by Losure, Mary
They teased Elsie, too, if she went into one of her daydreams. Maybe she’d seen some fairies?
Pretty soon Elsie said she was sick of it. And then . . . she told Frances she had an idea.
Why not take a photograph of the fairies? It would stop the teasing once and for all.
It would be splendid.
Elsie would borrow her father’s camera, she said. She’d never taken a photograph in her life, but that didn’t seem to stop her.
It was summer now, and Elsie’s father had just gotten his first camera, secondhand from Uncle Percy. It was a wooden box about nine inches tall, covered with pebble-textured black paper. It had a leather strap on top. It weighed about two and a half pounds.
It didn’t use the kind of film that came in rolls, which was a rather recent American invention.
Instead, Elsie’s father’s London-made camera used an old-fashioned kind of film that came mounted on glass plates. “Perhaps the advent of the luxurious roll-film has, to a certain extent, displaced the box-plate camera from its proud position of constant companion,” the camera’s instruction manual admitted. “But,” it added, “there is no gainsaying the fact that the best pictures have always been, and will always be, produced from plates.” Each photograph taken with Elsie’s father’s camera required its own glass plate.
To load the plates into the camera, you had to take it into a darkroom, “i.e. a room from which all light, except that given by a ruby lamp . . . has been excluded,” according to the manual. Elsie’s father had built his own darkroom in a tiny space in the cellar, tucked under the stairs that came down from the kitchen. He didn’t have a ruby lamp. Instead, he had blocked off the darkroom’s one window except for a small pane of red glass.
In the dim red light of the darkroom, you had to insert the plates, one by one, into metal holders known as sheaths, taking care to make sure the film side of the glass plates was facing up. You had to load each sheath into the camera, then close the camera’s hinged door, which had a large spring that held the sheaths in place.
Just recently, Elsie’s father had begun taking his first photos. Anyone could see by watching him that it wasn’t easy.
First (by working a lever on the front of the camera) he had to adjust the amount of light that went into the lens. Too much light, and the picture would be washed out. Too little, and it would be too dark.
He also had to set the shutter speed, again using a lever on the front of the camera.
He had to stand the right distance from whatever he was photographing (a distance that depended on the setting he’d chosen for the light) and decide which of the two glass viewfinders he wanted to use: the one on the side of the box or the one on top. And finally, he had to work the shutter (another lever, on the side of the box) very carefully. “A steady pressure should be maintained on the lever until the shutter is released,” the manual warned, as “a jerky, sudden movement will seriously affect the ultimate picture.”
But Elsie’s father’s photographs turned out wonderfully.
One of them showed tall Elsie and a much shorter Frances. They were standing side by side in the sunshine by the beck in their bathing costumes.
It was a good thing the pictures turned out so well, since each glass plate cost quite a bit of money.
One Wednesday night, Uncle Arthur and Aunt Polly went off to choir practice and Frances and her mother went to Bradford to visit Aunt Clara. When Frances got home and she and Elsie were alone in their room, Elsie said she had something to show her.
It was a set of beautifully painted cutout paper fairies.
Elsie had copied the bodies from some dancing fairies in one of Frances’s storybooks, then added bigger wings. She had cut them out so carefully that not one tiny sliver of paper showed around the edges.
The dancing fairies in Frances’s storybook
Frances was filled with admiration.
Elsie slipped them into a book and hid it under her bed.
Now all she needed was some hatpins (the long, sharp pins ladies used to fasten their big hats to their high-piled hair) and some gum, for attaching the cutouts to the hatpins.
Then, when the cutouts, the hatpins, and the gum were all ready, Elsie and Frances would wait for the next time the grown-ups asked them if they’d seen any fairies lately.
It was a bright, sunny July day when someone made the next fairy remark.
Quick as anything, Elsie told her father that if he’d lend her his camera, she’d take the fairies’ picture.
It was only fair, she said. He should either lend her the camera or stop teasing.
Uncle Arthur didn’t like the idea one bit, but Elsie and Frances pestered him. Nattered him, as Elsie would say in her Yorkshire way.
Aunt Polly and Frances’s mother laughed and took the girls’ side, and finally, after much grumbling, Uncle Arthur went down to his darkroom and returned with the camera. He gave it to Elsie and told her she had to carry it, not Frances. “There’s one plate in. If you make a mess of it you won’t get another,” he said, “and mind you take care of my camera.”
Then, with Uncle Arthur yelling, “Now take care!” behind them, Elsie and Frances raced for the beck.
At the little pool at the bottom of the waterfall, Frances took her shoes off and waded. Elsie wandered around, looking at all the sunny spots nearby. In a little while, she called Frances over.
Elsie had stuck the hatpins, each with its dancing fairy, on a mossy bank among a tangle of ferns and wildflowers.
The watercolor fairies danced barefoot, on tiptoe, their filmy dresses and long hair flying. Elsie had painted their wings with spots like butterflies’ wings. One fairy played a set of long pipes. They were graceful, cheery-looking little creatures, with beautiful slender ankles.
