The Cottingley Secret

by Hazel Gaynor

  The child within me had often wished for an opportunity to talk properly about the fairies. Sixty years is, after all, a long time to keep a secret, but on each occasion we were interviewed, Elsie and I remained faithful to the promise we’d made all those years ago. Our answers to the questions about the authenticity of the photographs were suitably evasive and never entirely conclusive. I wasn’t sure the watching millions wanted our answers to be conclusive. I always remembered an American newspaper report that came out at the time the first photographs were revealed. “The soul of the fairy is its evanescence. Its charm is the eternal doubt, rose-tinted with the shadow of a hope. But the thrill is all in ourselves.”

  Doubt. Hope. Thrill. Words that encapsulated everything I felt about the whole event.

  I suppose it was inevitable that one of us would break our silence in the end.

  It was Elsie who first confessed to the trick we had played. Our secret was finally free.

  I was cross with Elsie at first, but I couldn’t stay cross for long. In many ways I was glad to tell the truth. I felt a weight lift from my shoulders, despite the sensational headlines that raced across the printing presses as the story broke:

  FAIRY LADY ADMITS PHOTOGRAPHS WERE FAKED!

  THE COTTINGLEY PHOTOGRAPHS: A HOAX!

  I read the headlines while sitting in my garden, the birds singing in the hedgerows and bees buzzing around me, normal life going on as I turned the pages and read other people’s accounts and awful misrepresentations of our story. It is those inaccuracies that spurred me on to tell my own version of events. As Elsie once said in an interview, “Frances and I don’t care anymore. People can enjoy the fairies any way they like as far as we are concerned (so long as they get their facts right).”

  As interest in the photographs revived, I started to write this book. A memoir of sorts. The record set straight. Sometimes my memories elude me: gaps I can’t quite fill, names and places and dates I can’t quite grasp. But all the important things are there, as clear as the day they happened. Clearest of all are my memories of the fairies, and my dreams of a little girl with flame-red hair, standing in a woodland glen. I’ve known many people in my life who refuse to believe in things they can’t explain with scientific fact, but I’ll never forget what I saw, or the comfort Ellen Hogan took from the posy of flowers I gave to her, a gift from another realm.

  I met Elsie recently. Frances and Elsie, together again. Apart from the wrinkles and the gray hair, we hadn’t changed much over the years. Elsie still made me laugh with her deadpan Yorkshire humor, and I still made her wonder about things. We talked about our families mostly, swapped photographs of our children and grandchildren—so proud of them all. We didn’t talk about the fairies. We’d done all our talking about that.

  When we said good-bye, I wished Elsie the very best. I was so grateful to have known her, so grateful that when I stepped into the front room of 31 Main Street that cold April night, it was Elsie waiting by the fireplace with mischief in her eyes. I’m grateful that it was Elsie who first showed me the beck and that it was Elsie, and nobody else, who shared the whole experience with me. Two peas in a pod, Aunt Polly used to say. Elsie was the sister I’d never had. The friend and ally who took a photograph of me in a quiet sunlit moment in one of the most perfect places I have ever known, and captured forever a young girl with wonder in her eyes and the belief in magical things in her heart.

  For many years, I could only look at that photograph with guilt and anguish. Now? Now I look at it and smile, because whatever conclusions the experts may reach about our photographs, I alone know what that little girl saw, and she will hold that treasure in her heart forever.

  THE END

  But it wasn’t quite the end.

  Olivia turned the page and read on.

  Afterword

  My first memory of Frances Griffiths is sitting beneath an elder tree, looking at a children’s picture book with her. I admired it so much she said I could keep it.

  I was a young girl of about nine and lived in a pretty cottage beside a stream—the beck—in the West Yorkshire village of Cottingley. Frances knew my mother well—she had been Frances’s teacher in Bradford during the Great War. They became friends of sorts, drawn together by their shared worries of loved ones at war and what my mother described as “a particular sensitivity to nature.”

  I knew nothing about the Cottingley fairy photographs until that summer when Frances came to visit. She gave Mammy some photographs, which they talked about for a long time, and when she left, I begged Mammy to tell me about them. I especially liked the photograph of Frances leaning on a mossy bank, surrounded by fairies, and was thrilled when Mammy said I could keep it. She put it in a silver frame for me and I treasured it, believing—like everyone else—that the fairies were real. I spent the rest of that summer playing by the beck, sitting on the willow bough seat, watching, waiting, hoping.

  Mammy died long before the truth behind the famous photographs was revealed, but shortly after her death I found some letters she’d written to my father during the war in which she told him how she’d watched the girls take their photographs and that she had found the drawings they’d used to create them. She never told anyone, of course. That was her own part in the secret. Paper drawings or not, when Frances and Elsie finally admitted to their trick, Frances firmly maintained that she really did see fairies at the beck.

  I was much older when my mother first told me about Aisling and although I’d never known her, I felt as if I did. I’d often dreamed of a little girl with red hair, playing in the woods, and I often found flowers in our cottage, particularly white harebells and an unusual yellow flower called cinquefoil, known to be symbolic of dreams and a mother’s love. Mammy said she believed they were little gifts from Aisling and the fairies.

