I will start with my fascination with elephants. Why this fascination? It began with a story, the first story I loved, and still my favourite story. It was the story I wanted to hear my mother read to us again and again, and was her favourite story too. She used to read to us every night before we went to sleep. My brother, Pieter, and I would crawl into the same bed up in our attic room, and snuggle down. I could not count the number of times she read us “The Elephant’s Child”, from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. Everything in this story made me smile, the fun of it, the music in the words, the rhythm in the sentences, the gloriously inventive explanation of how the elephant got its trunk, and the deeply satisfying ending, in which this much put-upon elephant’s child gets to use his newly acquired, newly stretched, proper elephant’s trunk – elephants had just had little short snouts up until then – to spank his bullying relatives, who had always given him such a hard time because he would keep asking awkward questions.
It is precisely because this story was so precious to me that I could never bring myself even to attempt to write an elephant into one of my stories. I could never hope to write anything so good, so fine, so funny, so perfect. Great writers can inhibit sometimes as much as they can inspire. But I suppose, deep inside me, I must have clung to the notion that one day I might dare try it, if ever an idea occurred that seemed so right that I had to do it, that it was worth the risk. Then strangely, as if they had been waiting dormant all this time, two elephant ideas for stories came along in quick succession. For two years or more, elephants ruled my dreamtime and my story-making. First in Running Wild, and then in An Elephant in the Garden, a story very far removed in tone from the world of Kipling’s Just So Stories, a story I thought I dreamt up out of nowhere, but, of course, no story comes from nowhere. There are times when the stuff of dreams and reality blur, become so confused that you are not sure where the one ends and the other begins.
Here’s how An Elephant in the Garden began. We have been in the habit, Clare and I, of listening to the radio through the night-time, the BBC World Service. For us, it is a wonderful lullaby. The droning and burbling helps us to drop off to sleep, and when we wake, we sometimes find an interesting programme that helps us to forget we can’t sleep, soothes anxiety and enables us, sooner or later, to fall asleep again. Clare sleeps deeply, dreams, I think, less than I do. I dream often, partly because I wake more often – and I’m told we dream most intensely just before we wake. I dream vividly, wake up sometimes, heart pounding with excitement or fear, engendered by some vivid dream. But – and here’s the frustrating problem – I can rarely remember what my dreams are about. I can’t tell you the number of times I have been dreaming a wonderful, extraordinary dream, and often within the dream, I am even aware it is a dream and promise myself I must dream it to the end to find out what happens. I tell myself in my dream that I must remember it when I wake up, get out of bed and write it down at once so I don’t forget it. Then I wake up and, more often than not, it is already gone, flown away, forgotten! Infuriating! But just occasionally, I do wake up and remember – I have even been known to get out of bed and write my dream down whilst the memory of it was still clear in my mind.
One morning, with the light of dawn breaking and the sound of birdsong outside the window, I woke up holding a dream in my head. And such a dream! I didn’t get up and write it down; I just lay there, amazed at how clear and detailed the dream had been. I waited until Clare stirred. “You awake?” I asked. I had to tell her, had to tell someone. She mumbled something, not best pleased at being woken. “I just had the most amazing dream,” I told her. She murmured something that indicated to me that she really wasn’t interested at this hour of the morning, and couldn’t it wait? She wanted to be left to go back to sleep. But I was already into my story.
“I don’t know why,” I said, “but I think it all happened in Belfast. There was this lady and she worked in a Belfast zoo, looked after the elephants. It was sometime during the Second World War. One day, she went off to work as usual. When she got there, she found the zoo director, her boss, was gathering everyone together for a meeting. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’re not going to like this, but we haven’t got any choice. Orders. If the Germans come and bomb the city – which they will very likely, sooner or later, because of the port and the dockyards, I’m afraid we will have to be ready to destroy all the large animals. We can’t have bombs falling on the zoo, breaking open the cages, setting wild animals free to roam the city. I’m sorry, but there it is. In the event of an air raid, they will all have to be shot at once.’ Of course, everyone was very upset – most of all, the elephant lady, who loved her elephants dearly.
“Afterwards, she went up to the director and said, ‘Look, sir, you know I have one young orphan elephant I have brought up myself for two years now. She’s gentle as a lamb, everyone knows she is. We can’t shoot her, sir. We just can’t. I’ll look after her, see she doesn’t get loose if a raid comes.’
‘And how are you going to do that?’ the director asked. ‘You go home every evening. We all do.’
‘I can take her home with me,’ she replied. ‘Keep her in my back garden. It’s a walled garden, quite safe. She’ll never be out of my sight, I promise.’
‘You could do that?’ he asked. He hummed and hawed, but, in the end, let her take the young elephant home. So that’s what she did. Every night she’d walk the elephant back home through the streets and look after her in her back garden.”
“I never had such a vivid dream before,” I told Clare. “And what’s more, I remember all of it, everything.”
