In 1927 Mrs. M.K.F. Thornley and her clergyman husband were spending a few days in Cornwall at a cottage situated in a strange and lovely valley close to a rocky cove. To her, the place, though very beautiful, seemed sinister. She sensed a great melancholy brooding over its stream, its woods, and its old disused quarries. While with her husband, she felt safe, but when alone she almost feared the place. Only once was she away from him, when she went to post a letter a quarter of a mile off. The sad whispers of the trees and mourning of the brook seemed full of meaning, and she returned walking rather fast, anxious to get back. As she crossed the low plank bridge over the stream, she unmistakably heard the sound of harps, and sad, sweet, alluring voices floating upward from the water—and they were not good to hear. She knew she must not linger nor listen. Husband and wife, glad to quit the scene the following day, were afterwards to hear others speak of strange influences sensed in that sad valley.
When, later on, they decided to live in Cornwall, they made friends with a lovely young sculptress belonging to an old, established Cornish family. She was a singularly pure-hearted, sensitive creature, rather retiring, with uncommon tastes in poetry and music, and a great tenderness so towards all plants and animals. “One autumn afternoon,” said Mrs. Thornley, “she proposed to take us to a ‘fairy wood’ she had loved since childhood, where she said we might ‘hear something.’ We set out across the moor, and when we drew near the wood my husband became engrossed with the observation of some insects at work, so the girl and I left him and went into the wood together. After a few minutes, she whispered: ‘Do you hear?’ I think her presence helped my perceptions, for in a few moments I heard lovely sounds like a murmured cradle-song, voices of surpassing sweetness and contentment gently singing an endless, ageless melody—a melody of such character that it imprinted itself on my memory there and then. It seemed to me to be nothing less than the brooding over their charges of those beings who foster the seed-life of the trees and the gentle plants around them, bringing their generations to life out of the unseen mysteries of sap and seed, the voice of creation at work among the primal simplicities. On reaching home I was able to put the melodious chant into form and have it for solo violin among my secret treasures, as ‘The Song of the Woods.’”
Miss Lorna Heath, also of Cornwall, was comparing notes of strange experiences with two other playwrights at St. Ives Arts Club, and one of them said she had actually seen a little man about three-feet high, with a sack over his back, near Chanctonbury Ring in Sussex. Her dogs, who usually barked at strangers, took no notice of him, and he completely disappeared into a patch of scrub and low bushes. The other friend said that when she was seventeen she heard strange, unearthly music at night, and Miss Heath was able to say that she’d had a similar experience at the same age. “With me,” she explained, “this took the form of what sounded like a violin playing outside my bedroom window, very late one rather stormy night in Wales. I felt compelled to run downstairs and find out what it was, but when returning I was caught by my terrified parents, who thought that I was sleepwalking. I think that I may have been in a trance-like condition, but I was not unconscious of my surroundings.” Evidently Miss Heath found no ordinary explanation for the music she heard on that occasion, but she is quite frank about a further experience she had, which proves that things are not always what they seem to be. She was walking along a country road in Cornwall one windy day, when she heard the most wonderful music like wind bells and organ pipes combined, but on going to investigate she found that a new field opposite a builder’s house had a fence with a top rail made of disused rain-water pipes!
