by Hazel Gaynor
Uncle Arthur joked about there being “nowt so miserable as a hard Yorkshire winter,” and all too soon I experienced for myself how bitter and unforgiving it was. I dreaded every trip to the lavvy and every bath night, my bones aching with the cold until I thought my blood would freeze like the water pump in the garden. Elsie and I spent long evenings huddled beside the fire, knitting comforts for the soldiers, darning holes in our stockings, reading or drawing by candlelight whenever we could. I felt like a prisoner in the house with everyone’s bad tempers and rotten colds getting on top of each other. Elsie grew ever taller, leaving hardly any room in the bed for Rosebud and me. No wonder our occasional trips to the Picture House in Shipley became such a treat. We spent many happy afternoons there, captivated by the Gish sisters and Mary Pickford, whom I found as enchanting and magical as my fairy friends at the beck.
The winter nights were the worst. In those endless hours, waiting for morning, I longed more than ever for the warm breezes that had ruffled my hair in Cape Town as I walked on the beach with Daddy. I missed him more and more with each week that passed and worried about him being too cold in the trenches, even with all the hats and scarves we’d sent him. I took his portrait from between the pages of The Water Babies every night, shivering as I knelt on the cold floor and prayed with all my might for his safety. When I opened my eyes and looked at his face, I could hardly remember what he sounded like when he spoke or laughed. The picture was worn from being held so often, the image not as clear and sharp as it once was. Like the year, and like my hopes of ever seeing him again, my Daddy was fading away.
It was a rare frost-free day, two weeks before Christmas, when Aunt Polly asked me to take some wool to Mrs. Hogan. “She’s knitting a balaclava to send off to Mr. Hogan in his Christmas parcel, but she’s run out of wool, and the haberdashery is closed until Monday. Be a pet and take this ’round to her, would you, Frances?”
Glad to get out of the house for a while, I put on my wellingtons and coat and set off around the fields, following the woodland path toward Mrs. Hogan’s cottage. It was easier to see without the summer foliage concealing it, but it looked terribly lonely there in the woods, with only a few evergreens for company.
Lifting the latch on the gate, I followed the narrow path to the front door. The two pairs of black boots still stood on the step: one big, one small. The perfect circle of toadstools still grew beneath the elder tree, and just as I had when I’d first come here in the summer, I felt, again, a nagging sense that I’d forgotten to do something.
I knocked tentatively at the door and listened for the sound of footsteps approaching inside.
Mrs. Hogan was delighted to see me when she opened the door. “Frances! What a lovely surprise!”
“Hello, Miss. Aunt Polly asked me to bring you this.” I handed her the two balls of wool.
“Ah, well now. Isn’t that terrible kind of her? Come on in for a minute. You must be frozen stiff.”
A fire crackled in the grate, and I was glad of its warmth as I took off my hat and coat and gloves, which Mrs. Hogan took to hang on the stand. The cottage was as inviting as I remembered from my visit in the summer, but Mrs. Hogan looked as thin and pale as the bare branches on the elder tree outside.
I sat at the small table as she set the kettle on the stove and cut a thick slice of something—cake or bread, I wasn’t sure.
“Tea brack,” she said, putting it on a plate and handing it to me with a smile. “My mammy’s recipe. Best brack in Ireland. Tuck in.”
I hadn’t tasted tea brack before so I couldn’t say if it was the best in Ireland or not, but it was certainly delicious. As I ate, I noticed several new paintings had been added to the collection on the dresser.
“Started as a hobby to keep me busy while Robert . . . Mr. Hogan . . . was away,” Mrs. Hogan remarked as she saw me admiring them. She sighed and placed a hand to her heart. “There have been a lot of days to fill.”
I wished there was something I could do to take away her sadness about her husband being at war and her little girl gone missing, but as I knew only too well, no matter how much you wished someone was with you, it wouldn’t bring them back. “My cousin Elsie likes to paint,” I said, trying not to drop crumbs. “She’s very good.”