Clare turned over. “That’s because it wasn’t a dream,” she mumbled. “Unless I dreamt exactly the same dream, which I didn’t. It was on the radio. I heard it. Now, please can I get some sleep?”
I got up, went to my computer, typed in “Belfast Zoo WW2, Blitz, elephant”. And at once, up came a black and white photograph from the Belfast Telegraph, of a lady and an elephant in a back garden. True. Impossible but true. No dream. But what a story, all the same. I knew at once I would tell the story of that elephant, and call it An Elephant in the Garden. But as the weeks passed, it occurred to me that I had written often about the Second World War, and usually, though not always, from a British perspective. Wasn’t it about time I wrote a story set in Germany? There was bombing there too and on a massive scale.
Dresden came to mind immediately, a city set on fire and utterly destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945, raids in which thousands upon thousands of people had died, horribly. I would set it in Dresden, but was there a zoo in Dresden? I did my research and discovered there was indeed a zoo in Dresden. More than that, I discovered the very same order had gone out to everyone in Dresden Zoo, that, should the American and British bombers come – and they expected it – then all the large animals – tigers, leopards, lions and elephants – were all to be shot before they could escape into the city.
I knew something about the bombing of Dresden, but now I was finding out more and more about it – which was a painful experience – and of the flight westwards, afterwards, of millions of people to escape the bombing and the Red Army invading from the east. The roads were crammed with desperate families, carrying all they could with them. I knew, as I did my research, that my family – two children and the mother who worked in Dresden Zoo as an elephant keeper – who had looked after the young elephant in their garden until the raids, would be part of this exodus of refugees, this huge migration across Germany. They too would be seeking safety, and would have the elephant with them.
My Uncle Pieter had been killed early in the war in the RAF. Had he lived longer, I thought, he might well have been on that Dresden raid – he was in Bomber Command. I brought him back to life in this story. He is shot down and looked after by this family, becomes part of the family, helps them in their escape.
I was fortunate to have an insight into how it was to be part of that flight westwards across Germany towards the end of the war. The grandmother of a friend of mine had left a written account, a typescript with photographs, of her family’s perilous journey to the west. She was the widow of one of those German Army officers who had tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and bring an end to the war, a plot that had failed. Her husband had been arrested and executed with all the other conspirators. She wrote this account of her family’s struggle to escape and survive afterwards, a family history, written to tell her grandchildren about her late husband, their grandfather, and about the family’s flight across Germany to safety. It was their journey that inspired the perilous escape of my Dresden family, their elephant, and a shot-down RAF airman they befriend and who befriends them. So this is no “Just So Story”. It could not be more different, yet, without my mother reading me The Elephant’s Child, I doubt An Elephant in the Garden would ever have been written. This is a story with so many seeds – but my mother and Kipling sowed the first one between them. And my mother would have loved An Elephant in the Garden, I think, because of this; but also because her brother, my Uncle Pieter, plays such an important part in the story. They both liked playing parts; they were both actors, after all.
“It is the middle of the night,” growled the old man. “What is it that you want?”
“Please. We need a doctor,” Mutti told him. “My son, he is very sick. Please.”
Then from further inside the house came another voice, a woman’s voice. “Who is it, Hans? Is it more of them? Let them in.”
The door opened wider, and we saw then a lady in a dressing gown, coming down a huge wide staircase, and then hurrying towards us across the hallway.
“She says they need a doctor, Countess,” the old man said. They were both peering at us now, from behind the lamplight.
“We are from Dresden,” Mutti told them.
“Am I seeing things?” the lady asked. “Or is that an elephant?”
“I can explain about that later,” Mutti replied. “But my son is ill, seriously ill, and I have to find a doctor. Please. It is urgent.”
The lady did not hesitate. She took Mutti by the arm and led her into the hallway. “Come in, come in,” she said. “I shall send for the doctor from the village right away. And Hans, you will find a place for that animal in the stables.”
I had no idea that night who these people were, and neither did I care. We would soon have a doctor for Karli, and we had found shelter for him too. That was all that mattered. And it would be warm too. I could even smell food. But I did not get to go in right away. Mutti asked me to take care of Marlene, and to make sure that she had something to eat and drink. So, led by Hans, the old man in the nightcap, who muttered angrily to himself the whole time, I took her round the side of the house, through a great archway and into a stable yard. I saw to it that she had all she needed, hay and water both, and left her to it. She seemed quite happy, happier certainly than the horses across the yard from her, who were becoming increasingly unsettled at the appearance of this strange intruder.
As we walked back towards the house – the place seemed immense to me, more like a castle than a house – Hans was still grumbling on, but less to himself and rather more to me, about how he could never get a good night’s sleep anymore, how it was bad enough that the countess had opened her doors to all and sundry, but now she was turning the stable yard into a zoo. It was all too much, he said, too much.
