Whistling for the Elephants

  Whistling for the Elephants

  SANDI TOKSVIG

  To Julie

  I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable assistance in writing this book: my editor, Ursula MacKenzie, and all the staff at Transworld; my agent, Pat Kavanagh; The Born Free Foundation for all the work they do and for introducing me to Cynthia Moss, elephant expert; the staff at the British Library Reading Rooms, Bloomsbury; the Gladys Society; and for love and support, my family and friends, my children and Alice.

  Whistling for the Elephants

  Chapter One

  There are two basic types of creature in Nature’s kingdom. The first, like frogs and turtles, produce many offspring and simply hope that some will survive. The second, like elephants and people, produce one, or two at long intervals, and make great efforts to rear them. My mother belonged in a class of her own. She produced two at short intervals and made no effort to rear them whatsoever. Some people agonize over these things but I thank God. A hint more attention from my own family and things might never have turned out the way they did.

  We need to go back a bit. 1968. I was ten. Almost certainly I was wearing a short tartan kilt (Clan McLadybird), a white shirt, a very neatly tied tie, a blue blazer and a peaked sailor’s cap which hid my long curly ginger hair. No-one made me dress like that. It was a kind of school uniform I had invented for myself In the photos the combination tie and skirt make me look a strange boy! girl hybrid. My face, born with a frown, was obscured by the peak of my hat. I had spent most of my early childhood shielded from a full view of anything. The cap and I were inseparable. I was, even in my tender years, trying to develop a rakish look. I spent many hours trying to persuade people to call me Cap’n instead of Dorothy. It didn’t work. Not a popular child. Not even with my parents.

  Mother and I were, as ever, travelling. It was what we did. Always first-class and always a long way. This is not a story about coming up the hard way. At least not financially. It should have been idyllic. It was, I suppose, an education of a sort. I could read a wine list and order any meal combination in perfect French by the time I was seven. My first sentence was reputed to have been ‘What the hell’s happened to room service?’, but that may be family myth. I know that my brother Charles and I thought laundry came out cleaned and ironed if you left it in a bag overnight. Our life only came home to me as strange when Father rented a car the summer I was nine, in Berlin. The car-hire woman wanted our permanent home address and none of us could think of one.

  My grandmother thought we were growing up ‘as gypsies’, which is why Charles finally went to boarding school. The crunch had come during an annual visit to Granny.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ said Charles, then probably six to my four.

  ‘Roast beef,’ said Granny.

  ‘What else is on the menu?’ asked my brother, sealing his fate.

  We didn’t know about everyday life. We didn’t know it was possible to have just roast beef Charles was dispatched to Father’s old school on the Sussex coast. He went off to learn a smattering of Hardy, an ability to distinguish places of interest on an Ordnance Survey map of the Rhine Valley and to decline absolutely anything in Latin — except occasional buggery by the Latin master on exeat weekends when Granny wouldn’t have him. Charles received the dubious honour of a public-school education because he had been clever enough to be born with a penis. I, rather more stupidly, had come without and so carried on travelling with Mother.

  Both my father and brother were called Charles. Always Charles. Never Charlie. It gives you some idea about our family that we didn’t indulge in pet names. It wasn’t deliberate. I just don’t think anyone thought of it. Nor did we find it in the least bit confusing to have two males of the same name. This was probably due to the fact that on the whole we were not given to addressing each other directly. Anyway, my brother went off to learn ‘to interact with the world’. I don’t think he wanted to go. He cried for days before he went but he had no choice. In fact I think his crying rather confirmed the need for him to go. Learning to interact, not crying, was what men did. It was what Father did. I knew that because, wherever we were, he went off on the train every day to do it.

