Thank you, Elephant’s Child!
My only grandchild Markus in the U.K. arrived when I was almost 80, reviving my fast-fading dreams of reading stories to a grandchild as I had to my children decades earlier. But while Markus loved playing with me, he resisted all my attempts to read to him stories from books.
One morning, I had a brainwave. After Markus had settled in his room with an array of dinosaurs on the floor, I walked in casually with a book in hand. “You won’t mind if I sit here and read, will you? I asked him.”
“No, Mutthassan [grandfather],” he said. “But, Markus, I might feel like reading aloud at times and you won’t like that.” “That’s all right, Mutthassan.”
“Thanks, Markus.” I went in and took my place on the two-seater settee by the window.
“In the High and Far-Off Times, the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn’t pick up things with it.”
From the corner of my eye, I watched Markus. He was speaking to a dino in his hand.
“But there was one Elephant — a new Elephant — an Elephant’s Child — who was full of ’satiable curiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions...”
I noticed Markus had put down the dino. He had a slight frown on his face.
As I continued, I could see Markus had risen from the floor and come to the settee. I could feel him nestling up to me. I continued reading, as though I were oblivious to his moves.
Markus soon leant against my shoulder, and the next I knew he had occupied my lap.
As I read on, I could feel him tensing up as the elephant’s child, out of its insatiable curiosity, goes in search of a crocodile in the river Limpopo to ask what he had for dinner and the croc grabs him by the nose and tries to pull him into the river. Likewise, the easing of the tension, too, as the elephant child’s friend the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake goes to his rescue and pulls the child back from the croc’s mouth. It was such a hard tug-of-war that the elephant child’s nose is stretched into a handsome trunk.
That trunk, as expected, hooked Markus well and truly. And for me that was the beginning of years of bedtime reading to him. Thank you, Elephant’s Child!
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