Frances told Elsie how pretty they were. Then she got down behind them.
Frances was wearing an everyday dress with the sleeves rolled up, but the wreath of pansies in her hair looked nice. She rested her chin on her hand and gazed at the camera.
Elsie held the black box, Frances watched, and Elsie pressed the lever.
Frances and the fairies
After that, the two girls tore the paper fairies into little tiny pieces. They stuck the hatpins deep into the earth, climbed out of the beck, and gave the camera back to Uncle Arthur.
There wasn’t room for three in the darkroom, so Elsie and her father crowded into the little space under the stairs while Frances waited outside the door. There in the cellar, with the bright garden just outside, Frances hopped and jumped and danced in anticipation.
And then, from behind the darkroom door, she heard Elsie yell.
The fairies were on the plate!
Uncle Arthur wasn’t at all pleased, to hear Elsie tell it later. At first, as they watched the image emerge from the tray of darkroom chemicals, he grumbled that it was a nice picture of Frances, but they’d messed it up by leaving trash from a picnic lying around. He thought the fairies’ wings were “sandwich papers,” Elsie said, until he saw all the little legs coming up.
Uncle Arthur asked Elsie how she did it, but Elsie wouldn’t say. Later, in secret, she made Frances promise not to say anything, either.
Frances never heard the grown-ups discussing the photograph or the fairies, but now, at least, they didn’t fuss when she went down to the beck.
Maybe they figured she’d need new school shoes next year anyway? Or maybe it was that she had learned to keep her footing better on the rocks? But whatever their reasons were, the grown-ups left Frances in peace.
Down in the beck, the little men came and went, walking up and down the streambed in single file. Frances got to know their comings and goings: they reminded her of people going to work on a train every day. She especially liked to watch her favorite little man, the one who was always last in line. He wasn’t as serious as the rest of them. Every once in a while, as he brought up the rear, he’d hop or skip or do a little jig.
On fine summer morning
s when Frances woke up, other sounds besides the brook might drift through her window: horses’ hooves in the lane, the clack of the mowing machines, the bleating of sheep in the fields. And in time, there were other things to do besides going down, all alone, to the beck.
When haymaking season came, Frances and Aunt Polly volunteered to help a farmer named Mr. Snowden. His farm lay right at the edge of Cottingley Village, not far from 31 Main Street. He needed help with his hay because so many men were away in the War.
With pitchforks, Frances and Aunt Polly tossed the hay into the wagon. Then they got to climb up and ride on top of the load. They would lie in the sweet-smelling hay while Mr. Snowden drove down the country lanes, past hedges blooming with roses and honeysuckle.
Mr. Snowden had a daughter named Ada, and she and Frances became friends. After that, Frances often went to visit her at Manor Farm.
Ada wasn’t silent like the little men.
Frances and Ada would climb to the top of the haystack and sit there for hours, just talking.
Late that summer, Frances and Elsie’s cousin Judith got married. Frances and Elsie both got to be in the wedding. They wore white dresses their mothers made for them.
Elsie’s father took pictures of the wedding party for the family photo album. Visitors always liked to look at it. The photo of Frances and the fairies wasn’t included, but Frances and Elsie and Aunt Polly liked to take the fairy picture out of its drawer and show it to people anyway.
No one ever knew what to make of it, but they often gushed about how lovely the fairies were.
Then one day, Elsie told Frances she wanted to take another photograph. She had already picked a spot for it when, on a sunny Saturday in September, she talked Uncle Arthur into lending her the camera. He loaded it with one plate, just as he had before.
Elsie put on the flowing white dress she’d worn to Cousin Judith’s wedding, then she and Frances set off for the beck. In her long skirt, Elsie followed the path down to the streambed and picked her way among the rocks and pools. After a while, she climbed up the stream bank to a field dotted with huge oak trees.
When she got to the right spot, she stuck a paper cutout (gummed to a hatpin) into the soft ground.
The figure she’d painted this time had a beard, a pointy hat, long spindly legs, and a sly expression. From its back sprouted what looked like wings. The gnome — for so it was — appeared to be tiptoeing across the grass.
Elsie checked to see that all the levers on the camera were set correctly. She selected a place that was the right distance from the gnome, then set the camera carefully on the ground.
Frances got down near the camera.
Elsie sat behind the gnome and arranged her skirts gracefully around her ankles. Over her long dark hair, she wore a shapeless, wide-brimmed gnomish sort of hat that went nicely with the gnome itself.
Then Elsie extended her fingertips so that they grazed the gnome’s little paper hand. She smiled at the little man, as though they were just now meeting in the woods. At that exact moment, Frances took the picture.
She pressed the little lever, and click! It was done.
Elsie and the gnome
After that, Elsie took the camera back so Uncle Arthur could develop the plate. Frances stayed in the beck to play.
At teatime, when Frances came home, the picture was set out to dry, but Frances didn’t pay much attention to it.
After all, it was only a paper fairy.
Fall and winter passed, and then another summer. Frances still saw fairies in the beck, but now their lives seemed rather aimless. “Fairies — the pretty, pretty ones — are just fairies,” Frances wrote, “and there’s not much I can say about them.”
