Clever Elsie.
The only redeeming thing about the article was a paragraph in which Conan Doyle supported the existence of fairies. That was what interested me. Not the tedious analysis of our photographs to prove if they were genuine or fake, but the study of fairy life: where they live, what their purpose is, how some people see them and others can’t. “These little folk, who appear to be our neighbors, with only some small difference of vibration to separate us, will become familiar. The thought of them, even when unseen, will add a charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk. The recognition of their existence will jolt the twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.”
These words, more than any others, I agreed with. Still, I hated to see the photograph of Elsie with that silly gnome.
Over Christmas, I tried to put the Strand article out of my mind, even when more plates arrived from Mr. Gardner, which I thanked him for in a letter, saying I hoped to take photographs of fairies in the snow. The New Year did bring snow flurries, but it also brought another letter from Aunt Polly, which added another twist to the tale.
15 January ’21
Dear Annie,
Trouble at mill. The girls’ identities are out.
A reporter arrived from the Westminster Gazette. He’d been sniffing around, asking folk what they knew about the Yorkshire fairies and the girls in the Strand article photographs. His questions eventually led him to our Elsie.
I answered his questions as best I could and assured him Elsie has always been a truthful girl but he tracked her down at work (she’s at Sharpe’s card factory now, in Bradford) and asked her lots more questions. She told me he was quite polite and that she answered his questions as best she could. Having read his report, I’m not sure she did. I’ve told her to give better answers next time, and not so much “I suppose” and “I can’t say” and “you don’t understand.”
I’ve enclosed a copy for you to read. It’s a pity he gives your address. I’d hoped you might escape some of the attention.
Love to all,
Polly
x
I put Aunt Polly’s letter down and read the enclosed article from the Westminster Gazette. It was very long and detailed. I hardly had the patience to read it all, but one particular paragraph drew the breath from my lungs. “The ‘heroine’ of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story is Miss Elsie Wright. . . . When Miss Wright made the acquaintance of the fairies she was accompanied by her cousin, Frances Griffiths, who resides at Dean Road, Scarborough.”
It didn’t take long for the more tenacious newspaper reporters to track me down. They waited for me after school, lurking in the shadows with their trilby hats and notebooks and awkward questions.
“Did you really see little men and fairies?”
“Are you and your cousin playing a prank on us all?”
“Are there fairies in Scarborough?”
I wanted to say it was none of their business what I had or hadn’t seen, but Daddy told me not to be cheeking the reporters or they might write unpleasant things about me. I answered their questions curtly. “Yes, I did see fairies up the beck” and “No, I haven’t seen any fairies in Scarborough.” I found different routes home from school, cutting through back lanes and narrow side streets, avoiding the reporters as best I could. But no number of back lanes and side streets could help me avoid the girls at school. If I didn’t answer the teacher’s questions right away, they’d say, “Thinking about fairies, then?” and giggle behind their slates. The headmaster even asked to talk to me about the “Yorkshire fairies.” I didn’t want to talk to him about fairies. I wanted to be a normal teenage girl, like my friends.
I became sullen and withdrawn.
Daddy tried to cheer me up with walks along the prom. He told me not to take it so seriously. “Nobody’s come to any harm,” he said. “People are fascinated with fairies, that’s all. It’s not such a terrible thing, is it?”
“I wish we’d never taken those photographs, Daddy. We only wanted to show Mummy and Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur. Not the whole world.”
He wrapped his arms around me and said people would find something else to talk about soon enough.
In a way, he was right. The reporters eventually lost interest in me, finding me a difficult, uncooperative child. Elsie was much more amenable. She quite enjoyed the attention. To my relief, the focus of their questioning shifted from me to her. But alone in my bedroom at night, I worried, and when I worried, I dreamed, and still the images of a little girl with red hair nagged at my conscience.
Through the dreary winter months, the guilty secret of our photographs clung to me like my rain-sodden wool coat that pulled my arms to my sides and made my footsteps uneasy. The newspapers continued to report on our photographs. The Times of London said, “I would suggest to Miss Elsie that she has carried her little joke far enough, and that she should tell the public what the ‘fairies’ really are.” Other reports suggested we had been pulling Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s leg. Mr. Gardner wrote to advise us to keep hidden any copies of the final three photographs we’d taken the previous summer. He said we were not to worry about the speculation in the newspaper, writing, “We will surprise them all with the new fairy photographs. We will win through and Elsie and Frances will be justified everywhere.”
Our joke had already gone too far, and as Mr. Gardner took our photographs around the country on his lecture tour, interest in them and in us spread further and further until eventually Mr. Gardner and our photographs crossed the Atlantic Ocean and we were being talked about in Elsie’s beloved America.
Like the ripples I’d watched on the surface of the beck, I was absolutely helpless to stop it.
Part Three
Fairies Revealed
One mystery remains. It concerns a photograph in which the girls, unusually, are absent, and transparent fairies are depicted apparently in a sunny grass bower. Mrs. Griffiths maintains that she took the photograph and it is the only genuine one. . . .
—THE TIMES, 1983
Fifteen
Ireland. Present day.