I suppose a part of me always knew that there would be another chapter to our story, that the secret Elsie and I had kept for so many years would eventually be heard, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when, forty years after that last summer at Cottingley, Elsie sent me a cutting from a newspaper interview she’d done with a reporter from the Daily Express, sparking interest in our photographs for a whole new generation. Neither was I surprised when, six years after that, I was contacted by a TV producer who was making a documentary about the Cottingley photographs for Nationwide, nor five years after that, when another TV producer contacted me about a documentary for Yorkshire Television.
The child within me had often wished for an opportunity to talk properly about the fairies. Sixty years is, after all, a long time to keep a secret, but on each occasion we were interviewed, Elsie and I remained faithful to the promise we’d made all those years ago. Our answers to the questions about the authenticity of the photographs were suitably evasive and never entirely conclusive. I wasn’t sure the watching millions wanted our answers to be conclusive. I always remembered an American newspaper report that came out at the time the first photographs were revealed. “The soul of the fairy is its evanescence. Its charm is the eternal doubt, rose-tinted with the shadow of a hope. But the thrill is all in ourselves.”
Doubt. Hope. Thrill. Words that encapsulated everything I felt about the whole event.
I suppose it was inevitable that one of us would break our silence in the end.
It was Elsie who first confessed to the trick we had played. Our secret was finally free.
I was cross with Elsie at first, but I couldn’t stay cross for long. In many ways I was glad to tell the truth. I felt a weight lift from my shoulders, despite the sensational headlines that raced across the printing presses as the story broke:
FAIRY LADY ADMITS PHOTOGRAPHS WERE FAKED!
THE COTTINGLEY PHOTOGRAPHS: A HOAX!
I read the headlines while sitting in my garden, the birds singing in the hedgerows and bees buzzing around me, normal life going on as I turned the pages and read other people’s accounts and awful misrepresentations of our story. It is those inaccuracies that spurred me on to tell my own version of events. As Elsie once said in an interview, “Frances and I don’t care anymore. People can enjoy the fairies any way they like as far as we are concerned (so long as they get their facts right).”
As interest in the photographs revived, I started to write this book. A memoir of sorts. The record set straight. Sometimes my memories elude me: gaps I can’t quite fill, names and places and dates I can’t quite grasp. But all the important things are there, as clear as the day they happened. Clearest of all are my memories of the fairies, and my dreams of a little girl with flame-red hair, standing in a woodland glen. I’ve known many people in my life who refuse to believe in things they can’t explain with scientific fact, but I’ll never forget what I saw, or the comfort Ellen Hogan took from the posy of flowers I gave to her, a gift from another realm.
I met Elsie recently. Frances and Elsie, together again. Apart from the wrinkles and the gray hair, we hadn’t changed much over the years. Elsie still made me laugh with her deadpan Yorkshire humor, and I still made her wonder about things. We talked about our families mostly, swapped photographs of our children and grandchildren—so proud of them all. We didn’t talk about the fairies. We’d done all our talking about that.
When we said good-bye, I wished Elsie the very best. I was so grateful to have known her, so grateful that when I stepped into the front room of 31 Main Street that cold April night, it was Elsie waiting by the fireplace with mischief in her eyes. I’m grateful that it was Elsie who first showed me the beck and that it was Elsie, and nobody else, who shared the whole experience with me. Two peas in a pod, Aunt Polly used to say. Elsie was the sister I’d never had. The friend and ally who took a photograph of me in a quiet sunlit moment in one of the most perfect places I have ever known, and captured forever a young girl with wonder in her eyes and the belief in magical things in her heart.
For many years, I could only look at that photograph with guilt and anguish. Now? Now I look at it and smile, because whatever conclusions the experts may reach about our photographs, I alone know what that little girl saw, and she will hold that treasure in her heart forever.
THE END
But it wasn’t quite the end.
Olivia turned the page and read on.
Afterword
My first memory of Frances Griffiths is sitting beneath an elder tree, looking at a children’s picture book with her. I admired it so much she said I could keep it.
I was a young girl of about nine and lived in a pretty cottage beside a stream—the beck—in the West Yorkshire village of Cottingley. Frances knew my mother well—she had been Frances’s teacher in Bradford during the Great War. They became friends of sorts, drawn together by their shared worries of loved ones at war and what my mother described as “a particular sensitivity to nature.”
I knew nothing about the Cottingley fairy photographs until that summer when Frances came to visit. She gave Mammy some photographs, which they talked about for a long time, and when she left, I begged Mammy to tell me about them. I especially liked the photograph of Frances leaning on a mossy bank, surrounded by fairies, and was thrilled when Mammy said I could keep it. She put it in a silver frame for me and I treasured it, believing—like everyone else—that the fairies were real. I spent the rest of that summer playing by the beck, sitting on the willow bough seat, watching, waiting, hoping.
Mammy died long before the truth behind the famous photographs was revealed, but shortly after her death I found some letters she’d written to my father during the war in which she told him how she’d watched the girls take their photographs and that she had found the drawings they’d used to create them. She never told anyone, of course. That was her own part in the secret. Paper drawings or not, when Frances and Elsie finally admitted to their trick, Frances firmly maintained that she really did see fairies at the beck.
I was much older when my mother first told me about Aisling and although I’d never known her, I felt as if I did. I’d often dreamed of a little girl with red hair, playing in the woods, and I often found flowers in our cottage, particularly white harebells and an unusual yellow flower called cinquefoil, known to be symbolic of dreams and a mother’s love. Mammy said she believed they were little gifts from Aisling and the fairies.