Times of War Collection

by Michael Morpurgo

  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.

  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.”

  “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.”

  IZZIE 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. And he wrote books about paintings too, about Rembrandt in particular. He loved Rembrandt above all other artists. Like Mutti he loved listening to the gramophone, but he preferred Bach to Marlene Dietrich. He loved boating best of all, though, and fishing too, even more than Rembrandt or Bach. At weekends we would often go boating on the lake in the park, and in summer we would take a picnic and the gramophone with us, and we would have a picnic by the shore, a musical picnic! Papi loved musical picnics. Well, we all did.

  Every holidays, we would take a bus into the countryside, to stay with Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti on their farm – Aunt Lotti was Mutti’s sister, you understand. We would feed the animals and have more picnics. Papi built a tree house for us on an island out in the middle of the lake – which was more like a large pond than a lake, when I come to think about it – and it was fringed all around with reeds, I remember, and there were always ducks and moorhens and frogs and tadpoles and little darting fish. We had a small rowing boat to get across to the island, and plenty of trout to fish for in the stream that ran down into the little
lake – so Papi was happy.

  Sometimes when the harvesting was done, we’d all be out there in the field of stubble long into the evenings, gathering the last grains of golden corn. And whenever we could on summer nights, Karli and I would sleep up in the tree house on the island. We would lie awake listening to the gramophone playing far away in the farmhouse, to the owls calling one another. We would watch the moon sailing through the clouds.

  We loved the animals, of course. Little Karli loved the pigs especially, and Uncle Manfred’s horse – Tomi, he was called. Karli would go riding on Tomi with Uncle Manfred every day out around the farm, and I would go bicycling on my own. I went off for hours on end. I loved freewheeling down a hill, the wind in my face. It was our dreamtime, full of sunshine and laughter. But dreams do not last, do they? And sometimes they turn into nightmares.

  I was born before the war, of course. But when I say that, it sounds as if I knew there was going to be a war all the time I was growing up. It was not like that, not at all, not for me. Yes, there was talk of it, and there were many uniforms and flags in the streets, lots of bands marching up and down. Karli loved all that. He loved to march along with them, even if the other boys used to taunt him. He was so small and frail, and suffered greatly from asthma. They’d call him ‘Pegleg’, because of his limp, and I hated them for that. I would shout at them, whenever I felt brave enough that is. It was not only the mockery in their faces and the cruelty of their words that I hated so much, it was the injustice. It was not Karli’s fault he had been born like that. But Karli did not want me to stand up for him. He used to get quite angry at me for making a fuss. I do not think he minded about them nearly as much as I did.

  I think I have always had a strong sense of justice, of fair play, of what is right and what is wrong. Maybe it is just natural for children to be born like this. Maybe I got it from Mutti. Who knows? Anyway, I always recognised injustice when I saw it, and I felt it deeply. And believe you me, there was plenty of it about in those days. I saw the Jews in the streets, with their yellow stars sewn on to their coats. I saw their shops with the Star of David daubed in paint all over the windows. Several times I saw them beaten up by Nazi stormtroopers, and left to lie in the gutter.