  Mother didn’t interact with anyone. It was not required. She was, even with the distance of time, a curious creature. Rosamund Amelia Dorland Kane. Everything about her was perfect. Her nails, her hair, her voice, all strictly first-class. I remember her as having golden hair but I can’t find a single photograph to make that true. Perhaps it is because I can only see her as a kind of aura. Not so much the woman but the fine mist of perfumes and powders which always hung about her. A woman whose entire appearance was constructed to suggest that she had never had a secretion in her life. There was absolutely nothing moist about Mother.

  I can see her on that trip in ‘68. Sitting up in bed wearing a lace-trimmed morning jacket surrounded by her most devoted companion, Louis Vuitton. It is hard to imagine quite how much travel has changed in just these three decades or so. It makes me sound like an old fogey but it was so different then. There were no ziplock bags, absolutely everything was crushable and we always carried wooden hangers with our name embossed in gold on them. Mother and I were bound from Southampton to New York aboard the SS Hallensfjord. A five-day odyssey of cocktail wear and endless food. Mother, always indescribably elegant, and I, almost certainly, an indescribable disappointment.

  We were an odd combination, Mother and I. Early on in life she had discovered the pointlessness of enterprise. Being a married woman of some means, she had escaped the burden of usefulness. You have to understand —women’s lib was still on the cusp then. No one talked about it or thought inactivity strange. Mother followed Father and his work round the world utterly disengaged from it and him. I don’t know if she was bright. It never came up. She might have filled her time with religion, with some wider sense of responsibility, but being English she had escaped that too. Not for her the drive of the Protestant work ethic or the guilt of the Catholic. The Church of England was a comfortable backstay which functioned only on a social level, and then on predictable but limited days of the calendar. Mother travelled on. Going everywhere and seeing nothing. A shimmering varnish on life’s great table. It didn’t matter. There was plenty of surface life for her to lead.

  I was, for as long as I could remember, seeking something else, but I didn’t know what. I couldn’t see a fresh ocean of anything but I wanted to dive headlong into it. Even at ten I longed for desperate romance, nerve— jangling drama, or even just a minor vision from God. I thought I was precisely the right sort of person to appreciate the significance of a burning bush or two and could never understand why I was not ‘chosen’. Together Mother and I formed an ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle. It was not a picture which screamed ‘Mother and Daughter’.

  On the boat, apart from supper, we didn’t spend a lot of time together. In general I was expected to entertain myself. But we had two moments of scheduled daily closeness, one in the morning and one in the evening. After breakfast on my own, where I quite often ordered steak just because I could, I would go to my cabin for a while and look at my ‘present’. The ‘present’ was the only unsolicited thing I had ever received. (I’m sure I’d had gifts from my parents at Christmas and birthdays and so on. They weren’t unkind, just rather given to good form.) We had spent a short time in Singapore, I can’t remember why, and I had a nice lady who looked after me called Anna. When we left she cried and she gave me my present wrapped in a silk scarf. I didn’t open it for ages because I liked the idea of it so much. When I finally did it was a framed piece of illuminated manuscript. A strange thing covered in drawings and animals. Father explained that it was a tenth-cen
tury classification of the animal world according to the Chinese. It wasn’t an easy order to come to terms with, not when I was young and not really even now:

  1. Those Belonging to the Emperor

  2. Embalmed

  3. Tame

  4. Suckling Pigs

  5. Sirens

  6. Fabulous

  7. Stray Dogs

  8. Included in the Present Classification

  9. Frenzied

  10. Innumerable

  11. Drawn with a Very Fine Camelhair Brush

  12. Et Cetera

  13. Having Just Broken the Water Pitcher, and

  14. That From a Long Way off Look Like Flies.

  I studied the list every morning, partly to see if I could work out where I came and partly at the wonder of my unasked-for gift.

  Then — ‘Not too early!’ — about eleven o’clock, I would knock on the connecting door between our cabins. When Mother was ready, I would sit beside her bed on a chair reading from the Hallensfjord News, which was slipped, freshly printed, under the door just after midnight each evening.

  ‘There’s clay-pigeon shooting on the top deck at twelve.’

