The Fairy Ring (2 page)

N
ow that Frances lived at 31 Main Street, when she came home she opened the front gate and stepped through a tiny garden. It was shaped like a postage stamp, with a low fence all around it. It was the last in a line of postage-stamp gardens, one for each of the seven houses in the row.

The front door opened onto a small, formal parlor with flowered wallpaper. Lace curtains framed the room’s one window, which looked out onto the muddy lane that was Main Street.

If Frances went through the parlor (taking care not to knock over one of the potted palms or bang into the piano), she came to the kitchen, which was even smaller than the parlor.

Stairs from the kitchen led down to the cellar. It was bright, for a cellar, with windows looking out to the back garden. A tin bathtub hung on the wall. The cellar door opened to the back garden, where a path led to the privy.

If Frances bounded back up the stairs, she came to the bedrooms: one for Elsie and one for Elsie’s parents.

The top story was an attic, which had been made into another bedroom now that Frances’s family was here.

Still, that made only three bedrooms for two sets of parents and Elsie and Frances. That meant the only place for Frances to sleep was in Elsie’s room.

Elsie’s room was so small that there was hardly space for one bed, let alone two. So Frances and Elsie shared a bed.

It was lucky that Elsie didn’t mind.

Elsie was much older — fifteen going on sixteen, while Frances was only nine. Elsie was a good head taller than Frances, too. Still, she was nice to Frances from the very beginning. Frances was glad, she wrote later, that her first friend in England would be her lighthearted cousin. Elsie had a “wide beaming smile” and beautiful, thick dark hair. She laughed a lot.

Elsie let Frances look at her watercolor paintings, which she kept in an old chocolate box under her bed. Sometimes she even played dolls with Frances.

Elsie’s window looked out over the back garden, which sloped down to a little valley, its treetops bare now in the wintertime. A stream ran through it.

Elsie called it a
beck,
a Yorkshire word for stream. The beck was frozen now, but Elsie said in summer there was a waterfall.

One day, when Frances and her parents had been in Cottingley for two weeks, Frances’s father packed his things and boarded the train for France. In France, he would be a gunner on the front lines.

Now each week when the newspaper came, it showed rows and rows of photographs of men and boys from Yorkshire who had volunteered to fight, just as Frances’s father had. Next to each name were a few words saying what had happened to each soldier.

Killed.

Wounded.

Missing.

Sometimes the words were
shell shock, septic poisoning,
or
found in German trench.

And every week, there would be a new batch of photographs.

Frances’s mother’s hair began to thin. The doctor said it was from worry. After a while, Frances’s mother lost all her hair and wore a wig.

Soldiers in the War didn’t get paid very much, so Frances’s mother had to find a job. She went to work for Uncle Enoch. He had a tailor’s shop in Bradford, which was a big city bristling with smokestacks from woolen mills.

Now, every workday, Frances’s mother took the trolley to Bradford and came home tired, wearing a wig made out of somebody else’s old dead hair.

Cottingley Village, painted by Elsie the summer she turned 15

That spring when the snow melted and the beck thawed, Frances lay awake at night, staring at the black windowpanes and listening to the terrible roar of the rushing water.

In time, though, the roar faded to a pleasant murmur. Elsie said that when the banks dried out, they could go exploring in the beck.

On a warm, sunny Saturday, Elsie and Frances clattered down the kitchen stairs to the cellar. They opened the cellar door and followed the moss-covered stone path through the back garden. At the garden’s edge, the path dropped steeply down.

All her life, Frances would remember that day, the “running water and the sun shining.” The streambed, with its shallow pools and clear water swirling over dark rock, led up the valley and through the trees with their delicate spring leaves.

And the waterfall! It was just a few steps from where the garden path descended into the valley. There, the stream plunged downward over the rock into a lovely clear pool.

And it was right out Elsie’s back door!

That spring, Frances and Elsie built dams, watched the water rise behind them, then broke the dams with a
whoosh.
They built tiny boats and floated them across the pools. They caught baby frogs and sailed them on the boats, watching to see whose frog would stay on longer.

From down in the beck, a few upstairs windows, almost hidden by the trees’ new leaves, were all they could see of the world above. The cramped rooms of 31 Main Street, the grown-ups’ comings and goings, and the life of the village seemed far away.

Often they just sat by the stream and talked.

Even though Elsie was taller and older, she seemed to understand what it was like for Frances to be a stranger in a strange place. She knew what it was like to be teased, too.

Both their fathers teased them.

Frances’s father laughed at how she sang and danced when she was little. He criticized the mistakes Frances made in her letters to him.

Elsie’s father teased her that in school — where the bad students sat on one side of the aisle and the good students sat on the other — Elsie was “the best among the worst,” or sometimes “the worst among the best.”

Elsie’s father himself was so smart he could fix any kind of machine, including all the latest motorcars. He could sing wonderfully and play the piano. He loved to read.

Elsie couldn’t sing
or
play the piano. She was a slow reader, a terrible speller, and was always getting scolded for daydreaming.

