by Losure, Mary
She and Elsie would have to tromp through the beck with a bunch of strangers. And as if that weren’t bad enough, they’d have to sit there, hour after hour, waiting for fairies.
Frances decided that even if she did see any, she wouldn’t say a word. If Mr. Hodson wanted fairies, fine. He could just see one for himself.
Frances, Elsie, Mr. Hodson, and Mrs. Hodson sat in the woods, next to the basket of sandwiches they’d packed for lunch. It was August, but they all wore coats, for it had been drizzling rain when they set off that morning.
Mr. Hodson had brought a still camera, a cinema camera, and a field notebook. Mrs. Hodson took out her knitting.
Mr. Hodson turned out to be the kind of person who is forever bringing up the names of important people he just happens to know. His wife was older than he was, and he was always turning to her and saying things like “Happy, darling?” then giving her a little smile.
The sun moved slowly through the gray, dull sky. Mrs. Hodson’s knitting needles clicked.
After a while, Mr. Hodson began to speak in half whispers about his Experiences in the Occult World.
Frances listened carefully to the pompous, flowery way he talked so that she’d be able to imitate it later to amuse her friends. But after a while even that was boring.
Finally, after what seemed like hours and hours and hours, Elsie said she saw a fairy.
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Hodson eagerly. He added that the fairy was materializing.
Elsie said she saw one nearly six feet tall, standing by a tree.
Mr. Hodson said he saw it, too — it was chained to the tree. It was the spirit of the tree. . . .
He began scribbling in his notebook.
And then — they couldn’t seem to help it — both Elsie and Frances started pretending they saw fairies. “Our normal selves came to the surface,” Frances admitted later.
And it was funny, though they didn’t dare laugh.
Mr. Hodson wrote:
GNOMES AND FAIRIES. In the field we saw figures about the size of the gnome. They were making weird faces and grotesque contortions at the group. One in particular took great delight in knocking his knees together. These forms appeared to Elsie singly — one dissolving and another appearing in its place. I, however, saw them in a group with one figure more prominently visible than the rest. Elsie saw also a gnome like the one in the photograph, but not so bright and not coloured. . . .
WATER NYMPH. In the beck itself, near the large rock, at a slight fall in the water, I saw a water sprite. It was an entirely nude female figure with long fair hair, which it appeared to be combing or passing through its fingers. . . . Its form was of a dazzling rosy whiteness, and its face very beautiful. . . . It showed no consciousness of my presence, and, though I waited with the camera in the hope of taking it, it did not detach itself from the surroundings in which it was in some way merged. . . .
WOOD ELVES. (Under the old beeches in the wood, Cottingley, August 12, 1921.) Two tiny wood elves came racing over the ground past us as we sat on a fallen tree trunk. Seeing us, they pulled up short about five feet away, and stood regarding us with considerable amusement but no fear. . . . As Frances came up and sat within a foot of them they withdrew, as if in alarm, a distance of eight feet or so, where they remained apparently regarding us and comparing notes of their impressions. . . .
WATER FAIRY. (August 14, 1921.) This creature hung poised . . . much as a seagull supports itself against the wind. . . . I did not notice any wings.
FAIRY, ELVES, GNOMES, AND BROWNIE. (Sunday, August 14, 9 p.m. In the field.) Lovely still moonlit evening. The field appears to be densely populated with native spirits of various kinds. . . . Frances sees tiny fairies dancing in a circle, the figures gradually expanding in size till they reached eighteen inches, the ring widening in proportion. Elsie sees a vertical circle of dancing fairies flying slowly round. . . . (Written by the light of the moon.) I see couples a foot high . . . dancing in a slow waltz-like motion in the middle of the field. . . . Elsie sees a small imp.
On the afternoon of Thursday, August 18, Mr. Hodson was overcome by an especially beautiful creature who moved her arms, fluttered her butterfly wings, and then smiled at him, placing her finger on her lips. Her body appeared to be clothed only in “iridescent shimmering golden light.”