It was not until he was leading me back into the house and up the grand staircase that I began to see for myself what he was complaining about. Everywhere I looked, every centimetre of floor space, was occupied. People were lying fast asleep, in the corridors, on the landings, and, I presumed, in every room. And those that were not asleep were sitting there on straw-filled sacks looking up at me blankly as I passed by. There was bewilderment on every face I saw. Hans took me up to the top of the house, to the attic, where I saw Karli lying stretched out on a mattress by a fire with Mutti kneeling over him, bathing his forehead. Peter was busy piling more wood on the fire.
“He has a fever, Elizabeth,” Mutti said, looking up at me, her eyes full of tears. “He’s burning up. Where is that doctor? Where is he?”
For the rest of the night Karli lay there tossing and turning, sometimes delirious, and all three of us took it in turns to try to cool him. None of us slept, we just sat there watching him, hoping the fever would leave him, longing for the doctor to come. When he did come at long last, the lady came with him, dressed now rather grandly, and all in black. The doctor examined him, and said that Karli should be kept warm at all costs, and that the more water we could get him to drink the better. The doctor gave us some medicine for Karli and told us that on no account was he to go out in the cold, or travel, until he was completely well again.
It was only now, once he had gone, that the lady in black introduced herself. “Everyone just calls me Countess,” she said, shaking each of us rather formally by the hand. “We do not bother much with names here – it is safer that way. I think we have about seventy refugees now in the house – all sorts, mostly families from the east resting up for a few days. Everyone is passing through. It seems as if the whole world is in flight. We have soldiers on their way home on leave, or returning to their regiments at the front, some deserters no doubt, and we have a few vagrants too. I ask no questions. We have a hot meal only once a day, at midday, and then soup and bread in the evening. It is not much, but it is the best we can manage, I’m afraid. As you know, food is becoming very scarce everywhere now. You may stay as long as you like, certainly until the young boy is better, but I would not advise you to stay on much longer after that. The Russians are not so far away now, maybe a few weeks away, no more. The Americans are closer, by all accounts, but who knows who will get here first?”
Mutti thanked her from the bottom of her heart for all her kindness towards us.
The city of Dresden in Germany suffered one of the most severe bombing campaigns of the Second World War. Fifteen square kilometres of the city centre were utterly destroyed.
In four raids, between 13 and 15 February 1945, almost 1,300 heavy bombers from the RAF and the US Army Air Forces dropped about 3,900 tonnes of high-explosive bombs and, on one night, 650,000 incendiary devices. An RAF crew reported smoke rising to a height of 4,572 metres.
The incessant bombing created a self-sustaining and devastating fire-storm that swept through the streets. Road surfaces melted, and people found that their feet burnt as they tried to escape. Few in the city centre survived.
One who did, Rudolph Eichner, wrote: “There were no warning sirens… The cellars of the hospital quickly became hopelessly overcrowded with people who could no longer find shelter in their own burning buildings. Apart from the fire risk, it was becoming increasingly impossible to breathe, because the air was being pulled out by the increasing strength of the blaze. We could not stand up, we were on all fours, crawling. The wind was full of sparks and carrying bits of blazing furniture, debris and burning bits of bodies.”
Nobody knows exactly how many people died in Dresden during the bombing campaign, as it was crammed with up to half a million refugees. The figure lies between 25,000 and 100,000.
At the beginning of the Second World War, the bombing of military targets was expected, but the first bombing of London caused outrage, because it was accidental. Bombing London had been specifically prohibited by Hitler, not through humanitarian concern, but because Hitler believed that Britain might still agree peace terms. On 24 August 1940, Luftwaffe bombers, aiming for military targets near London, drifted off course. They dropped bombs on the centre of London. Several homes were destroyed and nine civilians killed. In retaliation, prime minister Winston Churchill ordered Berlin to be bombed the next evening, stunning the Germans by the attack on their capital. Berliners had been repeatedly assured by Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Göring, that this would never happen.
The notorious and shameful bombing of Dresden took place near the end of the war. By then, Germany was in full retreat. In an internal RAF memo from 1945, the strategy behind the bombing of Dresden was discussed: “Dresden is the largest unbombed city the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
The destruction of Dresden continues to appall the British national conscience. Some historians suggest that the Allies “descended to the enemy’s level”, and that it was militarily unnecessary as Germany was a “spent force” by this time. Indeed, after the raids, Churchill tried to distance himself, describing the policy of bombing cities as “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction”. Others argue that Dresden was not simply a cultural centre, but was home to factories producing weapons and equipment. It had a rail base to send troops east to the war front with the Soviets.
Others felt that any action that helped to shorten the war was justified. Bomber Harris held such a view: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” He stated openly: “The destruction of industrial sites always was some sort of bonus for us. Our real targets always were the inner cities.” Such rationalization of killing and destruction is unfortunately something still familiar today in other wars around the world.