  Poor Mammy took her grief to her grave. Aisling’s remains were found several years later and I was glad to be able to travel to Cottingley to see her laid to rest. She is the sister I never knew, but she is never forgotten. I often feel her—an echo, a shadow, a flash of light, the sense of someone walking beside me. I talk to her sometimes. People think I’m going daft in the head, hearing voices, seeing things. But I know what I see, what I hear.

  Frances wrote to me a few years ago to say she was writing her account of the Cottingley events. She eventually sent on the finished pages with a note saying she thought I might like a copy, since so much of the story included my mother and my dear sister. I am pleased to have it, although not entirely sure what to do with it. My husband says if he ever opens his bookshop he’ll have it bound and kept on display. Cormac doesn’t believe in fairies, but he does believe in the power of stories. We both believe that Frances’s story deserves to be told.

  In many ways, I wish the story had ended that autumn of 1917, that the girls’ secret had remained theirs alone. But some secrets are too big to keep and even as I write these final comments, I have a feeling that Frances’s story will go on. In interviews, Frances often spoke about the curious fifth photograph—but she never referred to it as the last.

  I wonder.

  People speculate about why Frances and Elsie didn’t admit to the hoax sooner, but I can understand why. So many people made the story their own, twisting and turning the facts so that in the end it almost wasn’t Frances and Elsie’s truth to tell anymore. The story they had created—albeit unintentionally—filled people with excitement and wonder and hope. The truth would have destroyed the girls and their family, not to mention the hopes of a nation recovering from war.

  In Frances’s final years, people still asked her if she really had seen fairies at the bottom of the garden. Now that her story is written down, I suppose people will make up their own minds. I only hope that Frances and her fairies will be talked about for many years to come.

  Perhaps I’ll write my own story one day. It would be nice to capture my memories before I become too old and forgetful.

  For now, dear reader, thank you for setting
Frances’s words free. May they fly ever onward.

  Martha Kavanagh

  July 1987

  Beneath these last typed words of Nana Martha’s was a handwritten note. Olivia’s heart roared with emotion as she read it.

  Dear reader,

  My mother once told me that if a lie is told often enough it will eventually become the truth. Like any story well told, with each retelling it grows and strengthens so that over many years we might forget it was ever anything but the truth. That is, after all, how legends and myths are born. She always believed that was what happened in Cottingley. A little white lie, told for good reason, became a story in itself. A story that has endured for decades.

  The photograph of Frances and the fairies has passed down through several generations of my family, and now belongs to me. I keep it in my jewelry box in the same silver frame my Nana Ellen first placed it in. One day I’ll show it to Olivia and tell her all about Frances and Elsie and the fairies in Cottingley, just as my mother told me, and as her mother told her. Like all good fairy stories, it should endure and grow.

  Photographs have always fascinated me; the way they offer a portal into our past, the way they capture a fleeting moment and make it last forever. There is one particular photo of myself and Olivia that I especially love, the tips of our noses just touching as she gazes into my eyes. When I look at it, I’m instantly transported back to that moment: her adorable fat little hands scrunched into tiny balls, the delicious folds of her skin, the ripe-peach smell of her, the velvet touch of her hair, her searching eyes following something around the room as she gurgled into space. I wonder what she saw.

  I found Frances’s book when I was clearing out the back bedroom at my parents’ cottage. I read it on quiet afternoons while the wind howled around the eaves and Olivia sent her teddies and dolls on great adventures.

  I can hear her now as I write this, making up her innocent little stories.

  I love her more than I can find the words to say.

  It breaks my heart to know that she will grow up and have to try to understand the world, with all its complications and uncertainties. I hope she won’t try to understand everything, and that some of the magic she knows now will stay with her.

  Perhaps she’ll ask about her father one day, and I will tell her what a kind and clever and wonderful man he was. Like every good story, I will make him the best sort of hero, because that is the father she deserves. I will invent a story for her, one we can believe in together, because she deserves more than the truth as far as he is concerned. We will learn to do this together, Olivia and I. She will teach me how to be a good parent, and I will teach her how to tie her shoelaces and how to tell the time on a dandelion clock. As in all good fairy tales, we will find our happy ending.

  Our story is just beginning, but Olivia will write her own conclusion. And perhaps that is the greatest gift I can give her: the confidence to fill the blank page, the desire to live a life full of tomorrows in which everything is possible and all our best stories are waiting to be told.

  Katherine (Kitty) Kavanagh

  April 1988

  The wind rattled the door frame.

  Time seemed to stop, a respectful silence in which a lifetime shifted and found a new center. Olivia clutched these final pages to her chest as tears slipped down her cheeks in silent silver ribbons.

  Frances had not only written a fascinating account of her incredible fairy photographs, but in doing so, she had brought together all the disparate parts of Olivia’s story too.

  Olivia worked late, stitching and gluing until these final loose pages became part of Frances’s account, and everything was encased in a new leather cover. With painstaking care, she added the title in gold lettering on the front:

  “Notes on a Fairy Tale, by Frances Griffiths.”