In school Elsie had hated every single subject except drawing and painting. So she had quit! She had left the village school when she was thirteen and a half, the youngest age the law allowed. Now that she was fifteen, she worked in Bradford at a boring job. But she still loved to paint.

Frances thought her paintings were wonderful.

So that was Elsie, Frances’s first friend in England. She loved a good laugh, she loved to paint, and she didn’t like being teased.

Those things were the key to everything that happened later.

But neither of them knew that yet.

N
ow that the weather was nice, Frances walked home from school instead of taking the trolley. She went to an expensive school in Bingley because it was better than the village school in Cottingley.

Her school friends were all in Bingley. So every day, by the time she got to Cottingley, she’d be walking all by herself.

If the village children were outside playing, they could stare at Frances as she hurried past in her uniform, her school hat with a ribbon, and her good leather school shoes. The village children went to school in their ordinary working clothes. Some of them wore wooden clogs.

If they said anything to her, it was in a Yorkshire accent so thick that it was almost another language.

Frances’s parents had forbidden her to speak broad Yorkshire, but she tried to anyway. She left the
h
off the beginning of words like
had.
She began saying
me
for
my.

The village children weren’t fooled. Their school was only a few doors down from Frances’s house, but for all the friends she made there, it might have been on the moon.

Every day when Frances pushed open the door at 31 Main Street, Elsie would be in Bradford, working. Frances would rush through her homework. Then she’d go down, all alone, to the beck.

She liked to catch frogs and study their bulging eyes. She liked to see their tiny throats going in and out and to feel their pointy fingers on her palm before they leaped away.

She liked to go exploring, following the stream up the little valley.

Huge, gnarled trees, their roots and trunks above her head, grew on the tops of the banks. Light slanted down, playing on spiderwebs and specks of floating dust.

She had her favorite tree now, in the beck. It was a willow leaning out over the water.

One day when the air was very still, Frances was sitting in her willow tree when she noticed a leaf moving, all by itself. There was no breeze, yet the leaf seemed to be twirling anyway. It was odd, but Frances didn’t give it much thought until another afternoon, when the same thing happened: one leaf began to twirl.

All by itself.

As she peered through the willow branches, Frances noticed a little man. She described him, years later, in a book she wrote about her life. He was about eighteen inches high, dressed all in green, twiddling a willow leaf as he walked along the bank.

She wasn’t all that surprised to see him, she wrote in her autobiography, and there being a little man there did explain the puzzle of the twirling leaf.

Truly, the beck was an extraordinary place.

A pair of rubber boots would have been useful for exploring, for then Frances could have waded through the shallow pools. Instead, she had to scramble over the slippery, moss-covered rocks in her one pair of leather shoes. She had to wear a dress, of course, since girls in those days did not wear pants, and it was hard to keep the hem dry. When she came home wet and muddy, she got in trouble, but how could anyone stay away from a place like the beck?

She sat by the stream for hours, watching the little men.

Once, one of them broke off a willow branch without the least effort.

Frances was surprised. After all, the stems and leaves of trees are usually tough. Most people have to give them a good tug to pull them off.

Frances watched as, twirling the leaf, the little man walked down the bank and crossed the stream, right on top of the water.

He had a rugged face like the workingmen at the railway station who drove carts pulled by huge, beautiful workhorses. He wore a serious expression, as though he had a job to do.

One day Frances saw him leading a crew of three or four other little men. All were dressed in green coats and baggy tights in a darker shade of green. They marched down the bank, crossed the beck, and turned right. Frances watched them until they went behind a clump of willow herb and were gone.

A few weeks after she spotted the little men, Frances saw some other fairies: the flitting, winged kind that many people think of when they hear the word
fairy.
Their dresses were wishy-washy pastels. Frances liked the little men better.

The pastel fairies seemed to have a lot of meetings, though, and every once in a while a dark-blue, take-charge, no-nonsense fairy would show up. She reminded Frances of a Head Prefect at school.

Once, the fairies held a very big meeting. It was like something she’d been learning about in school called a wapentake.
Wapentake
is an ancient Viking word for a “weapon take,” where all the chiefs meet and hand over their weapons. Frances wondered what the fairies were doing at their meeting. Were they counting heads, conducting a census of some kind? Or maybe they were holding an election?

She wondered how the fairies communicated, for she never heard them speak or saw their mouths move. Sometimes she heard a high-pitched sound, like a ringing in her ears.

Frances never tried to talk to them. She just observed them quietly and carefully, the way a scientist would.

They never paid any attention to her, but still, she thought they could see her. After all, the first time she’d seen a little man — the one who was all by himself — he’d given her a good hard stare before he went on his way.

For a long time, Frances never told anyone, not even Elsie.

Sometimes when Frances and Elsie were in the beck together, Frances saw the fairies. But Elsie never said anything about them! Not even when the fairies were quite near.

After a while, Frances did tell Elsie.

After all, Elsie wasn’t the kind of person who would laugh at you for seeing fairies.