Honestly.
What could Elsie and Frances say to that one?
Elsie made a pencil sketch that showed Elsie and Frances dancing together to a ragtime tune. “When we two one step,” she wrote underneath.
It was a funny sketch, quick and laughing, like Elsie herself. Frances in the picture is mock serious, clowning around. They looked, dancing together, as though they shared a joke that only the two of them understood.
One day when they went out in the fields with Mr. Hodson, Elsie took a photograph of his plump, tweed-clad bottom as he crouched in the long grass, waiting for fairies.
Mr. Hodson looking for fairies. Photo by Elsie.
A few times that August, Elsie and Frances’s little cousin Marjorie came along. After a while she said she saw fairies, too. Elsie took a picture of her dancing in the woods. Later, Elsie colored it in, so that Marjorie almost looked like a fairy herself.
Cousin Marjorie in the woods
Still, it was a long week.
In one photograph taken then, Elsie, Frances, and Mr. Hodson stand uneasily in front of a window, its dark surface reflecting shadows and sky.
Frances wears a cautious smile. Elsie’s expression is guarded, her eyes slightly narrowed, her head turned to the side.
She looks like a person who is getting very, very tired of fairies.
Mr. Gardner came to visit for part of the week and gazed unhappily into the camera as he had his picture taken with Elsie, Frances, and Mrs. Hodson. In the photograph, Elsie and Frances are each wearing their cameras. Yet they have not taken a single photo of a fairy.
Mr. Hodson, too, has for some reason failed to take any, with either the still camera or the cinema camera.
When Sir Arthur heard what had happened, it seemed to him that the “change in the girls” was the main reason why they couldn’t take any more pictures of fairies. It was too late now. Like the rabbit in a magician’s trick, Hey, presto! The girls’ simplicity and innocence had vanished. It was just as Mr. Gardner had feared, in the letter he had sent to Sir Arthur long ago.
Now when the fairies came near Frances and Elsie, the bright, airy substance of which fairies were made no longer became solid. It wouldn’t show up on a photograph.
It was a pity, really, but that was the way fairies were.
Elsie said it, too: the fairies were gone.
“When the last fairy pictures were taken . . . they were doing a gentle see-through fade-out on us, especially that last mixed-up one. . . . ,” she once wrote in a letter. “No more fairies appeared so it was just a waste snapping away at nothing, for definitely that was the end of it all.”
Neither Elsie nor Frances ever took another fairy photograph.
Six years later, Mr. Gardner stood on the deck of an ocean liner bound for America. In his luggage were lantern slides of the five Cottingley Fairy Photographs, as they were now known.
“Briton in U.S. to Prove Fairies Exist,” a New York newspaper announced. “Champion of Elfs Struts His Stuff,” read the mocking headline in another. “A Bit of Britain’s Gnome-land,” commented the caption above the photograph of Elsie and the flower-bearing fairy — as though anyone could see how ridiculous it all was.
In California, the Los Angeles Examiner ran the photograph of Frances and the fairy ring with a caption that simpered, “Really, Truly They’re Fairies.”
Still, Mr. Gardner toured all over America. Everywhere he went, he showed slides of Elsie and Frances and the fairies.
He knew what he believed in.
Sir Arthur wrote a book about Elsie and Frances’s pictures. He called it The Coming of the Fairies.
Science, Sir Arthur now believe
d, was like a harsh light that left the world hard and bare, “like a landscape in the moon.” And surely, there was more to life than that! Just knowing that fairies were out there, even if you never got to see one, added charm and romance to the world.
Sir Arthur didn’t say this in his book, but a part of him had longed for fairies ever since he was a boy. His uncle Richard painted wonderful pictures of fairies: little creatures who lived in a world of soft sunlight and bright flowers. They hid under leaves, and you could see them if you just knew where to look.
