Cottingley, Yorkshire. July 1917.
I soon came to understand that Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur were highly regarded in Cottingley. With Uncle Arthur working for Mr. Briggs, the Wrights were considered close to the local gentry and regarded with a certain degree of respect. I noticed it after Sunday service when people stopped outside the church to shake Uncle Arthur’s extraordinarily large hands, and on Friday evenings when friends gathered in the front room for a musical evening around the piano. I loved to listen to Aunt Polly singing “Four Indian Love Lyrics” and Uncle Arthur’s deep baritone rendition of “Roses of Picardy.” Sometimes Elsie and I were allowed a slice of jam tart while we listened, and although I never tasted it, I liked the musty smell of Mason’s nonalcoholic beer that Aunt Polly brewed especially for the occasion. She said it was a chance for everyone to forget about the war for an hour or two, to sing and laugh “rather than worrit and cry,” although I knew that everyone’s thoughts were never far away from their loved ones.
But even with these social gatherings at the house, I found it hard to join in. I was the girl who stood back, the girl who remained quiet and reserved, happy to let Elsie do the talking on behalf of us young uns, as we were called. I wasn’t necessarily shy, but I still felt like a stranger in Cottingley, despite my efforts to adopt the local dialect and throw in the odd thee and thou for good measure. Mummy mithered at me to try harder to make friends with the village children. “No wonder they talk about you behind your back, Frances. They don’t know what to make of you, walking around with your head in the clouds. They think you sullen and unfriendly.”
“But I’m not.”
“Well, I know that, and you know that, but they don’t, do they?”
I tried to explain that I had friends at school, although most of them lived in Bradford so I didn’t see them in the holidays. I said there wasn’t much point making new friends when we would be going back to Cape Town when the war was over and Daddy was home, and that, besides, I was perfectly happy playing with Elsie at the beck, or on my own. Mummy threw her hands in the air and said she gave up, really and truly she did.
It was on a thankfully cooler day when Elsie was off work with a head cold that I decided to explore a little further afield, clambering over the stile at the top of the lane and following the beck upstream, where it opened up into the glen and Cottingley Woods. From there, I walked along the far bank, following a little trail where the grass had been flattened, perhaps by other inquisitive young girls, or perhaps by a badger or fox. As I stopped to pick a handful of wild raspberries, I saw Mrs. Hogan’s cottage among the trees ahead. It was almost completely concealed by the lush summer foliage, more woodland than house, as if made of flowers and trees, not of stone and mortar.
I picked my way through the tangled briars underfoot, drawn toward the cottage as if in a dream as something nagged at me, a distant memory of something I’d forgotten to do. As I walked, I thought about fairy stories of stolen children locked up by wicked old witches and I skirted the edge of the cottage wall with a mixture of excitement and trepidation as I peered into the garden. I knew I shouldn’t have been there, and yet I sensed that I was welcome, that I had been there before and knew everything I saw in front of me: the rambling roses around the low white door, the patterned curtains at the windows and the posy of wildflowers in a willow pattern jug on the sill, the elder tree—heavy with white blooms—that grew in the center of the garden, the pair of man-sized black boots on the doorstep and the much smaller pair of child’s boots beside them.
Everything was so peaceful, the only sounds the birds singing in the branches high above and the constant gurgle of the beck behind me, the waterfall just visible through a gap in the trees. I imagined Mrs. Hogan standing at her window, watching Elsie and me play that April morning. I wondered if she’d once watched her daughter play there too.
A click of the latch on the cottage door snatched me back from my thoughts.
“Frances? It is you. I thought it was.” Mrs. Hogan stood in the doorway, her hands covered in paint, a bemused look on her face.
My cheeks blushed furiously. “I was taking a walk, Miss, and . . .”
“Exploring?”
I nodded.
Mrs. Hogan smiled warmly. “I’m almost completely hidden by the trees in the summertime. But you’ll see the cottage easily enough in the winter when everything dies back. Come on in for a glass of water. ’Tis fierce thirsty work, exploring.”
I followed her inside the cottage, as pretty on the inside as it was on the outside. Tapestries and samplers hung on the walls with carefully stitched Irish proverbs and sayings. One in particular caught my attention.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild,
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
The words reminded me of Elsie’s nighttime stories of changelings and fairies who stole human children and left monstrous things in their place.
Mrs. Hogan noticed me looking at it as she emerged from the pantry with a glass of water. “William Butler Yeats. ‘The Stolen Child.’ One of his most famous poems. Perhaps we should read it in class after the holidays.”
She said this more to herself than to me as I turned my attention to the watercolor paintings of landscapes and flowers that filled the spaces between a hotchpotch collection of crockery on the dresser. I told Mrs. Hogan I liked her painting of the beck.
“I expect you like to play there,” she said. “Hard to resist such an enchanting place.”
“Me and Elsie make dams and race the baby frogs on leaf boats. You can hear the waterfall from our bedroom. It used to keep me awake at night, but I don’t notice it now.”
“Everything strange becomes familiar in time. I loved the beck when I was a young girl, although I was older than you when I played there—closer to your cousin Elsie in age. My parents moved to Yorkshire from Leitrim so my father could get work in the mills.” I sipped my water and wished Elsie was with me and not at home in bed coughing and sneezing. Elsie was much better at conversation than me. “You’ll have heard the stories, I expect, about the beck and the woods and Gilstone Crags.” I shook my head, even though Elsie had told me some of the local folklore. Mrs. Hogan lowered her voice. “Some claim to have seen the Little People there. Pixies and fairies and such.” Her eyes sparkled like the water in the beck when the sunlight hit it. “What do you make of that then?”
My heart thumped beneath my pinafore as I thought about what I’d seen at the beck. I desperately wanted to tell someone, and Mrs. Hogan was as good a person as any.