Iain Dahl, the author and painter who was then living in St. John’s Wood, London, contributed the following material, which I quote in full: “From about 1923 onwards and until the outbreak of the Second World War, I spent much of the summer and an occasional spring in the Island of Barra, then one of the most unspoilt fragments of the British Isles, and indeed of Europe. In the early 1920s, at least, it could be said that no place had changed less in the last five hundred years: there were no telephones, no wireless, no motorcars. Small droves of horses dozed or loitered in a half-wild state in the hills, and, if a mare were harnessed to a plough or go-cart, as likely as not a foal might be seen ambling or trotting at her side. In 1929, with the help of a cropper and a couple of old men ‘great at cutting the stone,’ I continued to build a cottage of the old pattern, oval in shape, with thatch set back deep within the thickness of the stone walls, the stems held down with boulders and tied with leather ropes against the fierce Atlantic gales. The site was striking, as the cottage stood on a small spur of Ben Mhartuinn above Allasdale, one of the quietest corners of the island, looking westward to America, with wild headlands to north and south, while, from the kitchen window, the turf rose a thousand feet to the skyline. (Incidentally, as I later discovered, ‘Allasdale’ is the anglicised form of an older name, which Carl Hjalmar Borgstrom—the Norwegian etymologist who has made a study of Norse place-names in the Western Isles—traces to the old Norse ‘Alfa-stodhull,’ which means ‘the Fairies’ milking-place.’ Alfa is a fairy and as such it might well be accepted, for between the few dwellings and the sea, there lies a wide sandy plain or machair, which in springtime glows with wild flowers, and at any season of the year has green feeding for fairy cattle.) I found the people rather shy of speaking about fairies or fairy experiences, for already they had been laughed at; but it was not hard to see that a belief was there, held in check, perhaps, by a layer or two of prudence or religious teaching. Stories at second-hand were to be heard, but I was wondering if I might not come upon some small personal experience of faery, which to me would be worth all the elaborate tales of another.
“I felt drawn to the wild mountainous centre of the island, and one still, warm August day I followed the rough track that leads from Upper Borve over heather and bog through a mountain pass to Skallary on the east side. With me was Miss X., a friend who has come in contact with the fairy world herself, and has heard chords and musical sounds in lonely places. As we climbed, we spoke little, but listened, and once or twice it seemed to me that there was an undercurrent of music in the air, but this I put down to eddies of air in the heather, wild bees, or the small water-music of unseen burns. At the point where the pass is narrowest, a great rock overhangs the approach, and here we both stopped dead, halted by a tiny, stinging note like a silver trumpet. Music seemed to be coming from somewhere inside the rock—a short, repetitive phrase, rather like the tenor voice of a cello or the lower notes of a clarinet. We listened, and Miss X. quickly drew out a notebook lined for musical notation, and began to jot down what she heard. This was made possible by the fact that the phrase was repeated more than once, returning on itself, so that I, who do not write music but have ‘a good ear for picking up tunes,’ was able to memorise it; it was almost as though the rock were announcing a ‘signature-tune.’ We continued to listen at different parts of its surface, putting our ears to the stone and moss, but now its mineral body seemed quite inanimate and the air itself deprived of vitality. We went slowly on our way, alert for any further echoes of the music, but heard nothing that could not be put down to the rustle of water in the peat-hags, the drip of a burn, or the whine of wind in heather. I had kept the tune well in my head, and, without seeing what she had written, I hummed it over to my companion. We were delighted to find that our two versions were almost identical. A little later, a neighbour related, to our great amusement, how Jonathan Maclean—a giant of a fellow with farms both here and on Mingulay—had heard music coming from a rock in a cleft of the hills, and ‘had taken his soles out of it, runnin’ as though the Black Chase was after him!’
“A year or so later I had two further experiences in the same region. On a clear day with small wind-currents that seemed to be coming from all directions, I was climbing through heather near the pass, when I heard a voice in the air just above my head. It was the kind of small, girning voice one might expect to hear
from a gnome or a manikin and it continued to skirl and complain like a bagpipe, as if some creature were trying to express a happiness to which it was unaccustomed. For a couple of minutes it continued to grind away in this fashion, and then, as suddenly as it had begun, the voice ceased. There was no human being anywhere within sight, and it must have been several miles to the nearest dwelling. On the second occasion, the day was exceptionally still and almost sultry. I was approaching the pass and was perhaps a quarter of a mile from its mouth on a broad sweep of soggy turf, when I heard a rushing sound, such as might be made by some creatures in flight. I looked up and was surprised to see no sign of any birds that could conceivably have caused it; but while I was staring about me, the rushing returned, and it seemed as if two or more creatures were weaving about in the air, diving and swooping up again quite close to my shoulders. As they did so, there came a sound: ‘Hoo-oosh!’ just by my right ear, then, almost immediately, ‘Hoo-oosh’ a little to my left. Something or things were playing, perhaps trying to frighten me, in the way that swallows will sometimes play and dive above sheep. There was a final ‘Hoo!’ from overhead, and the sounds withdrew. Everything was now very still. I was somewhat startled, and as the sun was about to set, thought it wise to return home.
