounding, my knees trembling like a jelly pudding. “Our Frances isn’t telling fibs. There are fairies at the bottom of the garden.”
Uncle Arthur spat his tea with laughing. “Never heard such a load of old codswallop. Fairies in the beck! What next? Pixies in the lavvy?”
I looked at Mummy. Her arms were folded defiantly across her chest, her face a picture of incredulity and anger as she stood in broody silence beside the range.
Aunt Polly raised an eyebrow. “Well now, girls. Supposing, just for a moment, that you have seen fairies. What would they look like?”
Elsie stared at me. “Well, Frances. Go on. Tell them.”
I stared at the floor, wishing I could disappear into it. How could I possibly describe them? How could I explain their misty, barely-there peculiarity, the ringing in my ears, the fact that I sensed their presence and beauty as much as saw it? “I don’t remember.”
Uncle Arthur burst out laughing again. “No wonder you don’t remember. You never saw them in the first place.”
“I really did,” I whispered. “I really do.”
Mummy harrumphed. “Well, if you say there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, then I suppose there must be, because I can’t for the life of me think why you would say such a thing otherwise.” She turned her back to everyone as she put the pie in the oven. “You can show us after tea.”
I felt hot and prickly and for all that I nipped at the skin on my legs to distract myself, I couldn’t stop the tears falling. I was relieved when Mummy told me to go and get out of my wet clothes and somehow I walked from the kitchen, my legs shaking, my head down, my cheeks burning hot in anger and shame.
I heard them talking about me as I made my way upstairs. Aunt Polly defending me, saying Uncle Arthur shouldn’t tease me because I wasn’t used to it like our Elsie; Uncle Arthur saying I’d want to get used to being teased if I was going around telling folk I saw fairies at the bottom of the garden.
“Fairies in Cottingley!” he laughed. “Never ’eard the like of it!”
“And wash your hands,” Mummy called after me.
I knew Elsie would follow. Without turning around, I knew she was right behind me. She would know what to do next. I was sure of it.
In the bedroom I fell onto the bed, unable to stop my tears. Elsie closed the door behind her.
“I shouldn’t have said it, Elsie. It was a secret. My secret.”
“Our secret.”
“I should never have told you, even.”
“Well you did, and I’m glad. At least this way there’s two of us saying it.”
“They don’t believe us anyway,” I sobbed. “Did you hear Uncle Arthur? He thinks it’s a load of nonsense.”
“But they were interested all the same.” Elsie hesitated for a moment. I knew what she was going to say. “Have you really seen them, Frances? Cross your heart and hope to die.”
I sat up and made the most solemn face I could. “I have, Elsie. I really and truly have. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Then you can show us all. After tea. Like Auntie Annie said.”
“But they don’t always come, Elsie. What if they’re not there?”
Elsie thought for a moment. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something.”
And she did. The next day, after more teasing by our parents and several unsuccessful “fairy-spotting” excursions to the beck, Elsie came bounding upstairs where I was writing to Daddy. Full of excitement, she grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet.
“I’ve got it, Frances! It’s perfect!”
“Got what?”
“An idea. For how to prove to them about the fairies. We can borrow Daddy’s camera and take a photograph of them. Then they’ll have to believe us, won’t they?”
It was a perfectly clever idea. “But what if the fairies don’t come, Elsie? They don’t come every day. Only sometimes.”
But she wasn’t listening. She was rummaging about in the trunk at the foot of the bed. “Where is it, Frances? Your book? Princess Mary’s book.”
I pulled it out from under the bed and handed it to Elsie, who flicked quickly to the page she was looking for, the Alfred Noyes poem “A Spell for a Fairy” with Claude Shepperson’s lovely illustrations of fairies dancing.
“There,” Elsie said. “If they want fairies, we’ll give them fairies. We don’t have to wait for actual fairies. We’ll make our own!” She grabbed her box of pencils and paper and began to copy the illustrations from the book, and although her drawings weren’t like the real fairies I’d seen, I said they were, because I didn’t want to hurt her
feelings.
I would often look back on that moment in the bedroom at 31 Main Street and wish things had been different. Had I known then how much trouble Elsie’s idea would cause, I would have dismissed the whole thing as nonsense and continued to enjoy the fairies in private, hoping Uncle Arthur’s teasing would eventually subside. But I didn’t know what the future held, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked Elsie’s plan. It was only a bit of harmless fun after all, a little joke to make Mummy and Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur believe me about the beck fairies so that Mummy would stop fussing and let me play there as much as I liked.