  The story, complete.

  Nineteen

  Ireland. Three months later.

  Ireland was at its loveliest in the autumn: sun-gilded and rosy-cheeked. It was a season of growth and abundance, the season when Olivia felt most alive. This was her spring. Her renewal.

  Since Nana’s death, life had taken on a different shape. Losing the last link to her past, the last remaining member of her immediate family, had left Olivia feeling peculiarly alone, untethered to anyone and anything, although Henry often reminded her that nobody can ever be truly alone when they are surrounded by stories, as she was.

  Although it was sometimes undeniably daunting, she found a new confidence from having to stand on her own two feet and get on with things. Nobody was going to pick her up or rub it better. Nobody actually needed her, apart from Hemingway, and whether he needed anything other than the occasional bit of food and a bed to curl up on was a matter for debate. But that was okay, because Olivia now realized that it was far more important for her to support herself than to depend on someone else. She knew who she was. Without question or doubt, she knew what she wanted, and why.

  Eventually the shock and devastation she’d caused by calling off the engagement and canceling the wedding dissipated. Like ink in water, everything had settled and found a new path and although it was upsetting at times, Olivia never faltered. The only lasting legacy from her five years with Jack was the chance discovery that she couldn’t have children. This, above all else, broke her heart, and yet she knew she would be okay. Yes, life for her would be different now, but no less complete.

  As for Jack, they’d spoken a few times, mostly civilly and mostly about practical monetary matters. Olivia had heard a rumor he was already in a relationship with someone else, which didn’t surprise her. For all his showmanship, Jack was hopeless on his own. He needed the accessory of a woman on his arm as much as he needed his expensive watch. Whenever she thought about him, it was only ever with a sense of dispassionate relief that she’d had the courage to trust herself and accept the truth of their relationship. The date of their would-be wedding passed with little to mark it other than a text from Ross to say he hoped she was bathing in champagne and not hitting the gin.

  Dear Ross. She thought about him often—too often, perhaps. Not only in the quieter moments when she had time to stop and think and miss his smile and the strumming of his guitar, but also in rowdy moments of excitement when she found herself wishing he was there to share it with her. That, perhaps, was when she felt most alone.

  Iris wrote once a week, telling Olivia all about her new school and how nice everyone was and, as promised, Ross called for a chat every Friday evening when he’d finished writing and Olivia had locked up. He poured a glass of wine in Kerry and she poured a glass of wine in Howth and they spent half an hour or so putting the world to rights and making each other laugh. They were both still firmly of the opinion that it was best to be friends and not romantically entangled, but even so, absence did what absence does, and as the weeks and months slipped by, two hearts grew ever fonder.

  As life settled down, the garden in the window began to grow again: tender stems and green shoots and tiny hopeful buds, waiting for Olivia when she went downstairs each morning. Still she couldn’t explain it, and still she didn’t wish to. She saw the window for what it was: a reflection of herself. It thrived when she thrived. It faltered when she faltered. Like breathing in and out, she and the shop were connected in every way it was possible to be.

  But just when Olivia thought life was settling down into some sort of new normality, there was one final surprise in store.

  It arrived in an envelope one amber-tinted October afternoon. Inside the envelope was a key with a label attached. It read: Number 6, Little Lane. Taking the key, Olivia stepped outside to the empty cottage beside Something Old. The key turned easily in the lock.

  The interior was clear and bright. Bare white walls and dark oak floorboards. On a wall to the right hung a picture frame, inside which was a flattened coffee cup, the inscription Live facing outward.

  She smiled and picked up a note from the desk.

  “The sun shines for you
he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me . . .”

  See, I read it. Nice try, Kavanagh. Nice try! R xx

  Another envelope on the desk was addressed to her. Opening it, she read the letter inside.

  Dear Olivia,

  Welcome to your new shop! I’ve been working on this for a while but couldn’t say anything because I wasn’t sure what—if anything—would come of it, but finally everything is confirmed.

  When my nephew was going through your grandfather’s paperwork, he discovered the original deeds to the cottages on Little Lane. It has come to light that Something Old and the cottage beside it are legally considered to be one property. They were originally built as one cottage—Number 5—which was divided into two smaller properties in the late 1800s. It is all rather complicated and no surprise that the detail was missed when your grandfather leased his part of the property.

  Nora Plunkett’s husband was the last shopkeeper in cottage 6, and, as you know, it has been vacant since he passed away several years ago. I suspect this was as much to do with Nora grieving for her husband as it was to do with not being overly fond of your grandfather. In any event, and without getting into too much detail about ground rent and lapsed leases, it was Cormac’s all the time—and now it is yours. I know you will make it something very special indeed.

  Warmest wishes—and congratulations.

  Henry Blake

  PS The picture and the note are a welcome gift from Ross. He said you would understand. He also tidied the place up a bit. He’s a very pleasant young man.

  The wind whistled down the chimney breast, bringing with it the distant refrain of a familiar song. Olivia’s heart danced as she looked around the empty shop. She already knew exactly what she was going to do with it.