Free The Fairy Ring by Mary Losure Page B

in collecting data.”
    “They say, jointly, calmly and lightly, that they don’t mind at all,” he wrote in a book,
The Case of the Cottingley Fairies.
“They chat amiably and naturally together as the tape circles. . . . When they laugh, which is often, there is a high, spontaneous tinkling about it all, and my fancy thinks there
is
something when the pair of them get together.”
    “Once I was talking to this doctor’s wife,” Elsie told him. “She said, ‘Come on, Elsie, tell us how you did it — I mean, well, it must have been trickery because . . . well . . .
you
don’t believe in fairies, do you, Elsie?’” And at that, both Elsie and Frances gave high peals of laughter.
    They had “an air of mystery and gentleness and holding back something,” Joe Cooper noticed.
    This time when Elsie and Frances went down the garden path to the beck, a television reporter and a cameraman came, too. A soundman wearing headphones and wielding a huge microphone on a beam scurried along beside them.
    At the spot where the waterfall was, the whole group came to a halt. The reporter had Frances sit by the waterfall, put her chin on her hand, and gaze at the camera.
    When they came to the field where the huge oaks grew, Elsie had to sit down and hold out her hand the exact same way she’d done in the gnome photograph.
    The whole time, the reporter asked questions.
    Elsie and Frances answered with open, smiling faces. They looked at each other and laughed, especially when he asked them about Mr. Hodson. Mr. Hodson was a phony, they said. He was preposterous! He’d even written a book. . . .
    “How big were the fairies?” the reporter asked.
    Elsie and Frances glanced at each other. After a tiny pause, Frances held her hand low to the ground. “This big.”
    “Did you in any way fabricate those photographs?” the reporter asked.
    Another pause. “Of course not!” said Elsie.
    “Are the fairies here now?” he asked.
    Frances hesitated. “Yes,” she said. Then a look of sadness passed over her face. “It’s trodden round, everybody’s been round. . . . No, I don’t think so.”
    When she got home, Frances wrote the reporter a letter. “I’m sorry if I upset you by not taking you very seriously, but you so obviously thought we were a couple of confidence tricksters, and I’ve met so many people like you in the past.” She admitted that she couldn’t help enjoying his baffled expression as she answered his questions.
    “I’m known as a woman who does not mince words . . . so you should feel a little grateful that I did not say to you, when you asked what I had to say and you didn’t believe my story, ‘Why the hell should I care what you think? My family and friends — I care for their opinion, but why should I care what a stranger thinks?’”
    When a newspaper ran a story implying that Elsie and Frances were liars, Elsie was the one who responded. She wrote her letter by hand, in her big bold writing and eccentric spelling and punctuation. “(If people wish to believe in Fairies there is, No harm done.) And if people wish to think of us as a couple of practical jokers, or two solemn faced Yorkshire comedian’s, thats alright too,” she wrote. “But the word liar is a rough word for a true or untrue Fairy Story.”
    After that, an American hoax buster went after Elsie and Frances, but he couldn’t prove anything.
    Years and years went by, and nobody else could either, no matter how hard they tried.
    Many people who looked at the quaint old photographs now could hardly believe that anybody had ever thought they were real.
    But still . . . how could two such sweet little old ladies be
lying
?

I t was Elsie who finally told.
    It was because of her grandchildren, she said later — she didn’t want them to think they had a “weirdy grandmother.” So she told Glenn, who had never believed in the fairies anyway.
    Glenn told Christine, and Christine didn’t believe him. It couldn’t be