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    An Elephant in the Garden: Inspired by a True Story
    An Elephant in the Garden: Inspired by a True Story
    An Elephant in the Garden: Inspired by a True Story
    Ebook130 pages2 hours

    An Elephant in the Garden: Inspired by a True Story

    By Michael Morpurgo

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Lizzie and Karl's mother is a zoo keeper; the family has become attached to an orphaned elephant named Marlene, who will be destroyed as a precautionary measure so she and the other animals don't run wild should the zoo be hit by bombs. The family persuades the zoo director to let Marlene stay in their garden instead. When the city is bombed, the family flees with thousands of others, but how can they walk the same route when they have an elephant in tow, and keep themselves safe? Along the way, they meet Peter, a Canadian navigator who risks his own capture to save the family.

    As Michael Morpurgo writes in an author's note, An Elephant in the Garden is inspired by historical truths, and by his admiration for elephants, "the noblest and wisest and most sensitive of all creatures." Here is a story that brings together an unlikely group of survivors whose faith in kindness and love proves the best weapon of all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 25, 2011
    ISBN9781466804456
    An Elephant in the Garden: Inspired by a True Story
    Author

    Michael Morpurgo

    Michael Morpurgo OBE is one of Britain's best loved writers for children, with sales of over 35 million copies. He has written over 150 books, has served as Children’s Laureate, and has won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, the Writers Guild Award, the Whitbread Award, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Eleanor Farjeon Lifetime Achievement Award. With his wife, Clare, he is the co-founder of Farms for City Children. Michael was knighted in 2018 for services to literature and charity.

    Read more from Michael Morpurgo

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    Reviews for An Elephant in the Garden

    4/5

    97 ratings15 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I read this as an adult and found it to be a very engaging and well written story for all ages. I recommended it to various family members and friends.
    • 3/5
      Great historical fiction for kids grades 4-6, maybe 7. based on a few true stories that he mashed to make this one, it is the journey of Elizabeth and her family as they leave their home during the bombing of Dresden, taking an orphaned elephant with them. It is uplifting and interesting in the way that Lowery's Number the Stars is. I can see this on some school lists...the one the kids will enjoy!
    • 4/5
      A very touching story of a young girl and her family trying to survive amidst the war. A heart-warming story that gives you inspiration to keep on going in life...
    • 5/5
      This story begins in a nursing home with the narrator and her son, Karl, speaking to a resident of the home named Lizzie. Lizzie has often told people that there had been an elephant that lived in her garden when she was younger. No one ever believed her until Karl did. So Lizzie tells her incredible story to Karl and his mother. Lizzie grew up in Dresden, Germany. Her father, Papi, went away to fight in the war and left Lizzie, her mother Muttie, and her younger brother Karli to fend the best they could during wartimes. Muttie worked as a zookeeper and became enamored with an elephant she named Marlene. Because Marlene lost her mother suddenly, Muttie took it upon herself to help Marlene through her grief. Everyday after work Muttie brought Marlene home where she stayed in the garden until Muttie returned to work in the morning. Marlene became a cherished member of the family and ultimately saved their lives. After their town was destroyed by bombers, the family, with Marlene in tow, headed through the countryside away from the approaching Russians and toward the American soldiers. Soon into their journey they met a Canadian RAF soldier named Peter who, with his invaluable compass, helped lead the way to safety. There are no illustrations within the book, but the cover illustration shows the family walking away from their home with Marlene on a cold winter night.Inspired by a true story, this book tells the incredible story of a German family making their way to safety with their beloved elephant.
    • 5/5
      Dying in a hospital bed, Lizzie tells her story to a nurse and her young son. During World War II, Lizzie's mom brought home an elephant, Marlene, from the local zoo. Karli, Lizzie's brother instantly fell in love with Marlene. Forced to flee the city when it was destroyed by bombs, the family takes the elephant with them. Often, the elephant acted as an ice breaker between the family and other refugees.This was a fast paced quick read. I think it is perfect for pre-teens and young teenagers. The characters were well designed and were very realistic. Overall, I really enjoyed this book.
    • 5/5
      An Elephant in the Garden is another wonderful war story based on real life events, as only Morpurgo can tell them. An 80-something year old woman in an old folks home recalls her girlhood days living in Dresden, Germany during WWII, when her mother brought back an elephant from the zoo she was working at to keep in their garden just before the allied forces bombed the city to smithereens. Through a series of circumstances, the elephant who had run off to charge at a barking dog ended up rescuing the girl and her mother and brother from the bombing, and accompanied them on a long march to safety (their father was meanwhile fighting on the Russian front). The elephant was called Marlena, after Marlena Dietrich, and something tells me I'll never forget this story or Marlena, in part because I'm crazy about animals in general and elephants in particular, in part because I cherish stories about how essential to life animals are, and in part because it's so rare to hear stories about the war from the point of view of the Germans. For all these reasons, I've just now decided to upgrade my original rating from 4 to 4.5 stars. I might have rated it the full 5, but was a bit annoyed that they chose an English narrator to tell the tale in an unconvincing German accent on this audio version instead of casting a native German speaker, but that's me being finicky.
    • 4/5
      A story within a story, an elderly nursing home patient, Elizabeth (Lizzie) tells a caretaker and her son about the escape of her family from Dresden in winter of 1945 with an elephant in tow. Along the arduous trek they surprise a wounded Canadian RAF navigator, who joins them on their journey.