Sir Arthur’s father drew fairies, too. One of his watercolors showed a fairy band streaming down from a starlit sky to alight in the grim, gray courtyard of an insane asylum.
Sir Arthur’s father lived in that insane asylum. He’d gone away, never to return, when Sir Arthur was seventeen. In the asylum, Sir Arthur’s father drew pictures of tiny people holding leaves as big as umbrellas or lurking in flowerpots or riding on the backs of birds.
Sir Arthur didn’t mention any of that in The Coming of the Fairies. But if fairies were real, Sir Arthur’s father wasn’t crazy after all.
If fairies were real, the world was a happier place.
As he drew toward the end of his life, Sir Arthur had statues of gnomes set out in his garden, hoping that fairies would be drawn to them. He even had his gardener’s little girl sit next to the statues to increase the chances.
For fairies seemed to like little girls.
Elsie and Frances grew up and got married. And still, they kept their secret.
Elsie immigrated to America, where no one knew who she was. There she met a man named Frank Hill, who liked to laugh as much as she did. Elsie and Frank got married and sailed away on an ocean liner for India, where they lived for many years.
Elsie got to see the snow-covered peaks of Darjeeling. She sent home postcards of the pyramids and of the minarets and bazaars of Cairo. She saw monkeys and palm trees. She rode horses and explored jungles and swam in the ocean. She saw a white stone temple rising out of a jungle on an island in Malaysia, like the mysterious cliffs rising out of the jungle in The Lost World.
Elsie never told her husband the secret of the cutouts, but it didn’t seem to matter. “My husband always says he believes in fairies,” she once wrote, “but he always says it in the middle of when he is laughing.”
Back in England, no one knew who Frances was. She could daydream all she wanted now and nobody asked her if she was thinking about fairies.
She danced the Charleston, just like any carefree, pretty young woman. She went on vacation and sent back a picture of herself in a grass skirt, signed “Love, Frances.”
Frances in a grass skirt
In a long white gown and pearls, Frances married a soldier named Cecil Wilfred Way. She felt it was only right to tell him about the fairies, so she did. “It was one of those things that I thought he’d better know,” she told someone once. “And he believed me — always believed me.”
For years and years, Frances never saw another fairy. Then another war started: the Second World War. Frances began to worry, just as she’d worried when she was only nine and her father went away to what was now called the First World War.
Frances’s husband worked long hours, preparing for the great invasion of Europe that would decide whether England and its allies won the war or lost to Nazi Germany. Frances’s husband got sick and lost weight, and Frances got so worried that she had horrible headaches.
Then one day, Frances was standing in the kitchen with a headache when she looked down and saw a fairy man gazing up at her.
She ran from the room.
After that, she began to wonder if being worried and seeing fairies had anything to do with each other.
Sometimes, too, it seemed to Frances that she could hear people’s thoughts. It was very unpleasant, hearing what people were thinking as if they had spoken out loud, and Frances was glad when it went away.
These days when she thought about the fairies, it seemed as though they’d haunted her all her life. She got a creepy feeling when she looked at the picture of herself with the dancing fairies. Their wings were much too large for real fairy wings. And the little gnome had a sinister look on his face.
But the last photo, the one that Mr. Gardner had called the fairy’s bower, was different. She knew now that Mr. Gardner had been right about the last photo.
There were fairies, real ones, in among the grasses.
The fairy’s bower
Frances had two children, a boy named David and a girl named Christine.
One day when the grown-ups were gone, David and Christine had nothing much to do. So together, they went exploring in the house.
They snuck into their mother’s bedroom and rummaged around in her cupboard. On the second shelf, they found a book wrapped in brown paper. They leafed through the pages — and there, sitting in front of a waterfall and gazing straight at them, was their mother as a little girl. A ring of fairies seemed to be dancing all around her.
The book was called The Coming of the Fairies.
David and Christine put the book back in the cupboard, exactly where they’d found it. They closed the door and never said a word to anybody.
