The Fairy Ring (12 page)

“I’m known as a woman who does not mince words . . . so you should feel a little grateful that I did not say to you, when you asked what I had to say and you didn’t believe my story, ‘Why the hell should I care what you think? My family and friends — I care for their opinion, but why should I care what a stranger thinks?’”

When a newspaper ran a story implying that Elsie and Frances were liars, Elsie was the one who responded. She wrote her letter by hand, in her big bold writing and eccentric spelling and punctuation. “(If people wish to believe in Fairies there is, No harm done.) And if people wish to think of us as a couple of practical jokers, or two solemn faced Yorkshire comedian’s, thats alright too,” she wrote. “But the word
liar
is a rough word for a true or untrue Fairy Story.”

After that, an American hoax buster went after Elsie and Frances, but he couldn’t prove anything.

Years and years went by, and nobody else could either, no matter how hard they tried.

Many people who looked at the quaint old photographs now could hardly believe that anybody had ever thought they were real.

But still . . . how could two such sweet little old ladies be
lying
?

I
t was Elsie who finally told.

It was because of her grandchildren, she said later — she didn’t want them to think they had a “weirdy grandmother.” So she told Glenn, who had never believed in the fairies anyway.

Glenn told Christine, and Christine didn’t believe him. It couldn’t be true!

Christine told Frances what Glenn had said. Then Frances was angry at Elsie, and Elsie was mad at Frances.

After that, nobody could agree exactly who told what to whom, and when.

But in time, Joe Cooper wrote that the secret of the fairies was out — they were paper cutouts. His articles appeared in a magazine called
The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind Space & Time,
and they were announced on the cover alongside such stories as “Men from Mars” and “Whatever Happened to Dragons?” And he didn’t say how he knew that the fairies were paper cutouts.

Still, Frances and Elsie were outraged.

“You’re a traitor,” Frances told him on the telephone. She slammed down the receiver.

Elsie wrote him in mock Yorkshire, “Tha’s properly muckied tha’ ticket wi’ me!”

After that, both Elsie and Frances talked to reporters.

“Cottingley Fairies a Fake,” said the headline in the
Times
of London on March 18, 1983. “Secrets of Two Famous Hoaxers,” said a second
Times
article.

And that was that.

People believe what they read in the
Times,
and there it was: Elsie and Frances were liars. The fairies were a hoax.

“I am sorry someone has stabbed all our fairies to death with a hatpin,” Elsie told a reporter, but it was too late now.

Frances insisted that there
had
been fairies in the beck. She knew they were real! She knew that the last photograph was real! But no one really listened.

“No one has ever taken any notice of what I say,” she wrote in her autobiography. She stopped writing it and put it away, unfinished.

But now, at last, neither Elsie nor Frances would ever have to lie about the fairies again.

In time, they made up and were friends again.

Frances’s daughter and her grandchildren forgave her for not telling them about the cutouts. The real fairies were what mattered, and now Frances could tell them all about the little men without feeling guilty about lying. And Frances’s daughter and grandchildren were proud of her. Christine was sure that Frances, not Elsie, had taken the fairy bower photograph.

A real photograph, of real fairies.

Frances stood by the fairy bower photograph until the day she died. “Fairy Lady Dies with Her Secret,” one newspaper said. But there wasn’t any secret, not anymore. It was true that Frances had lied about the first four photographs. But that didn’t mean the last one was a fake.

Frances had always known that she’d seen real fairies, there in the glen. Nothing could change that, ever.

Elsie lived the rest of her life in peace. She dug in her garden and told jokes and smiled her big, wide smile. She drew and painted steadily, as she had ever since she was a girl. She painted because she loved to, no matter what others thought of her art.

Which meant she was a real artist, and always had been.

She sometimes called the fairy pictures “photographs of figments of our imagination.” And what is art, but a fine figment of the imagination? Art can be a painting. Or it can be a photograph. It can be a young girl, a waterfall, and a ring of fairies on a summer afternoon, captured forever by an artist’s eye.

Elsie once wrote her autobiography, but the manuscript lay forgotten in a box. Then somehow, it disappeared. She once told somebody she’d only put in a couple of paragraphs about the fairies, anyway.

So . . . what did she really think about the long-held secret that changed her whole life? She never talked about it much. It was as though deep inside her was an oyster, crusted over with time, closed up tight.

Elsie did leave a little trail of clues, though, in a play she began but never finished. It’s called
The Case of the Cottingley Fairies.

ACT 1, SCENE 1

A figure slips through the closed curtains and stands in the spotlight at the front of the darkened stage. His name is Puck: he’s the fairy from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Puck jerks his thumb back toward the curtain and explains that behind it, a bunch of people are trying to pry open an oyster shell. It’s sixty years old and crusted over with age. It’s a great huge oyster — more than six feet wide.

