An Elephant in the Garden. Michael Morpurgo
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An Elephant in the Garden
Michael Morpurgo
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
Contents
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