Our elephant’s foot lived near the meat safe on a shelf in the garage in Baldoyle when I was a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was wrapped in sacking for 11½ months of the year but was taken down from its perch by my father the week before each Christmas.
Remnants of spider webs and wriggly creatures were dispersed from its depths by my mother, swatting at it with an old cloth. The cloth was usually a greying vest or sensible knickers that had gone beyond the bounds of my mother’s very considerable patching skills.
Then it stood, 16in high, leathery and covered with long brittle hairs, in the corner of our good front room. It was ready to receive our Christmas tree. My father sliced peat briquettes lengthwise and fitted them around the base of the tree as my older sisters helped hold the tree in the centre of the foot. Rolled up balls of newspapers stuffed any remaining gaps.
Once steady, the usual rows ensued as to how and where the decorations should hang. Their positions changed daily as sister vied with sister to arrange the coloured strands of tinsel more “artistically”.
The glass lantern fairy lights made its big “potato-like” toes glow. It was as though the fairies themselves had polished up the toes for their festive stay in our good front room. Years later, I realised the elephant’s foot was not gigantic. It was the sorry remnant of a little baby elephant. It had been brought to us by my uncle Fred , my dad’s younger brother. Fred lived in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaya, as it was known at the time.
I had no concept of where Malaya was, but I loved the sound of its name. Fred was as exotic as the elephant’s foot and he blew into our lives from the tropics every couple of years. He smoked cigars and drove a hired car that was twice the size of my father’s grey Volkswagen Beetle.
I never knew whether he shot the poor baby elephant himself or bought it as a present for Dad as a symbol of his colonial lifestyle.
The foot has lived with me in Sligo and has seen its share of Christmas trees in my hall. I can’t undo the savagery of its felling or make amends to its mother, who might have suffered the same dastardly fate. But I polish its toes and stroke the remaining spiky hairs and wonder what fate was bestowed on its three other little feet.