Inside the oyster is one of two things.

“(Either a pearl busting joke),”
Elsie wrote, or
“(A lustrous pearl of beauty) capable of whisking people’s imaginations off to gorgeous and precious fairy land places.”

The curtains swing open to reveal a group of men in shirtsleeves — they’ve taken off their ties and jackets — hammering away on the oyster.
“One man is standing aside with a pencil poised over a note book. Someone jibes at him for not helping, he says, ‘I want to be the first to get it down on paper when the mystery comes unstuck,’”
Elsie wrote.

“One hot and sweating worker yells, ‘Hey! Did you hear that, chaps? This guy has been just standing there with a pencil in his hand while we have all been slogging our guts out,’ to which the young writer replied:

“‘The pen is mightier than the crow bar,’ where-on the whole crowd of them down tools, put on their coats and disperse, one loud last remark from one of them saying, ‘You can blooming well prise it open with your pencil then.’ The writer now all alone with the giant shell, climbs up and sits down on top of it, then replaces his pen and writing pad to his pocket and then with his elbows on his knees he sits in sad contemplation.

“Then to his astonishment, two wings expand from each side of the shell and away he floats.”

Elsie’s play ends here.

The oyster shell floats away.

But surely, now, the audience can tell that what’s inside it is not a joke or a hoax. It’s a fairy story with big, strong wings that can fly people’s imaginations to gorgeous and fairyland places.

Now, as they sit in the darkened theater, maybe the audience can hear the low murmur of a stream in a hidden valley and the laughter of two young girls.

And maybe — if the air is very still and there isn’t much rustling in the woods — they can just make out the faint, high piping of a gnome.

I first got the idea for
The Fairy Ring
when I was browsing in Common Good Books, a wonderful independent bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota. At eye level, in the history section, I spotted a book called
The Coming of the Fairies,
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I pulled it out, and there on the front cover was the picture of Elsie and the gnome.

For a long time, I’ve been interested in true stories with children as their heroes, and here was an
amazing
story. Who were these girls? What were they thinking?

Frances Griffith’s autobiography,
Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies,
provides many clues. Whether you believe her little men were “real” or not, the fact that she saw them is not in doubt. I am grateful to her daughter, Christine, who published her mother’s autobiography and dedicated it to Frances, “who always wanted the full story of the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ told.”

The letters between Edward Gardner and the Wright family form the backbone of
The Fairy Ring.
Edward Gardner saved copies and passed them on to his son Leslie. Unfortunately, Leslie lived in a rather damp houseboat, but they’re now well preserved in the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. Elsie’s letters to Leslie Gardner are in the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford Central Library.

Most of all I would like to thank Elsie’s son and daughter-in-law, Glenn and Lorna Hill, for all their gracious and good-humored help. They told me stories about Elsie and let me pore through their family photo albums, take down Elsie’s watercolors from their walls to photograph them, and ransack their attic. Without them, this book would not have been possible.

My thanks also to Joe Cooper, whose long friendship with Frances and Elsie provided insights and firsthand accounts that would have been lost forever without his work. His book,
The Case of the Cottingley Fairies,
is dedicated to Frances and Elsie, “two amiable adventuresses” whose cutout fairies have not shaken Joe’s belief in real ones.

Final thanks to Joe’s family, to the archivists at the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds, to the many astute and patient readers who offered help and encouragement with drafts of this book, to my farsighted editor, Deb Wayshak, and to the good people of Cottingley today.

Chapter Two

“wide beaming smile”: Griffiths, p. 6.

“running water and the sun shining”: Ibid., p. 10.

“The best among the worst,” and “the worst among the best”: author interview with Glenn Hill.

Chapter Three

“There is! I go up to see the fairies!” and “That’s the end. You’ve started telling stories now!”: Griffiths, p. 17.

Chapter Four

“Perhaps the advent . . . constant companion,” “But there is no gainsaying . . . produced from plates,” and “i.e. a room . . . has been excluded”: Butcher, pp. 1 and 8–9.

“A steady pressure . . . shutter is released” and “jerky, sudden movement will seriously affect the ultimate picture”: Ibid., p. 5.

“There’s one plate . . . take care of my camera” and “Now take care!”: Griffiths, pp. 23 and 24.

Chapter Five

“sandwich papers”: “There
Were
Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden,”
Woman
magazine, October 1975, p. 43, Brotherton Collection.

Chapter Seven

“Fairies — the pretty, pretty ones . . . not much I can say about them”: Griffiths, p. 54.

“Dear Joe . . . How are Teddy and Dolly?” and “Elsie and I . . . too hot for them there”: Cooper, p. 192.

“My little friend . . . amongst friends now”: Griffiths, p. 39.