“My next experience began in a remote little valley or fold of the hills to south and east of the fairy pass. Again the day was still and sultry, and I sat down on a clump of turf by a burn to drink and meditate. As I rested, I grew conscious of a sound in the air that was somehow persuading me to hear it—a three-note call, I agreed, and, perhaps, not entirely unfamiliar. In a minute or two I knew what it was—it was the fairy call in answer to which Mary Rose disappeared in J. M. Barrie’s play—the same curious interval, drawing away indefinitely on the third note, continuing in an almost irritating fashion. I got up and shook off the impression. It seemed to me altogether too easy, too whimsical a notion that the valley should be impressing upon me the call from a fairy play; nobody would believe a thing like that.
“I decided to say nothing at all about it, but a week or two later I happened to be at a ceilidh in a house near Castlebay. There, among my friends, was an artist—Miss Anna Maclean. We talked a little about painting, and all at once she said: ‘You know, I’ve found a lovely little spot I call it the ‘Mary Rose Valley.’
“‘Oh?’ I said, ‘Where exactly does it lie?’
“As accurately as possible, she described the position of the valley I was thinking of. ‘But why do you call it the ‘Mary Rose Valley,’ I asked.
“‘Well,’ she replied, ‘I was rather tired carrying my sketching things when I came to it, so I sat down there a while to rest. Then I kept on hearing the call—I’m sure it was the same call that is in the Mary Rose play—have you seen the play? You remember when Mary Rose gets drawn away –’
“‘I remember,’ I said. The music for the play was written by the late Norman O’Neil. I have been wondering if and how the ‘Mary Rose Valley’ continued to enter his ear.”
Most of the nature spirits delight in music because they are able to bathe in the sound waves. A fairy seen by Mrs. Martha C. Smith, of the USA, was dancing on the top of her television set to the music of the “Scarf Dance” that was being played by an orchestra. The little creature was about twelve inches high with tiny iridescent wings. She was dressed in sheerest gossamer, and around her was a light that scintillated like the facets of a diamond.
In May 1957, Mrs. G. K. Evason, of Tunbridge Wells, wrote to me: “I had been thinking this evening that there were no fairy experiences to relate at present. Then, catching the fragrance from some lilies-of-the-valley which were in a vase on my table, I looked towards them and became aware of a little white Fairy Queen with a diadem of flowers in her hair, and carrying a wand with a bright star on it. She was dancing by the table, just beneath the flowers.”
In a further letter Mrs. Evason said: “The little white fairy appeared again in the dawn hours, right in the aperture that I had left between my bedroom curtains, which are of a golden colour. She sparkled with the usual radiance, and a little in front of her appeared a group of fairies dancing to the tune and singing the words of a song entitled ‘The Little People.’ It is a charming song, and I often used to feel impelled to play it and would experience a wonderfully happy upliftment whenever I did so, but I did not know who was giving me the impression until I saw these fairies so vividly around. Now, whenever the name, words, and music of any of the Fairy Songs suddenly flash upon me, I realize the fairies’ sweet presence and know it is their way of requesting a certain tune to be played.”
Later she wrote; “The snow-white fairy frequently appears to me, sparkling and iridescent. Last night after I had retired to bed and lain awake for some time, I suddenly felt the atmosphere alive and vibrant with moving figures in beautiful swirling clouds of colour, and the words ‘The dancing fairies’ were plainly audible. There were little elves and sprites and the usual band of fairies and gnomes enjoying a very happy dance in the atmosphere halfway between floor and ceiling. It was such a joyous experience, and then I went peacefully to sleep.”
