The Plague of Elephants

The plague of elephants was bad news.

Old Pat had a furious temper and would go wild when he discovered the elephants that had started to appear in and around his house.

It was his family who would suffer, his wife and six children. He’d take his strop from the wall and give them all a thrashing at the first sight or sound of an elephant.

It was his wife who saw them first. She was hanging the washing out when she saw it. A big, grey, floppy-eared elephant, with a long, dexterous trunk. Quite what an elephant was doing here in England, let alone her garden, she didn’t know. But she knew how angry Pat would be if he saw it, so she hung the washing out around it, obscuring it from view with a combination of sheets, shirts and socks.

She hoped that would be the last of it, that the elephant would get tired of the view of slowly-drying laundry and move on to more exciting climes.

However, no sooner had she returned to the house than the twins, the youngest children Anna and Notanna, rushed into the kitchen and hurried her into the back garden. There, standing at the rear of the garden, next to the climbing frame, was a second elephant.

“Let’s play hide the elephant,” Mrs Pat said, and the three of them started covering it with sticks and branches.

They did the best they could, but after they finished it simply looked like an elephant with a few sticks and branches piled in front of it. It was hardly likely to fool someone as eagle-eyed as Old Pat, but what else could they do? It was too big to move and too stubborn to bribe.

The next morning, when Old Pat walked down to the forge where he worked, he passed the first elephant en route. Miraculously he didn’t seem to notice the elephant, he walked on by as if it wasn’t there.

When more elephants appeared the family did their best to hide these as well, pushing a flower pot in front of one, covering another with foliage, one they dressed as Queen Victoria and another they painted yellow, to look like a daffodil.

It seemed impossible that Old Pat wouldn’t notice the elephants, so slapdash and see-through were their attempts to hide them, but he failed to see through the puny disguises and never once noticed the barely-hidden giants.

Then, one day, Old Pat was changing the shoes of Chris Braithwaite’s horse. “Have you heard the news about the King’s army?” Braithwaite asked him. “I read of it in the paper.”

“I have no care for the King and his army,” Old Pat replied. “I’m King of this forge and my own army. I’m not one for reading news. Paper’s good for wiping your arse but not much else.”

“Well I thought it was good reading. The King is offering a guinea for every elephant he can recruit.”

“Elephants?” Old Pat said. “What does a king want with elephants?”

“He’s heard about foreign armies using them, they’re a hundred times stronger than horses, the mightiest of all beasts.”

“Well, good luck with that. He won’t find many elephants round here.”

“Still, a guinea a head, it’s worth taking a look isn’t it.”

After he’d finished in the forge, Old Pat called his family together. Nervously they gathered round, believing they knew what he was going to say. He surprised them.

“I want you to look for elephants,” he said.

“Look for them?” Jenny, the second eldest, asked nervously.

“Yes, see if there are any about anywhere. The King’s offering a guinea if you can find one. We could do a lot with a guinea.”

A guinea was a lot of money. But seventy guineas, which was roughly how many elephants they’d hidden, was a fortune. They could retire on seventy guineas. They could marry royalty. They could leave the forge!

Not wasting a second, the family started looking for the elephants they’d hidden. Jenny moved the flower pot she’d placed in front of one. Jack moved the foliage he’d placed in front of another. Mrs Pat brought in the laundry, but there was no elephant behind the sheets and socks.  They all searched high and low for Queen Victoria, inspected all the daffodils, but in spite of the inadequate nature of their camouflage, they couldn’t find a single elephant.

That evening, when Old Pat returned from the forge, he was already in a bad mood, having had to deal with an ill-tempered horse.

“Well,” he asked, “Where are all the elephants?”

“We couldn’t find any elephants,” his wife confessed. “You don’t get many elephants in these parts.”

“I told you to look for elephants,” he said. “We could do with that King’s guinea, sometimes I wonder if I can rely on to do anything.”

He reached for his strop, to remind his family of the importance of obedience.

But it never came to a thrashing. Because, there, hiding behind the strop, was an elephant.

“It looks like we’ve got our guinea after all,” Old Pat said.