An Audience with an Elephant Read online

  ‘Once a day, nails,’ said her keeper, Robert Raven, a railwayman’s son from Norfolk. ‘I oil them, for they’d crack otherwise. Twice a week I grease around her eyes. I wash her, brush her down, wait on her hand and foot.’ It is a seven-days-a-week job, from 7.30 in the morning, when she has her bran and maize, with hay, so she can make little sandwiches, to 10.30 at night. He scratched his head, incredulous that it should have come to this, when his ambition once had merely been to join a circus. (‘You have these ideas, when you’re a little boy.’) An elephant’s servant, muttered Mr Raven.

  He has been in service for eight years, during which time he has managed to fit in a marriage. ‘The wife’s convinced she’s jealous of her. We went for a walk once, the three of us, and I must have said something for the wife started hitting me and I shouted, “Help.” The next thing we knew, the elephant was rushing towards us. I managed to stop her, but when you’ve seen an elephant running towards you it’s a sight you don’t forget in a hurry. I am very careful now.’ Things are even further complicated by his baby son, who is fascinated by the animal, and whenever he manages to get out of their caravan crawls towards her tent; the elephant is nervous of small things.

  The tent is a lean-to, with the flaps down to prevent the draughts to which an elephant is susceptible. Inside this she is chained, mainly on account of her curiosity. Water she associates with a black hosepipe, and with the number of black electric cables lying around the encampment a curious elephant wandering around would be a major hazard. ‘Plus the fact that she’s badly spoiled,’ said Robert Raven. ‘She was very ill once and went to stay with a vet, who let her do anything she wanted on his farm. She made a hole once in a barn wall just to see what was going on, and if she wanted to go into a field she’d just walk through a closed gate. He’d stand there smiling and smoking a cigar.’

  The illness was in 1977, when her skin began flaking away, a condition that baffled the vets and was cured only when details were sent to Bombay University. It was suggested that the vegetables and fruit in her diet be increased. ‘We were so worried, and then she recovered,’ said Gerry Cottle. ‘I suppose that made her special.’

  Cottle bought her in 1973, a tiny elephant from north-west India who turned up at Stansted with her mahout. He has good reason to remember it, for when he got there he was informed that VAT, which had been introduced a week earlier, applied to elephants. He lost £250,000 in the next two years because circus audiences appeared to agree with the councils that animals were a persecuted minority. When he went back into animals he had a vicar in to bless them and, to cock a snook at authority, added a turkey. The turkey, which does nothing except walk up and down, is called Lucky.

  Twice a night, for seven minutes at a time, Rani steps from tub to tub, or walks over people. (‘Being the only animal which can’t jump, an elephant has to be sure-footed. She could walk on an egg.’) She also plays cricket but has refused to play football. ‘And what else would she be doing?’ Robert Raven stroked one huge wrinkled side. ‘Humping timber or walking up and down in a zoo.’

  However often you have seen elephants, the bulk close up is bewildering. This, and the fact that the animal is never still, the body swaying from side to side, the whiskery trunk, in perpetual motion conveying food to the strange pink little mouth, prompting unease. I had brought a big bag of windfalls, which she ate one after the other, then did a quick professional frisk of my person. Apart from that she seemed to be engrossed in a private world.

  ‘Oddly enough, I used to be frightened of dogs.’ We had taken her for a walk. ‘I suppose it’s dangerous work, for more injuries are caused by an elephant than any other animal. Most of it’s accidental, caused through sheer weight.’ He stared at the great shape. ‘When we go for a walk like this she hovers round me. She might chase a bit of paper but she never goes far. Does she like me? I don’t know, she does as I tell her, but it’s hard to say. Still, we have a good time — we go everywhere. We went into the sea once, only she went in a bit far.’ In their time together he has managed to potty-train her, and a large black bin accompanies this curious pair on their social round. ‘She’ll go anywhere with me, and because of her I’ve been to places I wouldn’t have been to, met people I’d never have met.’

  He stopped, the elephant stopped and even the sinking sun seemed to stop. ‘He’s not a bad chap, that Harrison Ford,’ said Robert Raven.

