Elsie turned onto her back. She was used to my nighttime ponderings now and knew she wouldn’t be left alone until we’d had our little chat. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, with you working at Gunston’s, you must know all about cameras and whatnot.”
Elsie laughed. “I don’t see the cameras, Frances. All I see are the gaps on the plates. I know about as much about the workings of a camera as you do.” She yawned and turned onto her side. “I suppose it would be fun to try it out, though. I could take a picture of you to send to your father.”
I quite liked that idea. “Do you think Uncle Arthur would let you use it?”
Elsie giggled into her pillow. “No. I do not. You’d think it was made of gold the way he fusses over it. Now, get to sleep, Frances. You might not have school tomorrow, but some of us have to go to work.”
I settled down beneath the top sheet, dangling my leg and arm over the edge of the bed to let the cool air brush over my skin. I felt sorry for Elsie. Sometimes she had to be so grown-up, and yet when we played our games and made up stories together, she became a child again, like me. As I lay in the dark, listening to the distant rush of the waterfall, I hoped that part of me would always be nine and a half, and that even when I was an adult and had to face the world with all its grown-up responsibilities, part of me would always know the excitement of the fascinating things I’d seen at the beck. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than a life without such wonders. How dull and sad life would be if it was all work and chores and war.
For the best part of a fortnight, I was intrigued by Uncle Arthur’s camera and the images that emerged from the mysterious darkroom he’d set up beneath the cellar steps (much to Aunt Polly’s consternation). After several failed attempts, he was delighted when he took the first successful photographs of Elsie and me. He followed these with several portraits of Mummy and me, and then of the two sisters, and eventually all of us together. I sent Daddy a portrait of myself and Mummy, telling him all about Uncle Arthur’s new hobby. “It was great fun at first,” I wrote, “but me and Elsie are fed up of having our games interrupted so that he can take another photograph of us. He even asks the tourists to stop to have their picture taken. Aunt Polly says she wished he’d never set eyes on ‘that ruddy camera!’ You know how he likes to tinker. I think it takes his mind off things, stops him thinking about not being at war with the rest of you.”
But as with most things that were once strange and then become ordinary, the novelty of the camera soon began to wear thin, and the summer started to drag. Without school to occupy me and with everyone at work, I found the days interminably long. I played skipping games and hoops and hopscotch with some of the village children in the street, but our games always ended in petty squabbles as the heat intensified and tempers frayed. If the heat didn’t spoil things, Mavis Clarke and her spiteful tongue did. I tried my best to fit in, to talk like the locals, dropping my h’s and saying “me Mam” instead of “my Mummy,” but square pegs won’t go into round holes, no matter how hard you try. I was different. That was that.
I was secretly glad of the days when I woke to the rain pouring down outside. On those days, I stayed inside to work on my flower diary and wrote long letters to Daddy and my friend Johanna in South Africa, but still the days dragged.
There was only one place that kept me enchanted that summer: the beck. The place that held such magical secrets and crept into my dreams at night so that sometimes I wasn’t sure where the dreams ended and the new day began. Mummy still worried about me playing there, and fussed at the slightest hint of damp on my skirts, but I couldn’t resist.
It was on the warmest days when I saw them most clearly, days when the sun dawdled high in the sky, tinting everything with rich gold and amber as long shadows played lazy games of hide-and-seek among the trees and ferns. Like the wildflowers that decorated the riverbank, my fairy friends grew more abundant as the summer went on, multiplying in numbers and strengthening in color, the pale yellows and greens evolving into mauves and pinks. I loved nothing more than to be among them, to dip my feet in the cooling water and watch them work. To be able to spend my days in such a place was a gift I would be ever grateful for. I needed nothing and nobody while I was there, although Elsie was always keen to come with me when she stayed off work, which was often, her being of a rather delicate constitution. Aunt Polly encouraged our games. I was good for Elsie, she said, and so was the fresh air, although there was nothing fresh about the manky stench from the woolen mill, which only worsened beneath the summer heat.
On days when my patient waterside vigil was unrewarded and nothing emerged from the foliage, I returned to the house sullen and disappointed. “What’s got into you?” Mummy would chide. “Your face will stay like that if the wind changes.” Aunt Polly still teased me about being in love with one of the village boys. “Look at you, mooning around, lost in your daydreams. A lovesick schoolgirl if I ever I saw one.” I didn’t really mind the teasing. It was worth it to see the fairies when I did.
It was an especially muggy July afternoon when I returned from my latest excursion to the beck. By then, I had almost become used to the presence of my little friends while I played. I suppose a sort of understanding existed between us—a delightful harmony of the magical and the ordinary, a coming together of the world I understood and the world that fascinated me. I grew hot and bothered by the persistent tickle of thunder bugs on my arms and the back of my neck and started to make my way home, slipping and tumbling into the shallow water as I did. My heart sank into my sodden skirts. I knew I would be in trouble.
Mummy and Aunt Polly were in the scullery, making tea. Aunt Polly was making a pie at the table, pressing the rolling pin into a thick slab of pastry with brisk, firm movements before spinning the slowly emerging circle around and rolling the other end. I loved to help her bake but wished she wasn’t doing it right now. There was no way for me to sneak upstairs to my bedroom and change. I peered through a crack in the door frame, chewing anxiously on my fingernails. I would get into trouble for that too.
“I see our Frances was up the beck again yesterday,” Aunt Polly remarked, tutting for good measure. “Is she usually this disobedient, Annie?”