Whistling for the Elephants

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-century 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.