  Wales

  It Came as a Big Surprise

  HERE IS AN Angler’s Prayer you still come across occasionally, painted on old mugs in fishing inns. It is a bit like a river itself, the couplet meandering towards a tired rhyme.

  Lord, grant that I may catch a fish so big that even I,

  When speaking of it afterwards, may have no need to lie.

  This is an account of a man, ‘an excellent angler, and now with God’, as Walton put it, who did just that. He caught a fish so big it would have needed two large men, their arms fully outstretched, to give cynics in saloon bars even a hint of its dimensions.

  But he did more than that. He went fishing for salmon one day and caught something so peculiar, so far removed from even the footnotes of angling in Britain, that a grown man who was present ran off across the fields. Nobody would have thought it at all odd that day if the fisherman had been found trying to look up his catch in the Book of Revelations.

  It needs a photograph. The fisherman is dead, his friends are beginning to die, and, had a photograph not been taken, few people would now believe what happened. A hundred years ago ballads and hearsay would have wrecked it on the wilder shores of myth; as it is, yellowing cuttings from the local paper, almost crumbling into carbon, are slowly unfolded from wallets, a print is unearthed reverently from under a pile of household receipts.

  It was on 28 July 1933 that Alec Allen caught his fish, but even that has been elbowed into myth. His obituary (far from the national press) says that it was on 9 July. The Guinness Book of Records says that it was 25 July. But the one contemporary cutting had no doubts. It was 28 July. Appropriately, it was a Friday.

  The photograph is extraordinary. Allen, a short man in a Fairisle pullover and baggy trousers, leans against a wall beside a trestle. It is a typical 1930s snapshot slouch. His hands are in his pockets, there is a cigarette in his mouth. But of course you notice all this a long time afterwards, because of the thing dangling from the trestle.

  At first it looks like the biggest herring in the history of the sea. It towers over the man by a good 4 feet, a fish certainly, but the head ends in a dark snout, and the body appears to be armoured. The surroundings, a farm gate, the field beyond, underline the oddness, for in a farmyard a man is posing beside a thing the size of a basking shark. Alec Allen had caught himself a Royal Sturgeon in the River Towy, at Nantgaredig, near Carmarthen. It was 9 feet 2 inches long, had a girth of 59 inches and weighed 388 pounds.

  Allen was a commercial traveller from Penarth in Glamorganshire, a well known sportsman and hockey referee who in later life was to referee Olympic matches. He was then in his early forties, one of that oddly innocent breed who figure in Saki and Wodehouse, but who latterly seem to have become as extinct as the Great Auk, the sporting bachelor. His great delight was fishing, but in him it was more than a delight. His great friend was Alderman David Price of Nantgaredig, who had known Allen all his life. All they had ever talked about, he recalled with wonder, was fishing.

  In 1933 Allen was traveller for a firm of fishing tackle manufacturers. His father, also a great fisherman, was a traveller for a wallpaper firm, and father and son somehow contrived it that they could travel together in the same car. Both their commercial beats were West Wales, but theirs was a West Wales wonderfully concentrated between the rivers Wye, Teify and Towy. When their friends talk about the Allens it is with amusement, for it was notorious that their business rounds were designed for fishing.

  Off-stage Hitler was ranting, Stalin drawing up lists of victims. Ramsay MacDonald droned his platitudes, and the
dole queues lengthened. But in West Wales the Allens went their way, in a car full of tackle and wallpaper, their itineraries perfectly arranged to end in fishing inns beside rivers. The thing has an idyllic quality. It may have been a bit tough on you if your wallpaper shop was nowhere near a river, but nobody seems to have complained. In time the son succeeded the father as wallpaper salesman, but the itineraries did not change.

  The two had rented a stretch of the Towy since 1928, which included some of the deepest pools in the river. But the summer of 1933 had been dry, the water level low, when, walking by one of the pools that July, Alec Allen noted enormous waves suddenly cross it. It puzzled him, but at the time he would have discounted any suspicion that they had been made by a living thing, for it was 15 miles to the sea, and tidal water ended 2 miles lower down.

  A few days later Allen returned to the pool. It was evening, he had a friend with him, Edwin Lewis of Crosshands, and there was a third man, his name lost to history, watching on the bank. Allen began fishing, and at first it was a very quiet evening. But then he felt a slight tug on his line. He pulled on it but this had no effect.