  ‘Oh no, dear, I couldn’t stand the noise, the what do you call it, guns et cetera.’ Mother lay back against the pillows, exhausted by the very thought of finishing a sentence. She often started quite well and then drifted away as if everyone knew what she was going to say anyway. She eyed me carefully. I knew even then that I wasn’t right. Would never be right. I was like some very expensive appliance which she had bought in error. On paper I had all the functions of the required daughter, but she couldn’t seem to make me connect to her system. I caught sight of myself in a mirror. A slightly plump girl in a tie. Too much nearly a boy. A miniature monsieur— dame that no frock could ever feminize, with impossible red hair for which there was no genetic explanation. Mother never directly criticized me. That would have been too close to an actual conversation. She looked at me closely.

  ‘Darling, aren’t you … hot … in that tie and jacket, you know…?’ She waved a hand at my ensemble.

  ‘No.’

  Mother patted my cheek and sent me off while she powdered and dressed, which left me free till supper.

  After my maternal moment, I spent my day exploring the boat. It was all old wood and reeked of polish and a tidy absence of children. I spent most of my time pretending I was a spy, but I don’t think I was a very good one. In four days all I had worked out was that the lady in the Royal Suite was very kind to servants. One of the waiters visited her constantly and each time he came out he looked very happy. I took my time each morning making ‘observations’ as I worked my way from the Saloon deck down to Commodore. Through the library, past the ballroom and down near the shop, there was a closed, frosted-glass door. A green line on the carpet underlined the imprinted words Second Class. I longed to go through it. I knew that beyond there was a world of mystery, where people ate chips with their dinner, fathers drank beer and children slept in the same room as their parents. This side of the door, ours, was an unreal world.

  We had breakfasts of freshly peeled tropical fruit, bouillon on the Sports deck at eleven, grilled lunches on the afterdeck, tea in the casino, supper in the Polar Room and late snacks in the cabin. Not that Mother ate. She just ordered brilliantly. I don’t remember there being any menus. I know the waiters might occasionally suggest things but mostly people ordered as the fancy took them. Gold-trimmed plates would emerge in triumph from the kitchen bearing a constant stream of seared steaks wrenched from the whole side of a cow, wild birds festooned with wilder berries, lobsters dancing with lemon sole, crabs clutching other crustaceans and flaming batches of Baked Alaska. Caviare nestled in the curved back of an ice swan as Mother’s laugh tinkled over melting martinis.

  Our other moment of closeness came every night after supper. We played bridge in the library with some cheerful octogenarians in evening wear. It was the only time I think Mother found me useful. She could never be bothered to remember what cards had been played. I usually bid rather wildly so that Mother was assured of being dummy. She liked the shuffling and the dealing of the cards because she thought it showed off her long fingers. After that she much preferred to lay her hand down and just pretend to watch while she sipped Brandy Alexanders.

  ‘Oh, Dorothy has such a good brain, clever, numbers, et cetera. I’ll leave it to … her,’ she would announce, smiling as if genuinely pleased.

  Nothing stopped the elegant routine of those lazy days. At least it shouldn’t have. I don’t know what caused more stress to Mother that trip — the talent contest, my hair or the hurricane.

  I signed up for the talent contest in secret. Before the New York posting we had been about five months in Paris. Usually Father’s postings involved some nod towards my continuing education, but I don’t remember even an attempt at school there. The only concession had been a Mine Henri who had provided pianoforte lessons on a Thursday afternoon while Mother rested. (Thursday lunchtime was the weekly gathering of the Parisian International Ladies Lifeboat Association and she was always exhausted.) Mine Henri and I had worked rather hard at what I now realize was a simplified and possibly repetitive version of Beethoven’s The Bells. I thought it sounded wonderful. My new notion was that I was actually a child prodigy whose talents had inexplicably been overlooked. I was ready to sweep everyone away with my bit of Beethoven and the boat talent contest was, I knew, the place to do it. Mother had never heard my musical expertise and I thought to surprise her. I suppose in a way I did. We had gone to the lounge to watch the show and Mother had joined the captain and a group of socialites for coffee. She gave the tiniest murmur when my name was called and for a brief moment I swelled with pride at her unaccustomed full attention as I marched to the piano. I sat down and prepared myself My hands went to the keyboard and I began. My left hand carefully pounded up and down on the same two notes for the one-minute duration of the piece while the right plodded out something close to the tune. When I had finished there was complete silence. So, rather carried away, I played it all again. There was an even deeper silence when I had finished but I feigned exhaustion and left my instrument. Mother never opened her eyes once as I walked back across the dance floor to some belated but kind applause.

