An Elephant in the Garden. Michael Morpurgo

she needed to tell us.

      So I pulled up another chair, and sat down beside them. “What is it, Lizzie? Is there something about February the thirteenth that’s especially important to you?” I asked her.

      She turned her head away from me, unable to control or disguise the tremor in her voice. “It was this day that changed my life for ever,” she said. I reached out and took her hand in mine. Her grip was weak, but it was enough to let me know that she really did want us to stay. She was looking out of the window, and pointing now.

      “Look, do you see? Do you hear? The wind is blowing through the trees. The branches, they are shaking. Are they frightened of the wind, do you think? Little Karli said it that day, that the trees were frightened of the wind, that they wanted to run away, but they couldn’t. We could, he said, but they couldn’t. He was very sad about it.” She smiled at Karl. “Karli was my little brother, and you remind me so much of him. And this makes me happy, that you are here, I mean; and on this day too, so that I can tell you my story, our story, Karli’s story and mine. But it makes me sad also. On February the thirteenth I am always sad. The wind in the trees, it makes me remember.”

      I had noticed before that she spoke English in a strange way, pronouncing her words carefully, too correctly, and in proper sentences. Her name might have been English, but I had always thought she might be Dutch, or Scandinavian, or German perhaps. “It was a hot wind, a scalding wind,” she went on. “I do not believe in hell, nor heaven come to that. But if you can imagine it, it was like a wind from the fires of hell. I thought we would burn alive, all of us.”

      “But you said it was in February,” Karl interrupted. I frowned at him, but Lizzie didn’t seem to mind at all. “That’s in wintertime, isn’t it?” Karl went on. “I mean, where were you living? Africa or somewhere?”

      “No. It wasn’t in Africa. Didn’t I tell you this before? I think I did.” She was suddenly looking a little unsure of herself. “There was an elephant in the garden, you see. No, honestly there was. And she liked potatoes, lots of potatoes.” I think my wry smile must have betrayed me. “You still do not believe me, do you? Well, I cannot say that I blame you. I expect you and all the other nurses think I am just a dotty old bat, a bit loopy, off my rocker, as you say. It is quite true that my bits and pieces do not work so well any more – which, I suppose, is why I am in here, isn’t it? My legs will not do what I tell them sometimes, and even my heart does not beat like it should. It skips and flutters. It makes up its own rhythm as it goes along, which makes me feel dizzy, and this is not at all convenient for me. But I can tell you for certain and for sure, that my mind is as sound as a bell, sharp as a razor. So when I say there was an elephant in the garden, there really was. There is nothing wrong with my memory, nothing at all.”

      “I don’t think you’re batty at all,” said Karl. “Or loopy.”

      “That is very kind of you to say so, Karl. You and I shall be good friends. But I have to admit that when I come to think of it, I cannot remember much about yesterday, nor even what I had for breakfast this morning. But I promise you I can remember just how it was when I was young. I remember the important things, the things that matter. It is as if I wrote them down in my mind, so that I should not forget. So I remember very well – it was on the evening of my sixteenth birthday – that I looked out of the window, and saw her. At first she just looked like a big dark shadow, but then the shadow moved, and I looked again. There was no doubt about it. She was an elephant, quite definitely an elephant. I did not know it at the time, of course, but this elephant in our garden was going to change my life for ever, change all our lives in my family. And you might say she was going to save all our lives also.”

       2.

      LIZZIE PAUSED FOR A MOMENT OR TWO, THEN SMILED ACROSS at me sympathetically, knowingly. “No, no, you are too busy for this, dear, I can see that,” she said. “You have to get on. You have other patients to look after. I know this. I was a sort of nurse once. Nurses are always busy. But I can talk to Karl. I can tell him my elephant story.”

      There was no way I was going to miss her story now. If Karl was going to hear it, then I was too. And the truth was that I had already sensed from the tone in her voice that she was making nothing up, that Karl had been right about her. “You certainly can’t stop now,” I told her. “I’m off duty at twelve, and that’s just about now. So I’m on my own time.”

      “And we want to know all about the elephant, don’t we, Mum?” said Karl.

      “Then you shall, Karli. I think from now on I shall call you Karli, like my little brother. So it will be as if you are inside the story.” She laid her head back on her pillows. “I have had quite a long life, and quite a lot has happened, so it may take a little while. You are going to have to be patient. I think to begin with you have to know names and places. I was called Elizabeth then, or Lisbeth some people called me – I became Lizzie much later. Mother, we always called Mutti. And I had a little brother, as I have told you, about eight years younger than me, little Karli. He was always full of questions, endless questions, and when we answered, there’d always be another question, about the answer we’d just given. ‘Yes, but why?’ he would ask. ‘How come? What for?’ In the end we would often become impatient with him, and just tell him it was ‘for a blue reason’. He seemed happy with that – I do not know why.

      “Karli was born with one leg shorter than the other, so we had to carry him a lot, but he was always cheerful. In fact he was the clown in the family, kept us all laughing. He loved to juggle – he could do it with his eyes closed too! The elephant loved to watch him. It was as if she was hypnotised. The elephant was called Marlene. Mutti got to name her because she was working with the elephants in the zoo. She named her after a singer she loved, that many people loved in those days. Marlene Dietrich. I wonder if you might have heard of her – no, I don’t suppose you have. She’s been dead a long time now. She was very slim and elegant, and blonde too, not at all like an elephant, but that did not seem to matter to Mutti. She called the elephant Marlene, and that was that.

      “We had a gramophone at home, a wind-up one with a big trumpet – you do not see them like this any more, only in antique shops – and so Marlene Dietrich’s voice was always in the house. We grew up with that voice. She had a voice like dark red velvet. When she sang it was as if she was singing only for me. I tried to sing just like her, mostly in the bath, because my singing sounded better in the bath. I remember Mutti would sometimes hum along with her songs when we were listening to them. It was like a kind of duet.”

      “But what about the elephant?” Karl interrupted again, not troubling much to hide his impatience. “I mean, how come this elephant was in your garden in the first place? Where were you living? I don’t understand.”

      “Yes, you are right, dear,” she said. “I was getting ahead of myself, rushing on too quickly.” She thought long and hard, collecting her thoughts, before beginning again.

      “It would be better perhaps if I start again, I think. A story should always begin at the beginning. No? My own beginning would be a good start, I suppose…

      So, I was born on the ninth of February nineteen twenty-nine, in Dresden, in Germany. We lived in quite a big house, a walled garden at the back, with a sandpit and a swing. And we had a woodshed where there lived the biggest spiders in the whole world, I promise you! There were many high trees, beech trees, where the pigeons cooed in summer, right outside my bedroom window. At the end of the garden was a rusty iron gate with huge squeaking hinges. This gate led out into a big park. So, in a way, we had two gardens you might say, a little one that was ours, and a big one we had to share with everyone else in Dresden.

      Dresden was a wonderful city then, so beautiful, you cannot imagine. I have only to close my eyes and I can see it again, just as it was. Papi – this is what we all called our father – Papi worked in the city art gallery restoring paintings.