I knew Elsie would follow. Without turning around, I knew she was right behind me. She would know what to do next. I was sure of it.
In the bedroom I fell onto the bed, unable to stop my tears. Elsie closed the door behind her.
“I shouldn’t have said it, Elsie. It was a secret. My secret.”
“Our secret.”
“I should never have told you, even.”
“Well you did, and I’m glad. At least this way there’s two of us saying it.”
“They don’t believe us anyway,” I sobbed. “Did you hear Uncle Arthur? He thinks it’s a load of nonsense.”
“But they were interested all the same.” Elsie hesitated for a moment. I knew what she was going to say. “Have you really seen them, Frances? Cross your heart and hope to die.”
I sat up and made the most solemn face I could. “I have, Elsie. I really and truly have. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Then you can show us all. After tea. Like Auntie Annie said.”
“But they don’t always come, Elsie. What if they’re not there?”
Elsie thought for a moment. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something.”
And she did. The next day, after more teasing by our parents and several unsuccessful “fairy-spotting” excursions to the beck, Elsie came bounding upstairs where I was writing to Daddy. Full of excitement, she grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet.
“I’ve got it, Frances! It’s perfect!”
“Got what?”
“An idea. For how to prove to them about the fairies. We can borrow Daddy’s camera and take a photograph of them. Then they’ll have to believe us, won’t they?”
It was a perfectly clever idea. “But what if the fairies don’t come, Elsie? They don’t come every day. Only sometimes.”
But she wasn’t listening. She was rummaging about in the trunk at the foot of the bed. “Where is it, Frances? Your book? Princess Mary’s book.”
I pulled it out from under the bed and handed it to Elsie, who flicked quickly to the page she was looking for, the Alfred Noyes poem “A Spell for a Fairy” with Claude Shepperson’s lovely illustrations of fairies dancing.
“There,” Elsie said. “If they want fairies, we’ll give them fairies. We don’t have to wait for actual fairies. We’ll make our own!” She grabbed her box of pencils and paper and began to copy the illustrations from the book, and although her drawings weren’t like the real fairies I’d seen, I said they were, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
I would often look back on that moment in the bedroom at 31 Main Street and wish things had been different. Had I known then how much trouble Elsie’s idea would cause, I would have dismissed the whole thing as nonsense and continued to enjoy the fairies in private, hoping Uncle Arthur’s teasing would eventually subside. But I didn’t know what the future held, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked Elsie’s plan. It was only a bit of harmless fun after all, a little joke to make Mummy and Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur believe me about the beck fairies so that Mummy would stop fussing and let me play there as much as I liked.
It was agreed. Elsie would draw likenesses of the fairies, copying from the pictures in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, and we would take a photograph of them at the beck with Uncle Arthur’s camera.
As Daddy had said, the camera cannot lie.
If we could photograph fairies, everyone would have to believe me.
Wouldn’t they?
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Cottingley, Yorkshire. July 1917.
We made our plan in the bedroom as slivers of moonlight fell onto the counterpane. When we weren’t whispering about fairies, I dreamed of them, and always of the little girl handing me a white flower.
We decided to take the photograph the following Saturday when Mummy and Aunt Polly were due to spend the day with Aunt Clara in Bradford. Elsie had everything worked out and explained what we were going to do. She just had to persuade Uncle Arthur to lend us his precious camera. I had my doubts he would, but I didn’t say so. As Elsie said, it was worth a try.
Brimming with confidence, Elsie talked of nothing else in the days leading up to Saturday. She thought it a terrific joke. “Imagine their faces when they see the picture, Frances! It’ll be as good as a Harry Houdini trick. You wait and see.”
I perched on the edge of the bed while Elsie scrambled underneath and lifted a loose board. “Here. Grab this.” A hand emerged from beneath the iron bedstead, pushing a biscuit tin toward me.
I lifted it onto the bed as Elsie wriggled out backward and stood up to brush the dust from her dress and stockings. Her smile was infectious. “Well, go on, then,” she said. “Open it.”
My tummy fizzed with excitement as I opened the lid. One by one, I lifted out four beautiful fairies, each about three inches in height. They had been drawn onto stiff card and cut out carefully. Even the tiny gaps between their fingers were perfectly defined. Their wings and dresses were shaded in soft pastel tones of lavender, lemon, and green, giving them an almost lifelike effect: real folds in their skirts, real sunlight in their hair. One was playing an instrument, and they all looked like they were mid-movement.
Elsie sat down on the bed beside me, a proud smile on her face. “What do you think?”
“They’re beautiful, Elsie. You’re so clever.”
She couldn’t hide her pride. “Took me longer than I thought, but I wanted to get the shading right to make sure they looked real. Not too flat.”
I turned them over in my hands, picking them up in turn and placing them carefully back onto the counterpane. “They do look real, Elsie. Very real. I wish I could draw like you.”
“If you keep practicing, you will. Anyway, what matters is that they think they’re real when they see them on the plate.”
Her eyes glittered with anticipation, and all my doubts were brushed away in an instant. It was impossible not to fall under Elsie’s spell. There was something so alluring about her. If I was quiet and reserved at times, Elsie was an abundance of confidence. Like the pollen from the ragwort that left dusty marks on my hands, a little bit of Elsie had brushed off on me too.
I picked up the fairy cutouts again. “How will we stand them up? They won’t look real lying flat.”
Elsie winked and took a small box from her pocket. She tipped several of her mother’s largest hat pins onto the bed. “We’ll tape a pin onto the back of each cutout. Then we stick the end of the pin into the ground. Look, like this.” She demonstrated by holding a pin against the back of one of the drawings and standing it upright.
I giggled. “Oh, Elsie. It looks like she’s standing up on the bed!” I took the cutout and the pin from Elsie and held it up for her to see.
Elsie laughed too. “It’s perfect. Better than I thought. Now all we have to do is convince Daddy to let us borrow his camera and we’ll prove to them, once and for all, that there are fairies in the beck and you weren’t telling fibs. Then they’ll be happy to let you play there, and this can all be forgotten about.”