It was agreed. Elsie would draw likenesses of the fairies, copying from the pictures in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, and we would take a photograph of them at the beck with Uncle Arthur’s camera.
As Daddy had said, the camera cannot lie.
If we could photograph fairies, everyone would have to believe me.
Wouldn’t they?
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Cottingley, Yorkshire. July 1917.
We made our plan in the bedroom as slivers of moonlight fell onto the counterpane. When we weren’t whispering about fairies, I dreamed of them, and always of the little girl handing me a white flower.
We decided to take the photograph the following Saturday when Mummy and Aunt Polly were due to spend the day with Aunt Clara in Bradford. Elsie had everything worked out and explained what we were going to do. She just had to persuade Uncle Arthur to lend us his precious camera. I had my doubts he would, but I didn’t say so. As Elsie said, it was worth a try.
Brimming with confidence, Elsie talked of nothing else in the days leading up to Saturday. She thought it a terrific joke. “Imagine their faces when they see the picture, Frances! It’ll be as good as a Harry Houdini trick. You wait and see.”
I perched on the edge of the bed while Elsie scrambled underneath and lifted a loose board. “Here. Grab this.” A hand emerged from beneath the iron bedstead, pushing a biscuit tin toward me.
I lifted it onto the bed as Elsie wriggled out backward and stood up to brush the dust from her dress and stockings. Her smile was infectious. “Well, go on, then,” she said. “Open it.”
My tummy fizzed with excitement as I opened the lid. One by one, I lifted out four beautiful fairies, each about three inches in height. They had been drawn onto stiff card and cut out carefully. Even the tiny gaps between their fingers were perfectly defined. Their wings and dresses were shaded in soft pastel tones of lavender, lemon, and green, giving them an almost lifelike effect: real folds in their skirts, real sunlight in their hair. One was playing an instrument, and they all looked like they were mid-movement.
Elsie sat down on the bed beside me, a proud smile on her face. “What do you think?”
“They’re beautiful, Elsie. You’re so clever.”
She couldn’t hide her pride. “Took me longer than I thought, but I wanted to get the shading right to make sure they looked real. Not too flat.”
I turned them over in my hands, picking them up in turn and placing them carefully back onto the counterpane. “They do look real, Elsie. Very real. I wish I could draw like you.”
“If you keep practicing, you will. Anyway, what matters is that they think they’re real when they see them on the plate.”
Her eyes glittered with anticipation, and all my doubts were brushed away in an instant. It was impossible not to fall under Elsie’s spell. There was something so alluring about her. If I was quiet and reserved at times, Elsie was an abundance of confidence. Like the pollen from the ragwort that left dusty marks on my hands, a little bit of Elsie had brushed off on me too.
I picked up the fairy cutouts again. “How will we stand them up? They won’t look real lying flat.”
Elsie winked and took a small box from her pocket. She tipped several of her mother’s largest hat pins onto the bed. “We’ll tape a pin onto the back of each cutout. Then we stick the end of the pin into the ground. Look, like this.” She demonstrated by holding a pin against the back of one of the drawings and standing it upright.
I giggled. “Oh, Elsie. It looks like she’s standing up on the bed!” I took the cutout and the pin from Elsie and held it up for her to see.
Elsie laughed too. “It’s perfect. Better than I thought. Now all we have to do is convince Daddy to let us borrow his camera and we’ll prove to them, once and for all, that there are fairies in the beck and you weren’t telling fibs. Then they’ll be happy to let you play there, and this can all be forgotten about.”
Hearing movement downstairs, Elsie quickly put the pins and the drawings into the biscuit tin and slid back under the bed to return it to its hiding place.
“And not a word, Frances,” she said when she emerged. “Not to anyone. Promise?”
I nodded with my most serious face. “I promise, Elsie. I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“Not even Rosebud.”
My rag doll was propped up on the pillow. My confidante. The one person I told my biggest secrets to. She’d been there all the time, and heard everything about our plans. But Elsie—although not too grown-up to believe in fairies—was too grown-up to believe in dolls being able to understand humans.