Years went by, and one day when David was seventeen and Christine was fifteen, they happened to be talking about a science-fiction story they’d both read. It was about hidden worlds that existed right alongside the everyday world and how, if conditions were right, the two worlds could meet. David and Christine were deep in conversation when they realized that their mother was there in the room.
In a quiet voice, she told Christine to go to the cupboard in the bedroom and bring back a book, covered in brown paper, that she would find on the second shelf. Christine handed it to her in silence. Then their mother told them about the fairies.
David didn’t think they were real, but Christine was thrilled.
Her own mother had seen fairies!
“Now I’ve told you,” her mother said, “and I never want to hear about it again.”
Elsie was looking through a magazine once when she saw a cruel cartoon of Sir Arthur. It showed him squinting dreamily into the sky with Sherlock Holmes chained to his ankles and a cloud of smoke around his head.
But Sir Arthur would never know he’d been deceived.
Mr. Gardner would never be heartbroken.
Elsie’s mother and father would never find out that their daughter had lied.
Because as long as they lived, Elsie would never, ever tell.
Elsie had one child, a boy named Glenn.
Glenn grew up in India with his mother and father and their pet parrot. Outside their windows lay a green courtyard where banana trees grew.
Glenn’s granny Polly lived with them, too. She had come to India after her husband, Glenn’s grandfather, whom he had never met, died back in England. She was a cheerful, funny old lady. Glenn loved her dearly, almost as though she were his own mother.
In the long, still afternoons, with the ceiling fans stirring the hot air, she used to tell him stories about life back home in England.
And one day, when Glenn was ten, his granny told him about the fairies.
He could tell from the way she talked that his granny believed in fairies, but he didn’t, not for a minute.
His granny thought the fairies were a thrilling secret. But when Glenn’s mother found out he’d been told, she got so angry that it made Glenn’s granny cry, and he had to put his arms around her to comfort her.
Glenn’s mother told him never to tell anyone, ever. Reporters would come around! It would be as bad as it was in England!
She didn’t have to worry, though. Why should he tell anyone? Why would he want people laughing at him about a bunch of stupid fairies?
Years and years later, when someone asked him if he was named after the fairy glen, he said of course not. Glen has only one n. His name had two.
And fairies were absolute nonsense.
Glenn and David and Chris
tine grew up and had children of their own. So now Elsie and Frances were grandmothers.
Frances’s daughter, Christine, still believed in fairies. “She’s never been skeptical — she’s always been thrilled to bits. And she’s talked about it to my grandchildren all the time,” Frances once told someone.
Frances couldn’t tell her daughter and her grandchildren that she and Elsie had lied.
So they kept the secret, still.
One day, Frances was looking out the window when she saw a van pulling up. The letters on its side said BBC, which stood for British Broadcasting Corporation.
She knew right away what they’d come for.
Elsie had moved back to England from India, and somehow, a reporter had learned who she was. Now they were after Frances.
Frances hated it, just as she always had. But Elsie . . . Elsie rather liked it when reporters came around.
She still had “a touch of 1920s dash about her,” one journalist who met Elsie when she was an old lady wrote. “She has a dazzling smile and a laugh that — if laughs are really infectious — could lay low half of the county.”
Elsie stood tall — five feet ten inches — and was still slender. She still kept a parrot for a pet, and she still loved a good costume. She’d wear a big hat with a feather in it and gloves even when she was just waiting for the bus. Every morning, she put on rouge and bright-red lipstick.
When television reporters interviewed her, she’d watch herself on television later — she once joked that she wanted to see if she looked any better in color than she did in black and white.
In time, a Yorkshire television station invited her to come back to Cottingley to be interviewed there. On the day of the interview, she wore a red turtleneck, and a coat with a leopard-skin collar. She set her black hat at a jaunty angle, tilted above one eye.
Frances was invited to Yorkshire, too. It had been years since she’d been to Cottingley, so she said she’d go. She wore a raincoat and sensible shoes.