  Alderman Price was fond of telling what happened next, ‘Alec used to tell me that he thought he’d hooked a log. He couldn’t see what it was, except that it was something huge in the shadows. Then the log began to move upstream.’ A faint smile would come over Price’s face. ‘Now Alec knew that logs don’t move upstream.’

  Allen had still no idea of what was in the river. A more imaginative man might have become frightened at that stage, for his line was jerking out under a momentum he had never experienced. In the darkness of the pool he had hooked something which moved with the force of a shark. He played it for 20 minutes, letting the line move out when it went away, and, when it came back, retreating up the bank. But there was no channel of deep water leading away from the pool; if there had been, no salmon line made would have held his catch. Then he saw it.

  Suddenly the creature leapt out of the water. Maddened, it crashed into a shallow run, and there, under them threshing in the low water, Allen was confronted by a bulk that was just not possible. The sightseer ran shouting for his life. Lewis ran forward with the gaff, which he stuck it into the fish, but the fish moved and this straightened the thing. Then the great tail flicked up and caught Lewis, and threw him into the air on to the bank. Just one flick, but it nearly broke the man’s leg. There was a large rock on the bank. Allen dropped the rod (it had been a freak catch, the hook snagging in the fish’s head, a sturgeon having no mouth) and tugged at the rock. With it in his hands he waded out and dropped it on the head, lifting it again and pounding at it. The creature began to die, watched by two men who had no idea as to what it was.

  But in death it provided them with an even greater problem: how were they to get it out of the river? Allen ran to a nearby farm, and there occurred one of those rare moments that are pure comedy. Allen asked could he borrow a horse and cart, and the farmer, naturally, asked why. Allen said he had caught a fish. It ended with the farmer, farmer’s friends, dogs, horse, cart and all going back to the bank.

  ‘I can remember it now,’ said Alderman Price. ‘Alec came running to my house. I had never seen him so excited. All he would say was, “Well, I’ve caught something this time that you’ll never beat.” I went back with him. They’d pulled it up on to the trestle you see in the photographs, and the news had got round. People were coming in cars and in carts. They were ferrying children across the river.

  ‘It had these big scales, I remember that. And it was very slimy. It was a sort of black and white in colour. No, I wasn’t frightened.’ He was in the habit of pausing at that point. ‘It was dead.’

  As the anglers gathered it was determined that the thing out of the river was a sturgeon. Vague memories stirred. Was it not the law that a landed sturgeon was the King’s prerogative? A telegram was sent to Buckingham Palace inquiring after the King the next day, and a stiff little reply came the same day that the King was not in residence. Such trivia did not deter a man who had hooked the biggest river fish in recorded angling history. Allen sold the sturgeon to a fishmonger from Swansea for two pounds ten shillings, which worked out at something like a penny ha’penny a pound, this at a time when Scotch salmon at Billingsgate was fetching two and six a pound. More than 40 years later Allen’s friends, who had helped him load the thing on to the train, were still bitter about the deal. There had been so much caviar in the sturgeon some of this had fallen on to the farmyard where it was eaten by the farmer’s pigs. But selling it did get rid of one problem. There were no refrigerators in the valley, and 388 pounds of sturgeon was a lot of fish.

  Allen fished on until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. In photographs the lean figure became stocky. Spectacles were added. Catches got held up regularly to the camera, something he could never have done that wild July night when he was content just to pose beside his fish. So had he considered the rest of his fishing life a sort of epilogue?

  Brian Rudge, who ran the fishing tackle firm on whose behalf Allen meandered through West Wales, knew him well. ‘I think he saw the incident as more of a joke than anything, he wasn’t a man who was easily impressed. I think, you know, that as far as he was concerned it was a bit of a nuisance. He was out salmon fishing. The sturgeon had got in his way.’ Alderman Price heard Allen talk about it a few times. ‘It was usually when he heard anglers going on about their catches. He wasn’t a boasting man but sometimes he couldn’t resist saying, “Well, I suppose this would be the biggest fish I ever caught.” And then of course they’d say, “Good God.”’

