Dindy and the Elephant

Elizabeth Laird's Dindy and the Elephant is a gripping adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who slips out of the garden gate and into the tea plantation, taking her small brother along.

What happens

Dindy is nine, and she's very good at keeping still and listening. So she's heard the grown-ups talking. The British may soon have to leave India, and her family could be sent "home" to an England she has never even seen.

India is the only home she knows. There's the bungalow on the hill, the tea bushes all around it and, above all, Shanti, the ayah who has looked after Dindy and Pog since they were born.

So one hot afternoon she decides to be bold. With Mother asleep and Daddy away, she drags Pog out of the gate and down through the tea towards the stream.

What she doesn't know is that a wild tusker is loose on the plantation.

It's a real adventure. There's a snake in the bushes, a trumpeting elephant and an astonishing rescue by the mahout's son (involving rather a lot of elephant dung, which Pog thinks is brilliant).

But the bigger story is Dindy starting to see things differently. Shanti's son Nikhil tells her she doesn't know anything about India. Slowly, and painfully, she realises he might be right.

It's worth knowing that Dindy's mother drinks too much gin and says ugly, racist things about Indian people, including the new Indian doctor. Pog repeats them without understanding. The book shows clearly that they're wrong, and the Indian characters answer back. Dindy also hears her father slap her mother, and she dreads being beaten with a slipper.

For a younger or sensitive reader, that's worth talking through together. For one who's curious about how other children lived, it's a moving way in.

What to read next

For another child torn between Britain and a faraway home, The Prince Who Walked With Lions follows a young Ethiopian prince who's taken to England and sent to Rugby School.