Cottingley, Yorkshire. September 1917.
Our fairy photograph became something of a party trick over the summer, displayed with excessive theatrical flourish by Aunt Polly at her musical evenings and whenever the Bradford relatives came for Sunday tea. It was a source of great amusement and intrigue, the print Uncle Arthur had taken from the plate passing around eager hands so that everyone had their turn to study the image and decide if the fairies were real, or if not, how on earth we’d done it. Elsie and I played along, spinning ever more elaborate tales about how we’d found the fairies and what they looked like and how Elsie had taken the photograph. The trick had done its job, and although Mummy still fussed when I got my petticoats wet, she didn’t worry quite as much about me playing at the beck.
But as the weeks passed, Elsie and I grew tired of the teasing and speculation, and I began to wish the photograph would disappear and be forgotten about. Aunt Polly, especially, kept talking about it, pulling at it like an errant thread in her needlework to be unpicked. I heard her discussing it with Mummy while I was outside, their voices drifting through the open window.
“What do you make of the girls’ photograph, then, Annie?” Aunt Polly asked. I recognized the tone of her voice. Slightly too curious. Slightly meddlesome.
“I don’t know, Polly. Honestly, I don’t. Frances says it’s real, and she isn’t one for telling lies.”
“Arthur still thinks it’s a trick of some sort, but I’m not sure. You know as well as I do that folk have been talking about fairies in Cottingley since we were young girls.”
“That’s just folklore, Polly. Old tales told around the fire on winter nights.”
“What about the Hogan child? That’s not folklore, is it?”
Aunt Polly pulled the thread further, teasing and tugging to see what might be revealed. My skin prickled at the mention of the Hogan girl. I thought of the look in Mrs. Hogan’s eyes, the hushed silence of the cottage in the woods, the absence of the chatter of children.
“Poor little mite. She must have fallen down an old mineshaft, as they said. I don’t for one minute believe she was taken by the fairies. That’s the ramblings of a mother grieving for her child, and I can’t say I blame her for that.” I could hear the click clack of knitting needles as they worked furiously on more comforts to send to the troops. “Still,” Aunt Polly continued, “I’m sure there are stranger things than fairies in the world. Things you and I will never understand, at any rate.” A chair scraped against the floor as she stood up. “There’s a meeting of the Theosophist Society in Bradford next week. Will you come with me?”
I heard Mummy sigh. “Oh, I don’t know, Polly. Are you sure it’s wise to be getting involved with the likes of all that? Arthur says it’s black magic and conjuring the dead.”
Aunt Polly snorted with laughter. “Arthur Wright wouldn’t know how to conjure the dead if he was surrounded by corpses. Don’t mind him. Come with me. You might learn something. We both might. Don’t pretend you’re not as intrigued by that photograph as I am. It must be real. What other explanation can there be? If fairies can exist in another world, maybe our loved ones can too. If I’d lost my son in France, I know I’d rather believe in the possibility of seeing him as a spirit than never seeing him again. Wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose so.” After another moment of quiet knitting, I heard Mummy agree. “I’ll come to your meeting, then, but only on the condition that you put that silly fairy photograph away and forget all about it. You’re worse than the girls. And they’re bad enough.”
Elsie stayed home from work again the following week, suffering from hay fever or a summer cold or “lazy-itis,” as I heard Uncle Arthur muttering one day. When she was well enough, she loved to come up the beck with me, where we spent hours building dams or sketching the wild poppies and bee orchids or just talking and making up new adventures for a story we were writing. We didn’t discuss the photograph much, or the fairies. If the photograph of pretend fairies was our secret, the real fairies were mine.
I saw them when Elsie wasn’t with me, most often on the warmest days when they appeared to be busiest, tending to the flowers on the riverbank and in the hedgerows. Like the right notes played to make a chord on Aunt Polly’s piano, we resonated in peaceful harmony, the fairies and I. I played my games. They got on with their work. It was the most ordinary extraordinary thing. The sort of thing you never forget, no matter how many years weave themselves between the present and the past.
As the weeks slipped by and the golden days of summer turned toward the amber days of autumn, the fairy photograph was brought out less often, until I thought it forgotten about altogether. Only once did I see Aunt Polly take it from the drawer when she thought nobody was looking. Only once did I do the same, studying my face, that distant look in my eyes, captured by the camera as I’d glanced over Elsie’s shoulder to follow the glimmer of something far more interesting than a paper cutout. As I stared at myself, it was like looking into my past, because I knew that even when I was old and gray like my grandmother, or fretting about the laundry being mangled like Aunt Polly, part of me would always be that nine-and-a-half-year-old girl, playing with the fairies at the bottom of the garden. The photograph had captured that moment forever. It was a thought I carried with me as I fell asleep at night, drifting away beyond the bedroom window to chase my dreams of fairy glens and a little girl with red hair who entwined white flowers among the curls in my hair, and sang songs to me of the Little People.
Yorkshire’s autumn was as great a gift as Yorkshire’s summer. I loved watching the rusting of the leaves while the dales mellowed to shades of ochre, and rose hips and blackberries grew deliciously fat on their branches. The morning mists were mystical and magical to me, and the rose-glow of the evening sun lent the sky a hypnotic light that matched any Cape Town sunset.
It was harvest time: a time for thanks and prayer and reflection, but a time also tinted with sadness for the mothers and fathers who had lost loved ones in the latest offensives in Ypres and Passchendaele. The war was unceasing and cruel. I saw the telegram boy visit the same house three times in as many days, each chilling knock at the door bringing news of another son lost, until there were no more telegrams to deliver. No more sons to mourn.