“Is that so?” Mrs. Hogan sat in a chair opposite me and poured tea from the pot. “What does she like to draw?”
“Landscapes. Nature. And lots of fairies.” I froze as I realized what I’d said. “But mostly landscapes.”
Mrs. Hogan looked at me for a moment as if she wanted to say something, but changed her mind. “Well, everybody likes fairies, don’t they?” she said with a knowing smile. “And it’s a great skill to draw something purely from imagination.” I nodded in agreement and stuffed my mouth full of tea brack so I couldn’t speak. “My granny used to tell me stories about the daoine maithe—the Good People,” she continued. “She lived all her life among the ancient thorn trees and faerie forts in Ireland. What she couldn’t tell you about the faeries wasn’t worth knowing.”
There was a rare brightness in Mrs. Hogan’s eyes as she spoke, a dreamlike quality to her voice. I put down my brack and listened. It was like hearing my own heartbeat.
“She taught me the ballads and tales she’d been told around the turf fires when she was a coleen. I was enchanted by the stories of the sídhe and the púca, of changelings and leprechauns, the Far Darrig and the banshee. My favorite poem was one she used to recite by William Allingham: ‘Up the airy mountain, / Down the rushy glen, / We daren’t go a-hunting / For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, / Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, / And white owl’s feather!’ Do you know it, Frances?”
I shook my head, almost in a trance. I wanted her to keep talking.
“Perhaps we’ll read it in class. Some people dismiss it all as nonsense, but I believe in the Little People. Some tend the flowers and plants. Some tend the rivers and streams. Others are more mischievous.” She took a sip of her tea. “Not unlike humans, I suppose.”
My secret burned on the tip of my tongue. The desire to tell the truth raged inside me, the need to tell someone about the muddle Elsie and I had got ourselves into with the photographs. But the words wouldn’t come. I sat in silence and gazed at the tea leaves in the bottom of my cup, wondering what secrets they would tell if I could read them.
“If you ever want to talk about anything, Frances, I’m a good listener. It must be difficult for you and your mammy with your father away. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone who isn’t as close to you as your own family. Isn’t as involved?”
The question in her voice was an invitation. Did she know? Had she seen us taking the photographs? In our excitement, we’d forgotten that Mrs. Hogan could see the beck from the cottage, even if we couldn’t see the cottage from the beck. I stared harder into my teacup.
“You know, Frances, I sometimes think there’s too much truth in the world. Too much certainty and scientific fact. We don’t always need an explanation, do we? Sometimes all we need is something to believe in, something to give us hope and to remind us how remarkable the world can be, even in the middle of a war.” She stood up and walked to the window. “Perhaps that’s why we’ve always made up stories—created our own truths—because sometimes they’re easier to believe. That’s not so terrible, is it?”
Before I said something I would regret, I told Mrs. Hogan I’d best be getting home.
“Come and see me again before Christmas, Frances. And bring your mammy. There’s plenty more brack where that came from!”
I said thank you and that Mummy would like that. As I buttoned my coat, my eyes were drawn to a small oval painting on the windowsill. It was of a child with red hair. Her face was familiar, but I didn’t know why.
I thought about Mrs. Hogan’s stories of the Little People all the way home and all through tea and all that evening over card games in the front room. I was still thinking about them as I fell asleep that night, where my d
reams were filled with waterfalls and woodland glades and a girl with flame-red hair, handing me a white flower. “For Mammy,” she said. “Please. For my Mammy.”
Christmas came and went in a disappointing manner. Wartime rations meant meager pickings for Christmas dinner, although Aunt Polly’s figgy pudding was declared a triumph, and we all had second helpings to fill the gaps in our bellies. I was disappointed not to find the silver sixpence I’d planned to send to Daddy for good luck. He needed it now more than ever. Mummy tried to protect me from the worst of the news, but Elsie told me about the headlines she saw on the newspaper stands in Bradford and about the things the older women at Gunston’s talked about over tea break. The battles were fierce and the casualties many.