  Had I been older I would have realized that I never had a chance. The prize was easily swept away by a man who did impersonations of World War Two bombers using only his tongue, a paper cup and a great deal of microphone technique. As the only entrant under forty, I got a consolation voucher to spend on board in the establishment of my choice. Mother never said a word but I knew I had let her down. Perhaps she too had expected that I was about to reveal a light under my rather ample bushel. I don’t know which of us was the more disappointed. I should have been brilliant and I wasn’t. I was just a kid. A regular kid. Mother went straight to bed. The next morning she didn’t even want the newspaper read out. I wandered down to the Commodore deck a failure.

  The Commodore deck was home to, amongst other amenities, the barber’s shop. It had the most lovely smell outside it. I suppose it must have been bay rum or something. Men came and went in the big red leather chairs. It looked so comforting. Great hot towels gently wrapping their faces. A bit of jovial chat with the man in the white coat, who snipped away with hardly any hair falling on the floor at all. I had been to the ladies’ hairdresser with Mother and that was quite different. All rather shrill. Lots of bright pink bottles of things, hundreds of little stabby hairpins and everything happening at too high an octave. The barber’s looked and smelled more like Christmas. I stood there for about an hour looking in the window and watching customers come and go. After a while the place emptied as everyone went to change for something. There was always something to change for. The barber came out into the corridor in his white coat and shook a small towel in the air. He was about to go back in when I surprised myself.

  ‘I’ve got a voucher,’ I said. He looked at me as I produced the
talent-contest voucher from my blazer pocket. ‘Can I have a haircut?’

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Dorothy.’

  ‘Well, Dorothy, I don’t really do little girls. You need to go with your mother to see Mrs Harton down the hall at the ladies’ salon.’

  ‘But I want you to do it.’

  ‘What sort of haircut?’

  I wanted to say ‘like a spy’ but I knew that involved having a moustache as well so I said, ‘A boy’s one.’

  He shrugged. ‘Okay, it’s your money.’ And he did it. It seems odd now. Maybe he was sick of rich people and didn’t care any more. A short haircut. A really short haircut. I didn’t have the hot towel on account of not having a moustache, but otherwise it was wonderful. When he had finished I looked in the mirror and for the first time in my life I saw myself. An absurdly small, slightly freckled child with short red hair, now swept into a neat side parting. A young snake released from a confining skin.

  The hurricane occurred that night and I remember feeling that somehow it was my fault. Had I known about Shakespearean portents in the weather then I would have been sure that my Samson-like shearing had angered the elements. I don’t know why we didn’t avoid the storm but we didn’t. We steamed straight into the worst of it. The weather meant Mother didn’t emerge for supper so I hadn’t seen her between the haircut and going to bed. I awoke in my cabin to find a heavy blue-leather-and-mahogany chair walking slowly by itself across the room towards my bunk. Outside the porthole the sky had disappeared and been replaced entirely by sea. I wasn’t a child given to panic but this didn’t seem right. I crawled off my bed and had to clamber uphill to Mother’s room. In my hurry I quite forgot my cap. All the pillows from her bed had slipped and she was now lying quite comfortably on what had previously been the wall. She was doing her nails and didn’t look up as I came in.