Michael Morpurgo: An Elephant in the Garden

First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2010

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Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2010

Illustrations copyright © Michael Foreman 2010

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Source ISBN: 9780007339570

Ebook Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007352128

Version 2018-09-05

For Bella, Freddie and Max

Title Page An Elephant in the Garden

Copyright

Dedication

Part One Ring of Truth

1.

2.

3.

Part Two Ring of Fire

1.

2.

3.

Part Three Ring of Steel

1.

2.

3.

Part Four Ring of Bells

1.

2.

3.

About the Author

About the Publisher

TO TELL THE TRUTH, I DON’T THINK LIZZIE WOULD EVER HAVE told us her elephant story at all, if Karl had not been called Karl.

Maybe I’d better explain.

I’m a nurse. I was working part-time in an old people’s nursing home just down the road from where we live. It was part-time because I wanted to be home for Karl, my nine-year-old son. There were just the two of us, so I needed to be there to see him off to school, and be there for him when he got back. But sometimes, at weekends, they asked me to do overtime.

I couldn’t always say no – we all of us had to take our turn to do weekend duties – and if I’m honest, the money helped. So at weekends, if Karl hadn’t got anywhere else to go, or anyone else to look after him, they let me bring him into work with me.

I was a bit worried about it at first – whether anyone would mind, how he’d get on with all the old folks – but he loved it, and as it turned out, so did they. For a start, he had the whole park to play around in. Sometimes he’d bring a few friends. They could climb the trees, kick a football about, whizz around on their mountain bikes. As for the old folk, the children’s visits became quite a feature of their weekends, something for them to look forward to. They would gather around the sitting-room windows to watch them, often for hours on end. And when it was raining, Karl and his friends used to come inside and play chess with them, or watch a film on the television.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, on the Friday night, it snowed, and snowed hard. I had to go to work at the nursing home the next day – I was on morning shifts that weekend – and so Karl had to come too. But he didn’t mind, not one bit. He brought half a dozen of his friends along with him. They were going tobogganing in the park, they said. They didn’t have a toboggan between them. They simply brought along anything that would slide – plastic sacks, surfboards, even a rubber ring. As it turned out, bottoms worked just as well as anything else. The nursing home was loud with laughter that morning as the old folks watched them gallivanting out there in the snow. In time, the tobogganing degenerated into a snowball fight, which the old folks seemed to be enjoying as much as Karl and his friends were. I was busy most of the morning, but the last time I looked out of the window I saw that, much to everyone’s delight, Karl and his friends were busy building a giant snowman right outside the sitting-room window.

So I was taken completely by surprise when I walked into Lizzie’s room a few minutes later and found Karl sitting there at her bedside in his hat and his coat, the two of them chatting away like old friends.

“Ah, so there you are,” Lizzie said, beckoning me in. “You did not tell me you had a son. And he is called Karl! I can hardly believe it. And he looks like him too. The likeness, it is extraordinary, amazing. I have told him also about the elephant in the garden, and he believes me.” She wagged her finger at me. “You do not believe me. I know this. No one in this place believes me, but Karl does.”

I hustled Karl out of the room, and away down the corridor, ticking him off soundly for wandering into Lizzie’s room like that, uninvited. Thinking back, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Karl was always wandering off. What did surprise me, though, was how furious he was with me.

“She was just going to tell me about her elephant,” he protested loudly, tugging at my hand, trying to break away from me.

“There isn’t any elephant, Karl,” I told him. “She imagines things. Old people often do that. They get a bit mixed-up in the head sometimes, that’s all. Now come along, for goodness’ sake.”

It wasn’t until we were back home that afternoon that I had a chance to sit Karl down and explain all about Lizzie, and her elephant story. I told him I knew from her records that Lizzie was eighty-two years old. She had been in the nursing home for nearly a month, so we had got to know one another’s little ways quite well already. She could be a little prickly, and even cantankerous with the other nurses sometimes. But with me, I said, she was considerate and polite, and quite co-operative – well, mostly. Even with me, though, she could become rather obstinate from time to time, especially when it came to eating the food that I put in front of her. She wouldn’t drink enough either, no matter how much I tried to encourage her.