In December 1957, Mrs. Evason wrote again; “A group of dancing fairies has appeared a number of times during the Christmas season. They come in the usual lovely colour vibrations, singing the fairy songs that I play for them sometimes, and the elves play on little panpipes. One has a tiny silver trumpet, and I feel he uses it also to summon the group to the fairy ring for their joyous revels. It is so very wonderful, and one cannot doubt their existence.”
While penning another letter to me, Mrs. Evason said, “I am conscious of a little elf beside me. He is dressed in a pure white tight-fitting garment, and his white cap is shaped like an inverted tulip flower with a short stalk at the top. He appears to be greatly interested in a small ‘Belling’ electric heater, which gives out a gentle warmth but no light. In his hand he holds what appears to be a tiny imitation of a conductor’s baton, and now and again he beats time to the music of a symphony concert, which is coming through the radio. He gives me such a joyful feeling.”
A few weeks later, Mrs. Evason wrote that she was listening to music on the radio when the little fellow again appeared, dancing gaily and evidently enjoying himself immensely. “He seems to prefer to come alone, and disappears quite suddenly.” On another occasion Mrs. Evason saw quite a number of fairies dancing in a ring round the radio.
The Hon. E. C. F. Collier said that his first wife, who died in 1952, had remarkable powers of second sight but was very reticent on the subject and seldom spoke about it except to him. He related that whenever Tchaikovsky’s “Valse des fleurs” came over the radio the fairies used to come and dance in front of her. He could not see them, but she used to describe what happened and what they looked like. She said they were wonderful little creatures between nine inches and a foot high. They looked very happy and were beautifully dressed. Usually they brought along with them garlands of flowers and performed delightful evolutions of dancing together. “If I remember rightly,” Mrs. Collier said “they all seemed to be of female form, and there was always the very obvious Queen with them. They were well aware of my wife’s presence and always finished up with an obeisance to her. Although so perfectly formed, there was something about them that my wife found hard to define beyond the fact that they were not human. They used sometimes to bring a pet rabbit along, and once, I think, a small white poodle. As soon as the ‘Valse des fleurs’ stopped, they gathered together to give the farewell obeisance and then all scampered away and vanished.”
In his book The Hidden Side of Things (Theosophical Publishing House, Adya and London, 1948) the Rt. Rev. C. W. Leadbeater told of an elf in Italy who was so fascinated by a certain piece of music that when it was being played on the piano he would leave his wood and come into the room to bathe in its sound waves and pulsate and sway in harmony with them. The author wrote that more than once he had seen a shepherd boy in Sicily playing on his homemade double panpipe
with an appreciative audience of fairies frisking round him.
A concert pianist recounted to me in 1951 that once, when she and her friend were rehearsing on two pianos, her friend stopped suddenly and said that while they had been playing she had distinctly seen several fairies at the side of her piano, dancing in time to the music.
Many composers have been inspired consciously or subconsciously by the fairies and the higher Devas. Cyril Scott, in his book Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages (Rider and Co.), said that Grieg was the musical interpreter, the intermediary between the little nature-spirits and humanity, and one can well believe it. Wagner certainly captured the weird, exultant cries of the air spirits in his “Ride of the Valkyries,” and there are magical fairy passages in Mendelsohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mr. S. Jackson Coleman, F.R.G.S., F.R.A.I., etc., who was the Hon. Administrator of the Folklore Fellowship, told me that the airs of a number of Manx songs, including “Arrane y Ferrishyn” (Song of the Fairies), “Tappaghyn Jiargey” (The Red Topknots), and the “Arrane Ghelby” (The Dalby Song), are regarded as fairy tunes.
Seeing Fairies Page 40
