The Fairy Ring (4 page)

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.

L
ate 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.

F
all 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.

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.

I
n 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.

Mr. Gunston, the photographer, was too important to pay any attention to any of them. Sometimes Mr. Gunston’s wife had Elsie run errands, and at least that was less boring than dabbing paint.

It was a “below the stairs” job — that’s all.