The Fairy Ring (11 page)

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

F
rances 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 Christine 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.

When they got to Cottingley, they rode in a television van with a man named Joe Cooper. “Mind if I turn this on?” he asked them, motioning to his tape recorder. “I’m very interested in collecting data.”

“They say, jointly, calmly and lightly, that they don’t mind at all,” he wrote in a book,
The Case of the Cottingley Fairies.
“They chat amiably and naturally together as the tape circles. . . . When they laugh, which is often, there is a high, spontaneous tinkling about it all, and my fancy thinks there
is
something when the pair of them get together.”

“Once I was talking to this doctor’s wife,” Elsie told him. “She said, ‘Come on, Elsie, tell us how you did it — I mean, well, it must have been trickery because . . . well . . .
you
don’t believe in fairies, do you, Elsie?’” And at that, both Elsie and Frances gave high peals of laughter.

They had “an air of mystery and gentleness and holding back something,” Joe Cooper noticed.

This time when Elsie and Frances went down the garden path to the beck, a television reporter and a cameraman came, too. A soundman wearing headphones and wielding a huge microphone on a beam scurried along beside them.

At the spot where the waterfall was, the whole group came to a halt. The reporter had Frances sit by the waterfall, put her chin on her hand, and gaze at the camera.

When they came to the field where the huge oaks grew, Elsie had to sit down and hold out her hand the exact same way she’d done in the gnome photograph.

The whole time, the reporter asked questions.

Elsie and Frances answered with open, smiling faces. They looked at each other and laughed, especially when he asked them about Mr. Hodson. Mr. Hodson was a phony, they said. He was preposterous! He’d even written a book. . . .

“How big were the fairies?” the reporter asked.

Elsie and Frances glanced at each other. After a tiny pause, Frances held her hand low to the ground. “This big.”

“Did you in any way fabricate those photographs?” the reporter asked.

Another pause. “Of course not!” said Elsie.

“Are the fairies here now?” he asked.

Frances hesitated. “Yes,” she said. Then a look of sadness passed over her face. “It’s trodden round, everybody’s been round. . . . No, I don’t think so.”

When she got home, Frances wrote the reporter a letter. “I’m sorry if I upset you by not taking you very seriously, but you so obviously thought we were a couple of confidence tricksters, and I’ve met so many people like you in the past.” She admitted that she couldn’t help enjoying his baffled expression as she answered his questions.