An Elephant in the Garden: Part Two

by Michael Morpurgo
In the midst of WWII, Lizzie, Karli, and their mother are forced to flee their home to escape the bombings. But theirs is an extraordinary trek to safety because of their two traveling companions: Marlene, an orphaned elephant, and Peter, a Canadian navigator whose plane was shot down over enemy territory.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four
15 words 20 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. preoccupied
    deeply absorbed in thought
    We were so preoccupied, I think, by the ordinary things in life, that after a while I did not give much thought to Mutti’s mysterious idea.
  2. tram
    a vehicle that runs on rails and is often propelled by electricity
    People walked and talked in the streets, as usual. The trams rattled by, as usual.
  3. collage
    a paste-up of pieces to form an artistic image
    Mutti and Karli had made me a birthday card, and gave it to me at breakfast. I remember it was a kind of collage, full of cutout pictures of circus life, with clowns and acrobats and jugglers and horses, and elephants, of course, lots of elephants.
  4. persuade
    win approval or support for
    “It took a while to persuade the Herr Direktor, but in the end I managed it,” Mutti told me.
  5. resentment
    a feeling of deep and bitter anger and ill-will
    Any lingering resentment I might have still been harboring against Marlene vanished during that first night in the woodshed.
  6. cavalcade
    a procession of people traveling by foot, horse, or vehicles
    Some of our school friends who saw us now joined us in the park, dozens of them, until there was a whole cavalcade following along behind, all of them full of questions, and high with excitement.
  7. limelight
    a focus of public attention
    And I could see, in playtime, that Karli was also enjoying the limelight just as much as I was.
  8. lark
    play boisterously
    That evening we threw snowballs at one another, and larked about and laughed all the way home.
  9. infuriate
    make extremely angry
    He kept coming back again and again, and every time Marlene would run at him across the garden, trumpeting, tossing her ears, flapping them, but that only infuriated the dog even more.
  10. inferno
    a very intense and uncontrolled fire
    The flames from burning houses and factories were licking high into the sky, leaping from one building to the next, from one street to the next, from one fire to another, each fire, it seemed to me, seeking out another fire to be with, so it could become an inferno, so it could burn more furiously.
  11. trek
    any long and difficult trip
    So began our long trek through the snow, along a road that was quickly becoming ever more clogged with dozens, hundreds, then thousands of others like us, streaming out of Dresden, all of us desperate to leave the city behind us.
  12. buffet
    strike against forcefully
    Rather, it looked to me like one vast bonfire, where fire caught fire with fire, a fire whipped up by a mighty wind of its own making, that buffeted our faces, that was doing all it could to stop us from escaping, all it could to suck us back into the burning city.
  13. arduous
    difficult to accomplish
    The walking was at once more difficult here, the going more arduous, the snow deeper, but at least we weren’t dragging along with hundreds of others, being endlessly held up.
  14. slog
    a long period of difficult work
    We may have a bit of a hard slog ahead of us, children, but we shall manage.
  15. bleak
    offering little or no hope
    We stood there on that bleak hillside, quite unable to take our eyes off the huge fireball that was rising now over the city.
Created on Sat Jan 24 19:47:50 EST 2026 (updated Tue Mar 10 14:43:47 EDT 2026)

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