  Yet outside the valley and angling circles it was a small fame. There was no mention of it in the national press that July, and it was a small item even in the Carmarthen Journal. The august organ rose to its greatest heights of sensationalism. ‘Two anglers had an exciting time while fishing in the River Towy,’ the report began.

  In March 1972 Allen died suddenly at the home in Penarth he had shared with a spinster sister, and there was a passage in his will which surprised his friends almost as much as the catching of the sturgeon. Though he had talked little about the incident, he left instructions that his body be cremated and the ashes put into the river at the spot out of which he had pulled Leviathan.

  ‘I called on David Price one day,’ said Ronald Jones, the former Chief Constable of Dyfed, and another of Allen’s friends, ‘and said what a pity it was about Alec. “Aye,” said Dai, “I’ve got him there on the mantelpiece.” It was the casket, you see. We were all surprised. Nobody had ever heard of anyone wanting that done before.’

  ‘I suppose it was a romantic touch,’ said Brian Rudge, ‘but he wasn’t the sort of man who’d like people to gather round a grave.’

  It was a grey wet day when they put the ashes into the water. A dozen of his old friends, contacted by phone or letter, gathered on the bank, but no clergyman or minister had agreed to take part, their religion not recognising a river as consecrated ground. And, despite the hymns in the rain, it would seem to have had pagan overtones. Among the first things a people names are rivers. River gods are the oldest of all, so a man who had pulled out of a river its largest living thing would seem to be assuaging prehistory, having himself put back in its place.

  ‘We said the Lord’s Prayer,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘as we committed the ashes to the waters he’d fished for 50 years. But then as the wind carried them I saw a trout leap into the air just where they were drifting.

  ‘And I said to Dai, “Look, Alec’s there.’”

  The Lost Children

  OU WILL SEARCH in vain in any road atlas. I could not understand this when I started looking. I thought there had to be some small country town: the name breathed all the certainties of such a place. Sempringham. I could see the cobbled market square, the single Indian restaurant, the gleaming brass plaques on Georgian houses which bulged with solicitors. I knew it was in Lincolnshire but there was no sign of it on the map in that geometry of straight
lanes and fens. What made it even more mysterious, and will puzzle those of you who read medieval history, is that this is such a familiar name; it is there in all the indices. Sempringham, where the lost children were. . .

  It is 11 November 1283, and a king is writing to the Prior and Prioress of Sempringham. Edward I, the conqueror of Wales, has a request to make, ‘having the Lord before our eyes, pitying also her sex and age, that the innocent may not seem to atone for the iniquity and ill-doing of the wicked and contemplating, especially, the life of your Order’. But you can forget the phrases, typical of that legalistic and self righteous man; the King was making the Prior and Prioress an offer they could not refuse. He wanted a child to disappear.

  With a dangled pension of £20 a year there came an orphaned baby, the only child of the first and last Prince of Wales, Llywelyn, but to the King a biological time-bomb. She must never be allowed to marry or have children, and so Edward was ordering them to make her into a nun. When his troopers brought her father’s few treasures out of his shattered principality, the coronet called the Crown of Arthur and the fragment of the True Cross, they brought her as well to Edward, in her cradle out of Snowdonia. She would never return.

  Her name was Gwenllian, but the King’s clerks got that wrong, spelling it Wencilian. She had 54 years of life left among strangers who would never learn to spell it, for it is Wencialian to the end in the Priory records. More poignantly she may never have learnt to spell it herself, or even to pronounce it, for in her one letter, an appeal for money (the letters of the Middle Ages were either about money or the law), it is Wentliane.

  Her father Llywelyn was dead, killed in battle in December 1282, his severed head whitening on a pole above the Tower of London where it became a landmark (men could still see it fifteen years later from the pubs at the Tower’s foot). With him had collapsed a Welsh nation state in its shaky beginnings, and a dynasty dating back to the Roman Empire which made the King’s own family tree a thing of whimsy. But it is the private detail of the fall of the House of Gwynedd that is so overwhelrning. Gwenllian’s mother was dead, giving birth to her the previous June; her uncle’s family had been hunted down. She was just seventeen months old when she was brought to the place of lost children.