With the arrival of a new year, everyone made an effort to be full of good cheer and to talk of victory coming soon, but I couldn’t allow myself to believe it. The world had been at war for nearly a third of my life. War was as much a part of me now as three of my fingers and toes. All I could do was pray for Daddy’s safety and an early spring and an end to it all.
Mrs. Hogan had said that we didn’t always need an explanation for things. Fairies, I understood entirely. War, I couldn’t fathom at all.
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Cottingley, Yorkshire. Spring 1918.
According to Aunt Polly, Uncle Arthur had ears like an African elephant. “He can hear the dead turn in their grave, that man,” was her favorite turn of phrase. His ears were almost as big as his hands, so I suppose it was no surprise that it was Uncle Arthur, and nobody else gathered in the front room that Whitsuntide evening, who heard the latch on the gate. He wasn’t in the best of moods and certainly not in the mood to entertain uninvited guests.
He flicked down the top of his newspaper. “Who the ’eck’s that coming ’round at this time?”
Aunt Polly tutted. “It’ll be Edna Morris. Wanting to borrow something again, no doubt. Any excuse to stick her great snout in where it isn’t wanted.”
I burst out laughing, and both Aunt Polly and I earned ourselves a scolding from Mummy for being rude about the neighbors. Elsie winked at me and pushed her finger against the end of her nose to make it resemble a snout. I stuffed my mouth into the crook of my arm to smother my giggles.
But it wasn’t Edna Morris wanting to borrow something.
I heard the front door open and gently close with a quiet click. I heard soft footsteps.
And I knew.
I held my breath as the front room door swung open, and everything became nothing and there was only him.
“Daddy!”
One minute he was a distant fading memory, the next he was standing right there, in the front room, laughing and smiling and telling us he’d been through the delousing center and it was safe for us to hug him. As if all the months and weeks and days and hours without him had never happened, Daddy was home, tin hat in one hand, kit bag in the other, and all my heart was held in the smile that lit up his eyes.
I remember crying out his name, remember my petticoats wrapping themselves around my legs as I tried to stand up, remember his arms squeezing me tight, remember the peculiar smell of him: earth and salt, cigarettes and some other bitter tang I imagined was the smell of war.
My prayers had been answered. Daddy was home. Everything was going to be all right.
Mummy couldn’t stop sobbing. Even with her scrunched-up face and snotty red nose, she looked ten years younger and ten inches taller. She looked like Mummy again.
When Daddy finally had a chance to get a word in edgeways between all the fussing and hugging and back slapping, he explained that the war wasn’t over, but he had a week’s leave after which he would have to go back. Mummy said we would deal with that when the time came. For now, all that mattered was that he was home.
I sat on Daddy’s knee, the finest seat in all of England, as Aunt Polly went to put the kettle on and Uncle Arthur groused about the price of coal. Life at Number 31 Main Street felt wonderfully normal.
I had never been prouder than when Daddy sat beside me at church the next day, so smart and brave and important-looking in his uniform. My friends admired him and made a great fuss of me. Fathers were a rare sight in those days, and the boys wanted to ask him about the whizzbangs and the tanks and the trench rats. When one of the girls asked if the horses would be coming back, Daddy shook his head and said the horses had been very brave, which made us all cry.
I didn’t mind sharing Daddy for a few minutes, but what I loved most were the quiet, ordinary moments we spent together as a family at the house, Mummy sewing in the window seat, Daddy lying on the bed beside me as he read from The Pickwick Papers, making up terrific voices for the characters and causing me to laugh so much my sides ached.
I couldn’t wait to show him the beck, and on the first rain-free day, I insisted he come with me. We sat together on the willow bough seat, just as I’d often imagined.
“So, tell me what you and our Elsie have been up to. Your mother says you two have become the best of friends—and what about these other friends you’ve made, eh?”
I’d told Daddy about the photographs in my letters because I knew Mummy would mention them. “Did Mummy show you the photographs?” I asked. Nobody had seen them for months.
“She did. Quite something, eh? Our Frances playing with fairies. Captured forever in a photograph.”
