The Fairy Doll (3 page)

‘How can I take care of her?’ asked Elizabeth.

‘She is to take care of you,’ said Mother, but as you know if you have read any fairy stories, fairies have a way of doing things the wrong way round.

‘Pooh! She’s only an ordinary doll dressed up in fairy clothes,’ said Josie, who was jealous.

‘She’s not ordinary,’ said Elizabeth, and, as you will see, Elizabeth was right.

‘What’s her name?’ asked Josie.

‘She doesn’t need a name. She’s Fairy Doll,’ said Elizabeth, and, ‘How dare I take care of her?’ she asked.

Fairy Doll looked straight in front of her, but Elizabeth must have touched the wand; it stirred gently, very gently, in Fairy Doll’s hand.

‘Where will she live?’ asked Josie. ‘She can’t live in the dolls’ house. Fairies don’t live anywhere,’ said Josie scornfully.

‘They must,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Mother says some people think fairies were the first people, so they must have lived somewhere.’ And she went and asked Father,
‘Father, where did the first people live?’

‘In caves, I expect,’ said Father.

‘Elizabeth can’t make a cave,’ said Josie.

Elizabeth had just opened her mouth to say, ‘No,’ when ‘Ting’ went a sound in her head. It was as clear and small as one of the glass Christmas bells.

‘Ting. Bicycle basket,’ it said.

Elizabeth knew what a cave was like; there had been caves at the seaside; there was one in the big wood across the field, and this very Christmas there was a clay model cave,
in the Crèche, at school. If she had been a clever child she would have argued, ‘Bicycle basket? Not a
bicycle
basket?’ but, not being clever, she went to look. She
unstrapped the basket from her bicycle and put it on its side.

The ‘ting’ had been right; the bicycle basket, on its side, was exactly the shape of a cave.

The cave in the wood had grass on its top, brambles and bracken and trees and grass. ‘What’s fairy grass?’ asked Elizabeth, and ‘Ting,’ a word rang in her head. The
word was ‘moss’.

She knew where moss was; they had gathered some from the wood for the Christmas-tree tub. A week ago Elizabeth would not have gone to the wood alone, but now she had Fairy Doll and she set out
through the garden, across the road and fields; soon she was back with her skirt held up full of moss.

She covered the outside of the bicycle basket with the moss like a cosy green thatch; then she stood the basket on a box and made a moss lawn around it. ‘Later on I’ll have beds of
tiny real flowers,’ she said.

It is odd how quickly you get used to things; Elizabeth asked, and the ‘ting’ answered; it was a little like a slot machine. ‘What shall I put on the
floor?’ she asked.

‘Ting. In the garage.’

A cleverer child would have said, ‘In the
garage
?’ Josie, for instance, would not have gone there at all, but Elizabeth went, and there, in the garage, Father was sawing up
logs.

‘What did they put on the cave floors?’ asked Elizabeth.

‘Sand, I expect,’ said Father.

Sand was far, far away, at the seaside; Elizabeth was just going to say, with a sigh, that that was no good when she looked at the pile of sawdust that had fallen from the logs, and,
‘Sawdust! Fairy sand,’ said the ‘ting’.

‘What about a bed?’ said Josie.

‘A bed?’ asked Elizabeth, and back came the ‘ting’. ‘Try a shell.’

‘A coconut shell?’ asked Elizabeth, watching the blue tits swinging on the bird table, but a coconut seemed coarse and rough for a little fairy doll. A shell? A shell? Why not a real
shell? Elizabeth had brought one back from the seaside; she had not picked it up, the landlady had given it to her; it was big, deep pink inside, and if you held it to your ear you heard, far off,
the sound of the sea; it sounded like a lullaby. Fairy Doll could lie in the shell and listen; it made a little private radio.

The shell needed a mattress. ‘Flowers,’ said the ‘ting’.

Josie would have answered that there were no flowers now, but, ‘Is there a soft winter flower, like feathers?’ asked Elizabeth. ‘Ting’ came the answer. ‘Old
man’s beard.’

Do you know old man’s beard that hangs on the trees and the hedges from autumn to winter? Its seeds hang in a soft fluff, and Elizabeth picked a handful of it; then she found a deep red
leaf for a cover; it was from the Virginia creeper that grew up the front of the house.

Soon the cave was finished – ‘and with fairy things,’ said Elizabeth. She asked Father to cut her two bits from a round, smooth branch; they were three inches high and made a
table and a writing desk. There were toadstools for stools; stuck in the sawdust, they stood upright. On the table were acorn cups and bowls, and small leaf plates. Over the writing desk was a
piece of dried-out honeycomb; it was exactly like the rack of pigeonholes over Father’s desk. Fairy Doll could keep her letters there, and she could write letters; Elizabeth found a tiny
feather and asked Godfrey to cut its point to make a quill pen like the one Mother had, and for writing paper there were petals of a Christmas rose. If you scratch a petal with a pen, or, better
still, a pin, it makes fairy marks. ‘Later on there’ll be all sorts of flower writing-paper,’ said Elizabeth.

