Michael Morpurgo - An Elephant in the Garden

Karl kept asking me more and more questions about her. “How long has she been in the nursing home?” “What’s the matter with her?” “Why’s she in bed in her room, and not with the others?” He wanted to know everything, so I told him everything…

…how she and I had taken a particular shine to one another, how she was very direct, to the point of bluntness sometimes, and how I liked that. She’d told me once, on the very first day she came into the nursing home, “I might as well be honest with you. I do not like being in here, not one bit. But since I am, and since we shall be seeing rather a lot of one another, then you may call me Lizzie.”

So that’s what I did. To all the other nurses she was Elizabeth, but to me she was Lizzie. She slept a lot, listened to the radio, and she read books, lots of books. She didn’t like to be interrupted when she was reading, even when I had to give her some medication. She especially loved detective stories. She told me once, rather proudly, that she had read every book that Agatha Christie had ever written.

The doctor, I told Karl, thought she couldn’t have eaten properly for weeks, maybe months, before she came in. And that’s certainly what she looked like when I first saw her, so shrivelled and weak and vulnerable, her skin pale and paper-thin over her cheekbones, her hair creamy white against the pillows. Yet even then I could see there was something very unusual, very spirited about her – the steely look in her eye, the sudden smile that lit up her whole face. I knew nothing of her life – no relatives came to see her. She seemed to be entirely alone in the world.

“She’s a bit like Gran,” I told Karl, trying to explain her state of mind to him as best I could. “You know, like a lot of old people, a bit muddled and forgetful – like when she starts up about her elephant. She’s goes on about it all the time, not just to me, to everyone. ‘There was an elephant in the garden, you know,’ she says. It’s all nonsense, Karl, I promise you.”

“You don’t know,” Karl said, still angry at me. “And anyway, I don’t care what you say. I think it’s true what she told me about the elephant. She’s not fibbing, she’s not making it up, I know she isn’t. I can tell.”

“How can you tell?” I asked him.

“Because I tell fibs sometimes, so I can always tell when someone else is, and she’s not. And she’s not muddled either, like Gran is. If she says she had an elephant in her garden, then she did.”

I didn’t want to argue, didn’t want to make him any more cross with me than he already was, so I said nothing. But I lay awake that night wondering if Karl could possibly be right. The more I thought about it, the more I began to think that maybe there was a ring of truth about Lizzie’s elephant.

The next morning at work, with Karl and his friends cavorting about in the snow, I was sorely tempted to go in and ask Lizzie about her elephant, but it never seemed to be the right moment. It was best not to probe, not to intrude, I thought. She always seemed to me to be a very private person, happy enough in her own silence. We had got used to one another, and I think both of us felt comfortable together. I didn’t want to spoil that. As I went into her room I decided that if she brought up the elephant again, then I would ask her. But she never did. She asked about Karl though. She wanted to know all about him. She particularly wanted to know when he would be coming in again to see her. She said she had something very unusual, very special to show him. She seemed very excited about it, but told me not to tell him. She wanted it to be a surprise, she said.

I noticed then she hadn’t drunk anything again from her glass of water, and told her off gently, which she was quite used to by now. I walked past the end of the bed to close her window, tutting at her reproachfully. “Lizzie, you are so naughty about your water,” I told her. But I could tell she wasn’t listening to me at all.

“Do you mind leaving the window open, dear?” she said. “I like the cold. I like to feel the fresh air on my face. It cools me. This place is rather overheated. I think it is a dreadful waste of money.” I did as she asked, and she thanked me – her manners were always meticulous. She was gazing out of the window now at the children. “Your little Karl, he loves the snow, I think. I look at him out there, and I see my brother. It was snowing that day too…” She paused, then went on. “On the radio this morning, dear, I thought I heard them say that it is February the thirteenth today. Did I hear right?”

I checked my mobile phone to confirm it.

“Will your little Karl come in to see me today, do you think?” she asked again. She seemed to be quite anxious about it. “I do hope so. I should like to show him…I think he would be interested.”

“I’m sure he will,” I told her. But I wasn’t sure at all. I knew full well Karl wanted to find out more about her elephant story, but it looked to me as if he was having far too much fun in the snow outside. Lizzie said nothing more about it, as I washed her, and then arranged her pillows and made her comfortable again. She loved me to take my time brushing her hair. It was while I was doing this that there was a knock on the door. To my great relief, and to her obvious delight, it was Karl. He came in breathless, and sat down at once beside her, his face glowing, snow all over his coat, still in his hair. She reached out, brushing it away, then touching his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “Cold,” she said. “It was cold on February the thirteenth, February the thirteenth…” Her mind seemed to be wandering.

“Your elephant, the elephant in the garden. You were going to tell me about your elephant, remember?” Karl said.

That was when I noticed that Lizzie was becoming quite tearful and upset. I thought perhaps Karl should go. “He can come back later, another time,” I told her.

“No.” She was very insistent that we stayed, that she wanted us to stay, that she had something 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.”