“I won’t even tell Rosebud. I promise.”
Saturday arrived with bright sunshine and a warm breeze that blew through the open windows and doors of 31 Main Street. The house was heavy with anticipation, the air laced with secrets shared and secrets hidden.
I had a spoonful of porridge halfway to my mouth when Elsie asked Uncle Arthur if we could borrow his camera, explaining that she wanted to take a picture of me with it. I couldn’t move. I hadn’t expected her to come out with it just like that, as casually as if she was asking someone to pass the milk jug. I glanced sideways at Uncle Arthur, who was equally surprised.
He put his cup down. “Well . . . no. You can’t borrow the camera. Expensive stuff, that. I’ll take a photograph of our Frances if that’s what you really want it for.”
I glanced at Elsie, throwing her an oh, well look as my heart sank into my boots beneath the table. I’d suspected as much all along. Uncle Arthur would never agree to us having his precious camera. The plan was ruined, and I would still be forbidden from playing at the beck.
Elsie wasn’t as easily defeated. “Please, Daddy. I’ll be very careful with it. I promise. I’ve watched you work it, and I’ve handled lots of the glass plates at work. We’ll bring it straight back as soon as we’ve taken a picture, and you can develop the plate so we won’t be near your chemicals and things.” She looked at him with pretty pleading eyes, drawing every ounce of her infectious charm toward him.
Aunt Polly stood up to clear the breakfast dishes. “Oh, go on, Arthur. Let them use it. It’ll get them out from under your feet if nowt else.”
Elsie sensed her opportunity, pouncing as quickly as the cat catching a mouse. “Please, Daddy. Mummy’s right. It’ll get us out of the house for a while, and it’s such a lovely day.”
Everyone stared at Uncle Arthur. Eight eyes that he couldn’t resist. I watched him melt beneath his daughter’s gaze, and for a moment I forgot all about fairies and cameras. All I could think about was Daddy far away in France, and with all my heart, I wished he was here in the scullery so he could look at me that same way. Sometimes I forgot what he looked like. Sometimes, I struggled to remember him at all.
Uncle Arthur stood up, his chair legs scraping against the floor. “You’re to bring it straight back, mind. And if there’s so much as a scratch on it . . .”
Elsie was up and out of her chair before he could say another word, throwing her arms around his neck. “Thank you, Daddy. Thank you!” She turned to me. “Well, come on, then.”
There was an urgency to her voice. I stood up without even realizing I had.
“Erm. Where do you think you’re going, Frances Griffiths?” Mummy looked at me, arms folded, a quizzical look on her face.
“Can I leave the table?” I asked, itchi
ng to follow Elsie, who was already halfway up the stairs.
“May I?”
“May I leave the table?”
“Yes. You may.”
With that, we were gone, thudding upstairs on eager feet, giggling and whispering as we left the adults to finish their breakfast and shake their heads and wonder about the peculiar ways of children.
I waited as patiently as I could in the narrow hallway while Uncle Arthur explained everything to Elsie: how to load the glass plates, how to set the aperture and shutter speed, and how to frame the picture through the small viewfinder. It sounded complicated, and I hoped Elsie was paying attention. She wasn’t known for her ability to concentrate. I twirled my fingers around and around the curls in my hair, formed from the rags I’d slept in the previous night. I knew Elsie had the fairy cutouts in her coat pocket, and worried they would fall out and our plan would be spoiled before we’d even left the house.
As I waited, the grandfather clock ticked methodically beside me, sweeping the restless minutes away like dust being brushed out of the scullery door. Rather than taking time away, I imagined the passing minutes stretching out further and further, like bread dough rising and proving, filling the months and years ahead when I might not live in Cottingley and might never speak of fairies again. And for the first time, I understood why Peter Pan didn’t want to grow up, because neither did I. I wanted to be nine years old forever. I wanted to stay in this summer of fairies. I wanted time to pause.
Eventually Elsie emerged from the front room, carrying the heavy camera by the handle, her eyes wild with impatience. We didn’t speak a word to each other as we clattered down the cellar steps and followed the slope of the garden down toward the beck. Only when we’d negotiated the slippery stones and picked our way toward a mossy bank in front of the waterfall did we dare to look at each other and burst out laughing.
“Oh, Elsie. I thought he’d never agree. It’s a good job Aunt Polly stepped in.”