Frances’s father came home on leave, with his big pack and his tin hat hanging by a strap from his shoulder. Then, a week later, he had to return to France, for the war was still not over.
Frances wrote a letter to her friend Joanna in South Africa.
Dear Joe,
I hope you are quite well. I wrote a letter before, only I lost it or it got mislaid. Do you play with Elsie and Nora Biddles? I am learning French, Geometry, Cookery and Algebra at school now. Dad came home from France the other week . . . and we all think the War will be over in a few days. We are going to get our flags to hang upstairs in our bedroom. I am sending two photos, both of me, one of me in a bathing costume in our back yard. Uncle Arthur took that, while the other is me with some fairies up the beck, Elsie took that one. Rosebud is as fat as ever and I have made her some new clothes. How are Teddy and Dolly?
On the back of the fairy photograph, Frances wrote, Elsie and I are very friendly with the beck fairies. It is funny I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there.
One day in November, the teachers at Frances’s school called an assembly just before lunchtime. It seemed an odd time for an assembly, and when Frances got there, the teachers were all wearing their caps and gowns.
Then someone made an announcement:
The War was over!
School was let out!
Frances and all the other children sang “God Save the King” and gave three cheers. Then she and all her friends went running down the corridors and didn’t even get in trouble. Outside on the streets of Bingley, grown-ups were pouring out of the offices and mills, singing and shouting.
When Frances got to Cottingley, the mill hooters were sounding. People were hanging flags out their upstairs windows. Elsie came home early from Bradford, and Frances’s mother did, too.
That night, for the first time since Frances had come to Cottingley, the houses in the village were all lit up, their blinds drawn and the windowpanes shining. The Blackout was over! People were spilling out into the streets.
But at 31 Main Street, Uncle Arthur sat in his armchair, reading a book. He wasn’t going anywhere that night — and he said no one else was, either.
The sounds of people singing drifted into the cramped parlor. Footsteps in wooden clogs clattered on the cobblestones outside. Frances and Elsie grumbled as much as they dared, but it did no good.
Someone came to the door and said the trolley cars to Bradford were so crammed full that you could ride for free and people were riding outside on the trolley steps as everyone cheered and sang and waved flags. . . .
Frances almost cried.
The next day at school, all the girls talked about how their parents had taken them out for that wonderful night, and Frances knew she had missed what would have been one of the greatest moments of her life.
Because of Uncle Arthur.
But still . . . the War was over! And although Frances’s father was still a soldier and wouldn’t be coming home quite yet, he was alive, and that was what mattered. Frances and her mother sent him a parcel of books for his Christmas present in France.
That year when spring came, Frances noticed how beautiful England was — not just in the beck but everywhere. Running home from school in Bingley, she looked up and saw the tiny new tree leaves against the pale spring sky, and the world was a wonderful place.
When the beck thawed, the little men were still there. Frances noticed that they seemed to be wearing a paler shade of green than they had last year. “My little friend, the one always last in the file, was just as enchantingly childish. They still took no notice of me but I felt I was amongst friends now,” Frances wrote years later in her autobiography.
That fall, right after Frances’s twelfth birthday, she and her mother moved away from Cottingley to a seaside town called Scarborough. Her father, who was out of the army now, would be joining them soon.
There were no fairies in Scarborough, but there were ocean waves and sandy beaches, just like in South Africa. On sunny days the water was a beautiful blue.
Frances loved the big, ornate old hotels down by the water. She loved the little lonely coves with slopes of sea grass and cliffs covered with wildflowers.
She liked watching the fleets of wooden boats out fishing for
herring, and the fishermen’s wives who clicked away with their knitting needles as they walked around town, talking and looking in the shop windows.
One Tuesday, a month before Easter, Frances and her new friends from school ran down to the beach to watch a curious old custom, something people in Scarborough had done on that day ever since anyone could remember. Men at each end of long clotheslines twirled them around and around, just as children do playing jump rope. Then everyone — not just children but fishermen, fishermen’s wives, shop clerks, and even the most staid and sober of men — skipped rope on the sand.
Frances thought it was one of the nicest things she’d ever seen.
As for the fairies — who could say if she’d ever see them again?
Fairies come, and fairies go.
In Elsie’s house, the fairy photographs lay hidden away in a drawer.
Elsie had her room to herself now, with Frances gone. When the moon shone, the view was especially beautiful. The wind made a musical sound as it blew round the corner of the house, high on its hill.
Elsie was eighteen now, with her whole life ahead of her. Someday, she hoped to become an artist.
Once, in a photography shop window in Bradford, Elsie had seen some lovely portraits of children. They were black-and-white photographs, but somebody had colored them in by hand. And next to the portraits was a help-wanted notice.
So Elsie opened the shop door and went inside.
She got the job. But she soon found out it wasn’t coloring in portraits.
Instead, she had to sit in the basement, in a long row of other girls, dabbing black paint on white specks where photographs hadn’t come out quite right. The other girls were “school-leavers,” just like her.