Doreen Tovey - Donkey Work

Which was why, eventually, we ended up with no tortoises at all. Three weeks after the arrival of Uncle Ernest, as we named him on account of the original Victoria also having had an Uncle Ernest, we went to Yorkshire for a couple of weeks. The cats went to Halstock. Annabel went to the farm where they gave her her first taste of oats and forecast more truly than they knew that she'd be coming back for more. A friend of ours agreed to feed the goldfish and the tortoises. We left them, as it was now September and cooler and we thought it safer like that in case anyone went in there, in the conservatory with the door shut. And the decline of our tortoise kingdom set in.

Our friend went down the next day to discover that Uncle Ernest, named more appropriately than we realised, had climbed in our absence on to Victoria and Albert's big box, tumbled through the chicken wire which was only loosely over the top, and was asleep with his head inside their sleeping quarters. Victoria and Albert, panic-stricken no doubt at his invasion, had clambered out of the box via the chicken wire which Ernest had pushed in and were now roaming exiled round the conservatory. Our friend, thinking Ernest would only oust them again if she put them back, decided to leave them as they were. Even then all would have been well had not she, the following weekend, had a cold, and a friend who was staying with her went down to feed the tortoises and there encountered, in all his naturalist's glory, Timothy, whom we'd asked to cut the grass.

Timothy it was – old Cleverpants who'd never kept a tortoise in his life – who decided along with our friend's friend that it was too hot for them with the conservatory door closed and left it open. Timothy who, when we arrived home to find the conservatory door ajar with a tomato enticingly in the opening but no tortoises, explained tearfully that he'd blocked the door with wood and stones and couldn't think how they'd gone. We could. Unless they are completely vertical, stones, as we knew from experience, can be climbed by tortoises as easily as butter. What was so unfortunate, too, was that it hadn't been too hot for them. Tortoises in their native islands enjoy a heat far greater than our conservatory could build up in September… But that, alas, was that.

We spent our first morning home on a tortoise hunt. Crawling round the garden searching in undergrowth and old stone walls while Timothy once more distinguished himself by telling me about the crocodiles. I was routing under the dahlias at the time, telling him that Charles had a theory that tortoises always headed south. Tarzan had gone south to his new home; Ernest was moving south when he was first picked up; hence I was looking first in this dahlia bed, south of the conservatory door, for the truants.

Timothy, as one naturalist to another, was most impressed. If I was in a jungle and came across a crocodile, he said by way of return (I appreciated the touch very much seeing as I was just then lying on my stomach with my hands in deep undergrowth in what is well-known adder country)... even if it was dead, did I know which way it would be facing? I didn't, I informed him, trying not to listen. Towards water, said Timothy triumphantly. Even if it was a skeleton – even if it was a hundred miles away when I found it – it would be pointing towards the water.

After that I continued the hunt on my feet and with gloves on, but we didn't find them. Victoria and Albert we were afraid might not survive. We were informed by a small girl, who could have told Timothy a thing or two about tortoises if she'd met him in time, that baby tortoises shouldn't be allowed to hibernate through the winter. Their insides weren't big enough, she explained, and we should keep them warm in their box and put down bread and milk for them when they felt hungry.

We'd better hurry up and find them, she advised us – and we only wished we could. Uncle Ernest, the cause of all the trouble, was big enough to look after himself and would probably emerge in the Spring to eat our lettuces as large as life. But Victoria and Albert – tucked, as we remembered them, side by side in their sleeping box like twin toy cars in a garage; emerging when the sun shone to eat their plums and take their baths; regarding us, when we picked them up, with inquisitively outstretched heads not the least like Tarzan and his spitting... Victoria on her first night with us, finding the door to the sleeping box by herself and going inside while Albert, with typical masculine blockheadedness, stuck his foreshell ostrich-fashion in a clump of grass and thought we couldn't see him... Tortoises do have character. We missed them very much.

NINE

The Sad Tale of Micawber

That wasn't the only setback we had that year. Back in the summer, with the tortoises newly with us, the mousing season in full swing and Annabel emerging by instalments from her baby coat, Charles had developed a passion for peanuts. Peanuts by the pound, since he never did anything by halves. The dustbin was filled with peanut tins, Charles was slapping his chest saying peanuts certainly had something. When I said they couldn't be good for him in such quantities and – by way of another approach – what on earth would the dustmen think when they tipped out all those tins, Charles, practically devastated by his own wit, said they'd think we were nuts.

He didn't laugh when his rash came up and the doctor said it was either the oil or all the salt in his system. For the next two months, he only had to get agitated or over-heated and it came up again within seconds, turning him a bright brick-red with bumps. It was during that period that we adopted a magpie, and in no time at all Charles' bumps were up like measles.

The magpie came to us from friends in town who'd found him sitting on their dustbin lid one morning. Tamed, they imagined, by someone who'd taken him from a nest in spring. Turned out to fend for himself when his owner got tired of him. Homeless but hopeful, with a strong predilection for humans despite the treatment he had received, Micawber didn't fancy fending for himself, and for a week, amply justifying the name they'd given him, he sat stolidly on their dustbin lid waiting for something to turn up.

Nothing did. Our friends fed him but wouldn't, as he obviously hoped they'd do, let him into their house. So he tried his luck with a neighbour, ate two rows of the neighbour's peas by way of introduction, flew frantically back to our friends when the neighbour chased him... He was now, they informed us in a phone call late that night, locked precautionally in their coal-shed. The owner of the peas was threatening to shoot him the moment he set eyes on him. Would we, for his own good, have him to live with us in the country?

Touched by his plight, we agreed. The cats were used to birds by now, we reasoned. Pheasants skimming the clearing in the wood with Solomon leaping salmon-like beneath them were a staple view from the cottage, but he never caught one. Sheba, going through the kitchen door, dropped to her stomach like a sharpshooter when she saw the blackbird in the yard, but it was only habit. The blackbird flipped his tail at her and went on eating. Sheba got automatically up as if from a curtsey and went on round the corner. Even the robin they besieged under the settee for an hour one day wasn't particularly worried. They sat there the whole of lunch-time – Sheba guarding one end like a Buckingham Palace sentry, Solomon peering intimidatingly under the other in the intervals of sharing the tomato soup, us thinking they'd mislaid a mouse until eventually they gave it up, wandered off, and, to our astonishment, a robin walked calmly from under the settee and started to look for crumbs. Nobody caught anybody any more. Micawber, we said when we heard of his troubles, would be quite all right with us.