They lived temporarily, until Charles could make them a movable run in the garden, in a big cardboard box in the conservatory. Five feet by four, with a smaller cardboard box with a door in it in the corner for sleeping in, a couple of clumps of grass and a shallow dish of water. After we found that the cats were going into the box every time they passed the conservatory and drinking the water – he, said Solomon, lapping soulfully away amid the grass, was a Jungle Cat and he liked his water from a pool; she, said Sheba, didn't like silly old tortoises and drinking their water would annoy them – we put some chicken wire over the top.
Occasionally we put them out for exercise on the lawn, in a makeshift wooden frame that Charles had used the previous winter for growing anemones. It stopped them from straying but it was shallow and had no top, so that they were forever plodding round it one behind the other like circus elephants looking for a way out and Solomon, when he passed by and saw them in action, could never resist getting in and sitting bolt upright in the middle like a ring-master. Prodding them encouragingly when they stopped, or – if one of them did manage to find a foothold in a corner and by dint of terrific struggle get its chin over the edge – nipping excitedly out of the frame, lying flat on his stomach outside, and surprising them with a spidery black paw as their heads came over the top.
Eventually Albert did get out and we found him hiding under a nut tree. After that I balanced a tile on each of the corners of the run when they were exercising to prevent similar escapes and that – a strange wooden frame on our lawn, roof tiles set mysteriously on the corners and a Siamese cat in the middle prodding interestedly at something with his paw – was how people came to know we had tortoises. By opening the gate, country-fashion, and looking. That was also how we came to acquire another tortoise. Somebody rang up one day to say they'd found one wandering near the main road and could we – as they understood we kept tortoises – look after him while they enquired for his owner.
Charles, though he'd been found a mile away coming from quite a different direction, said it must be Tarzan returning home. It wasn't Tarzan because this one had a sort of frill to his shell and a broken hole in the edge whereby he'd obviously once been tethered. Moreover Tarzan, as I confirmed by ringing his current owners, was still in residence with them and had just eaten all the lettuce. But we kept him. Loose in the conservatory with a board across the doorway to stop him getting out. Albert and Victoria lived safe from his possibly predatory attentions in their cardboard box when they weren't out in their run. And there – once Charles got over his conviction that the new boy, left at large, would decapitate his grape-vine overnight by eating through the four-inch stem – they thrived. Paddling in their water-bowls, eating plums and lettuce – the big one, said Charles, had a remarkable bite; you could hear it like the action of a mechanical grabber, and after he'd bitten a piece of lettuce it was absolute seconds before he took the first slow chew and seconds after that before he took the next. He hoped, said Charles, that nobody would claim him. Tortoises were jolly interesting and next year, when he'd finished the goldfish pond, he was going to build a proper tortoise pit.
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.