      The story is based on two different true accounts, one of an Irish woman who saved an elephant in WWII and the other of a character met somewhere on the journey. Three unikely sets of friendship form during this book as well. It is nicely paced and keeps the reader interested throughout.
    • 3/5
      I was very attached to Marlene by the end of the book. I really enjoyed this book. The big picture of the book was to depict the lifestyle of refugees during World War II. The book also takes on the themes of compassion for enemies and animals during this time period. This book is based on actual events. Mopurgo does a great job of documenting the events, but making it his own.I really liked most of the characters. For example, Mopurgu really made Marlene, the elephant, a humanistic quality. Marlene is an Elephant from the Dresden Zoo. The zoo had orders to kill any animals if there was a bombing. Instead, Marlene's keeper convinces management to allow her to take her home at night. She bonds with the family, and after running away, saves her "family's" life. Her loyalty as an elephant is typical behavior for the animal. She certainly makes the story more of an driving force.I did not like the flashback method of the story. Marlene, the Royal Air Force Pilot and Marlene's family are strong characters. I feel like the nurse and her son did not help direct the story in any manner. They are not significant characters, but also do not really add anything of real interest to the story. They just serve as people to share the story with, which just does not any significance. Overall, I enjoyed the story
    • 5/5
      A frail and elderly Lizzie tells the story of her youth in Dresden Germany during World War II. Her father was fighting on the Russian front. Her mother was a zookeeper and fearing for the safety of the young elephant, she brought the animal home each night to their private garden. But the war is taking a toll on everyone and when the bombing begins on a snowy February night the family must flee the burning city. How can they possibly evade enemy troops with an elephant in tow?

      What a wonderful and heart-warming story! Inspired by true events, Morpurgo has crafted a tale of courage, perseverance, and kindness in the face of horrific deprivation. The author doesn’t dwell on the horrors of war, but he doesn’t skip them either. He shows that while nations may be enemies at war, individual people can (and do) disagree with their leaders. Morpurgo also takes the opportunity to show people doing what they believe is best and morally right despite the difficulty and even personal danger in doing so.