There was a broom made of a fir-twig, a burr for a doorscraper; a berry on a thread made a knocker. ‘In summer I’ll get you a dandelion clock,’ she told Fairy Doll.

‘You haven’t got a bath,’ said Josie.

‘Fairies don’t need baths,’ said Elizabeth. ‘They wash outside in the dew.’

It was odd; she was beginning to know about fairies.

‘What does she eat?’ asked Josie.

‘Snow ice-cream,’ said Elizabeth – it was snowing – ‘holly baked apples, and hips off the rose trees.’

‘Hips are too big for a little doll like that,’ said Josie.

‘They are fairy pineapples,’ said Elizabeth with dignity.

‘Look what Elizabeth has made,’ cried Christabel, and she said in surprise, ‘It’s pretty!’

Godfrey came to look. ‘Gosh!’ said Godfrey.

Josie put her hand to touch a toadstool, and a funny feeling stirred inside Elizabeth, a feeling like a hard little wand.

‘Don’t touch,’ said Elizabeth to Josie.

Spring came, and Fairy Doll had a hat made out of crocus, and a pussywillow-fuzz powder puff; she ate fairy bananas, which were bunches of catkins – rather than large bananas
– and fairy lettuces, which were hawthorn buds – rather small; she ate French rolls, the gold-brown beech-leaf buds, with primrose butter; the beds in the moss lawn were planted with
violets out of the wood.

One morning, as they were all starting off to school, Christabel said, as usual, ‘Elizabeth, you haven’t brushed your teeth.’

Elizabeth was going back when she stopped. ‘But I have,’ she said. She had been in the bathroom, and ‘Ting. Brush your teeth’ had come in her head. ‘I’ve
brushed them,’ said Elizabeth, amazed. Christabel was amazed as well.

A few days afterward Miss Thrupp said in school, ‘Let’s see what Elizabeth can do,’ which meant, ‘Let’s see what Elizabeth can’t do.’ ‘Stand up,
Elizabeth, and say the seven-times table.’

‘Seven times one are seven,’ said Elizabeth, and there was a long, long pause.

‘Seven times two?’ Miss Thrupp said encouragingly.

Elizabeth stood dumb, and the class began to laugh.

‘Hush, children. Seven times two . . .’

‘Ting. Are fourteen.’ And Elizabeth went on. ‘Seven threes are twenty-one, seven fours are twenty-eight . . .’ right up to ‘Seven twelves are
eighty-four.’

At the end Miss Thrupp and the children were staring. Then they clapped.

In reading they had come to ‘The Sto-ry of the Sleep-ing Beau-ty.’ Elizabeth looked hopelessly at all the difficult words; her eyes were just beginning to fill with tears when,
‘Ting,’ the words ‘Lilac Fairy’ seemed to skip off the page into her head. ‘It says “Lilac Fairy,”’ she said.

‘Go on,’ said Miss Thrupp, ‘go on,’ and Elizabeth went on. ‘Li-lac Fai-ry. Spin-ning Wheel. Prince Charm-ing.’ ‘Ting. Ting. Ting,’ went the
bell.

‘Good girl, those are difficult words!’ said Miss Thrupp.

In sewing they began tray-cloths in embroidery stitches; perhaps it was from making the small-sized fairy things that Elizabeth’s fingers had learned to be neat; the needle went in and
out, plock, plock, plock, and there was not a trace of blood. ‘You’re getting quite nimble,’ said Miss Thrupp, and she told the class, ‘Nimble means clever and
quick.’

‘Does she mean I’m
clever
?’ Elizabeth asked the little boy next to her. She could not believe it.

Soon it was summer. Fairy Doll had a Canterbury bell for a hat; her bed had a peony-petal cover now. She ate daisy poached eggs, rose-petal ham, and lavender rissoles.
Lady’s slipper and pimpernels were planted in the moss.

‘What’s the matter with Elizabeth?’ asked Godfrey. ‘She not half such a little duffer as she was.’

That was true. She was allowed to take the Sunday newspapers in for Father, and Mother trusted her to wash up by herself.

‘You can use my paint box if you like,’ said Christabel.

‘You can take your own bus money,’ said Josie.

‘Run to the shop,’ said Mother, ‘and get me a mop and a packet of matches, a pot of strawberry jam, half a pound of butter, and a pound of ginger nuts.’

‘What have you brought?’ she asked when Elizabeth came back.

‘A pound of ginger nuts, half a pound of butter, a pot of strawberry jam, a packet of matches, and a mop,’ said Elizabeth, counting them out.

‘But you still can’t ride the bicycle,’ said Josie.

It grew hot. Fairy Doll had a nasturtium leaf for a sunshade, and Elizabeth made her a poppy doll. To make a poppy doll you turn the petals back and tie them down with a grass blade for a sash;
the middle of the poppy makes the head, with the fuzz for hair, and for arms you take a bit of poppy stalk and thread it through under the petals; then the poppy doll is complete, except that it
has only one leg. Perhaps that was why Fairy Doll did not play with hers.

Something was the matter with Fairy Doll; her dress had become a little draggled and dirty after all these months, but it was more than that; her wings looked limp, the wand in her hand was
still.