I’d been waiting for the right moment to tell him about my fairies. More than anyone else, I knew Daddy would believe me. But when it came to it, I was terrified to say anything in case he didn’t.
“Do you believe in fairies, Daddy?”
“I’ve no reason not to I suppose, but I’ve never seen one myself.” He swung his legs beneath the bough and threw sycamore seeds into the water. “Do you know the story of the Angels of Mons, Frances?” I said I didn’t. “There was a big battle at the start of the war, in a place called Mons in Belgium. The British soldiers suffered heavy losses but said they’d seen phantom bowmen, troops of angel warriors storming the skies above them, firing flaming arrows down on the Germans to help the British forces. They became known as the Angels of Mons.”
“Were there really angel warriors in the sky, Daddy?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? The soldiers say there were, but how can we be sure if we didn’t see it for ourselves? That’s why I can’t say I don’t believe in fairies—but I can’t say I do, either, because I haven’t seen one.”
I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I had to tell him. “Daddy, if I tell you something, do you promise not to make fun of me?” Daddy was as bad for teasing as Uncle Arthur. Worse, in fact.
He promised. And he was true to his word. He didn’t comment or question as I spoke. He sat beside me as I told him about the glimmers of light and the misty visions I’d seen day after day through the summer. He listened quietly as the stream carried my secret away beneath our feet.
“Mrs. Hogan, my teacher, says there are lots of different types of fairies,” I explained, feeling clever to know so much about them. “She’s from Ireland and calls them the Little People. Some are nature fairies. Some are water fairies. They change with the seasons and the weather. Some fairies are mischievous, but most are kind. The ones I see are kind.”
“And what about the ones in your photographs? What type are they?”
I stiffened. I had never been able to tell Daddy a lie. He had a way of looking at me as if he could see straight into my mind, could hear what I was thinking. He looked at me that way now.
Should I tell the truth? Should I show him the mound of earth where the hat pins were pushed into the ground? But then he would have to tell Mummy and Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur and they would be ever so cross, and what would Elsie think of me if I broke my promise? The photographs were mostly forgotten about, hidden away in a drawer. I thought about the Angels of Mons and Mrs. Hogan’s words—that we don’t always need an explanation. That sometimes all we need is something to believe in, something to g
ive us hope. No, I wouldn’t tell him. Not now.
“The fairies in the photograph are different from those I see when I’m alone. The ones in the photograph only appear when me and Elsie are together.”
Without actually telling a lie, I had managed not to betray my secret.
Daddy didn’t mention the fairy photographs again.
We packed every minute of that week with laughter and fun. Daddy filled a hole we’d all felt but hadn’t been able to explain. He was the missing piece of Uncle Arthur’s jigsaw puzzle and Elsie’s lost button. He was Aunt Polly’s stray earring and Mummy’s misplaced glove. He was the lines I’d forgotten in the recital at school. Everything was right with him here. Everything was complete.
Which is why it was always going to be unbearable to say good-bye again.
We spent his final morning together at the beck, pulling faces at our reflections in the water and making each other laugh. The stream laughed with us, capturing our giggles in its gentle chatter as it meandered along. I buried my face in the warmth of his neck, breathing in the scent and feeling the shape of him, so that I wouldn’t forget.
“I’m very proud of you, Frances. Very proud of the way you’ve settled in here.” My heart swelled with pride as he spoke. “And as for fairies at the bottom of the garden,” he added, lowering his voice to a whisper, “I believe you. Don’t ever let anyone tell you they’re not real. Don’t let anyone take that away from you.”
I stored his words away in my heart, to treasure like precious jewels.
“The war will be over soon, and I’ll be back for good. I promise.” He made me look into his eyes. “You believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes, Daddy. I do.”
As the sun sank low behind the horizon that night, I thought of all the poor children whose daddies had never come home, not even for a week, and I was so grateful to have had this time with him, even if it broke my heart to lose him again so soon.
I cried myself to sleep that night as Elsie held my hand.