      I had previously read War Horse by the same author, and did not warm to it. So I was a little hesitant to read this one, but I’m glad I did, because I loved this book. I think the difference, for me, was the narrator. The earlier book was told from the animal’s point of view and I found that awkward. In contrast, I was easily able to connect with Lizzie. I’m sorry there are no young children in my life because I kept wanting to read it aloud; I could easily imagine a teacher capturing the attention of a class with this story.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful, moving and inspiring story from a brilliant storyteller.
    • 5/5
      By the author of War Horse, this is the story of a German family on the run after the bombing of Dresden. Well-written, easy read.
    • 3/5
      Not Murpurgo's best, but a good, solid story that mixes the fantastical animal relationship with the devastating hardships of war. The structure of the storytelling could have used some work, but the magic is in the story itself, in its heart, with an ending like a warm smile.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book! It is yet another wonderful example of Young adult genre transcends a specific age category.During WWII Dresden Germany was blasted/bombed unmercifully. This is a tale of an older woman, now in a nursing home, who recounts the story of her brave mother who worked in the zoo and fearing that an elephant she had tended since its childhood would die in the war, brought the animal home.When Dresden was bombed the family left the ruined city and made a trek westward with the elephant in tow.This is an insightful story of an elephant who was saved and in turn saved a family.Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Michael Morpurgo's latest (originally published in the UK last year) is a touching tale of a family trying to survive the fire bombing of Dresden with the help of a young elephant. I enjoyed the novel but was a bit disappointed. Certainly not as stunning as War Horse.
    • 4/5
      Reason for Reading: I like the author and would simply read anything he wrote.This story set during WWII is from a perspective which I don't read much of, that of the everyday German family. I have read books from the German perspective but usually they are hiding Jews and that would be the focus of the story. An Elephant in the Garden does not really explore the War itself very much, outside of what this middle class pacifist family would know from the propaganda they were fed. Before the war actually starts they have had a heated argument with their closest relatives who have said they never want to see them again as they believe Hitler will be good for the country and our family, living in Dresden think he is a madman. War starts and Papi is called to active duty, sent to fight in France and later in Russia. Mutti has gotten herself a job working at the local zoo which is a walkable distance from their home. With this background, we enter the main theme of the book as the Allies are winning, drawing nearer to the cities, and then Dresden is bombed to a pile of ash. Mutti, Karl and Elizabeth leave the city as many refugees do as they have the Americans coming from one side and the Russians from the other and no one wants to suffer at the hands of the Russians. So they all head towards the Americans, but Mutti feels she must bring Marlene with her, a very sad, grieving baby elephant whose mother died several months ago. Mutti has known her since she was born. Marlene has been living in their garden overnights and has become a part of the family. It is a hard journey for any refugee as they trudge for weeks through the snow, rationing a dwindling supply of food, with the Russians ever present at their back but with an elephant along this brings added elements both bad and good.This is a delightful story but wasn't as good as I was expecting it to be. It was a very quiet story, with interesting things happening but without any buildup to a big climax; it simply told a fascinating story with a calm approach. From the point of the German family it was a bit strange as the war as a whole was not a topic, only how it affected them: loosing Papi to the army and then the penultimate loss of house and home from the bombings. Hitler is mentioned twice by German characters who vehemently despised everything he stood for. Otherwise this could have been any war and I think there are two ways of understanding this story.One, from the everyday German civilian's point of view who suffered as much as any Allied civilian who had his town bombed to smithereens. This reminds us that wars are started by governments not the civilians. Second, the story focuses on the refugee status of the family, the long journey to safety, and upon safety being labeled "displaced persons" and put into a fenced-in camp. This compares to the modern day war refugees we see on TV today who have been driven from their homes and shows that refugeeism is a fall-out from war itself and has happened in every war to both sides, throughout history.A good read. Marlene the elephant adds humour and quirkiness to the story, she also brings people together who would not otherwise have spoken to each other. But yet, with all that goes on, it is still a quiet book that goes at a steady pace and lingers.

    Book preview

    An Elephant in the Garden - Michael Morpurgo

    Part One

    Ring of Truth

    One

    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, on weekends, they asked me to do overtime. I couldn’t always say no—we had to take our turn to do weekend duties—and if I’m honest, the money helped. So on 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 folks, 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, chewing him out 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 gotten 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 cooperative—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 shriveled 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 gotten 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 scolded her 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

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