by Doreen Tovey
We didn't care. We liked the cats. We liked Annabel, too, though we still weren't certain to what extent she liked us. Until, that was, the day I went out to see her after lunch and there, thinking nobody was about to shout at, she lay drowsily in siesta, outside her house in the sun. She had her front legs stretched before her like a sheepdog, as we'd seen her lie so often. Only this time there was no jumping up as I approached, nor even as I sat down cautiously in the straw beside her. Annabel, blinking contentedly in the sun, was half asleep. Annabel to my amazement, as I sat there stroking her nose and ears and wondering how fast I could get up if she decided to bite me, snorted dreamily, lowered her head and rested it lovingly on my shoulder.
There was no mistake about it. Once she lifted her head to reach down and bite her leg where a fly was tickling her. Again she lifted it when Charles – wondering from the silence, he said, whether I'd fallen in her feeding bowl and she'd eaten me – came and looked over the fence and nearly dropped at what he saw. Each time she drooped her lashes, snorted softly, and laid her head back on my shoulder to be stroked.
I told people about Annabel's responsiveness that day till they must have been tired of hearing it. I gave her peppermints. I went up to talk to her practically every half-hour. I saw myself achieving things unheard-of in the rapport between donkey – properly treated – and man.
It didn't take her long to blot that small beginning of a copybook. The next day, wandering up the lane with her in an atmosphere of mutual affection, on our own because Charles was spraying the grape-vine, minus my duffle coat because it was hot – and what need had I of protection now, when there was such a wonderful understanding between us? – Annabel bit me in the pants. A good hard nip like being caught by a pair of nutcrackers. Guess who did that? she enquired when I touched ground again, wobbling her underlip amiably at me à la Maurice Chevalier.
EIGHT
The Trouble with Tortoises
Our donkey apparently liked us. Solomon was mine to the extent that he alone was allowed to snuggle down with his head on my pillow when he and Sheba came into our bedroom in the mornings and if Sheba tried it on he bit her. Sheba would jump into a bath at any time to be with Charles, and when he worked at home she sat companionably on his desk like a paperweight, enquiring didn't he think she was pretty and making footmarks on his documents. The ingrate of the family – the one we never mentioned – was Tarzan the tortoise.
Tarzan, two years previously, had run away. Run was the operative word. Scarcely had we got to know him – scarcely, even, had the cats discovered which end to prod to make him work – than Tarzan bolted up the path one day while we were having lunch and vanished again till the following Spring. Tarzan, after that, had had a blue and white circle painted on his shell to make him more identifiable. Tarzan, we decided, thinking that might be what made him wander, should forthwith have a mate. We even decided on her name. Tosca we intended to call her. But there was a shipping strike on at the time. Tarzan wouldn't wait. By the time the boat came in and the Tortoises for Sale notice went up outside the local pet-shop, Tarzan, camouflaging himself presumably under a dandelion leaf, had gone again.
It was May when he disappeared and it was August – too late, we thought, to provide him with his Tosca at that time of year – when we discovered him again. Up on the hillside behind the cottage, where we'd gone quite by chance to call for Solomon, who as usual was missing when we wanted to go out. And there, as we shouted 'Tolly-wolly-wolly' and searched the neighbourhood with field glasses, for by this time he'd been missing for an hour and a half and we'd searched every thinkable place till we were exhausted, we discovered him. Not Solomon – whom we found eventually sitting conspicuously on the coalhouse roof saying he'd been there all the time though we knew jolly well he hadn't – but Tarzan. Standing on a rocky outcrop looking at us with his head out and a defiant expression on his face, and with the weather-worn remnants of the blue and white paint on his back to prove that he was ours.
How he'd got there in the first place was amazing, for behind the cottage garden was a ten-foot wall backing on the hill, and behind the cottage itself was an almost vertical stone-lined bank that one would have thought would have stopped an elephant let alone a tortoise. He spat at us when we took him back. Didn't want to live in the valley, he said, and we could tell from his expression he was mad. And so, seeing that a painted shell is useless when a tortoise takes to midsummer undergrowth or goes climbing above one's head, we fitted him with a ping-pong ball on the end of a long length of string tied round his waist on the principle of a marker buoy, offered him some bread and milk at which he withdrew his head and said he supposed we were trying to poison him now, and let him go. Outside the kitchen door where he immediately started out across the yard, which Charles was still in the process of paving, and got his ping-pong ball caught between a couple of stones.
We unhitched him from there, struggling away like a beleaguered Channel swimmer and spitting at us with disgust, and put him in the garden. There, for a few days while he learned the ropes, he stayed. Once, seeing the string pulled taut and Tarzan on the end doing his Channel-swimming act, I found he'd got the ping-pong ball anchored in the chrysanthemums. Shortly afterwards, seeing Tarzan struggling valiantly behind the dahlias, I looked to see what was holding him this time and found Solomon sitting on his string. Watching Tarzan's struggles on the end of it with the interest of an entomologist, but pretending, when he spotted me, that he hadn't a clue he was holding him up.
The third time it was the ping-pong ball I noticed, wrapped by its string round a rose tree. Three times round as if Tarzan had gone berserk and started walking in circles. But there was nothing berserk about that tortoise. Three times round for leverage that had been. When I trailed the string to where it ended in the Michaelmas Daisies, there was an empty red string waist-band and Tarzan once more had gone.
We never saw him again. He didn't appear the following Spring and we had, in fact, given him up as perished when, in the ensuing summer, we were invited out to supper by some people who lived up the hill a quarter of a mile away. They supposed, they said during the course of the evening, that we hadn't lost a tortoise? When we said we had as a matter of fact, nearly a year ago, they said they'd found one three weeks previously climbing up the hill. Two days following they'd seen him and the second day, fearing he might get run over, they'd taken him in and put him in their herbaceous border. Where, they said, he seemed to be pottering happily, came out to see them on occasion, and they'd grown quite fond of him.
It was Tarzan all right. The fact that he'd been found mountaineering was proof of that. But if he was going to keep leaving home and making for the heights; if he was happier when he got there – and the fact that he'd been pottering voluntarily in their flower-bed for weeks when he wouldn't stay five minutes in ours seemed proof enough of that – then they had, we said beneficently, better keep him.
They did. I, never having had Tarzan around long enough to strike up a bosom friendship with him, was content to let them. And Charles, after thinking it over for a fortnight, announced that he missed Tarzan and was going to ask for him back. When I said he couldn't, we'd given him to the people, he said he was going to lure him back. People had no right to other people's tortoises, he said, and if he went up there with a lettuce and Tarzan looked through the hedge at it he had as much right to pick him up as anybody. Tortoises, he said, were jolly interesting. Which was why the following week, to prevent Charles carrying out his threat of tortoise-napping and no doubt ruining our reputations for ever, I brought home two small baby tortoises.
Victoria and Albert we called them because at the time there was a move, quite rightly, to ban the importation of tortoises on account of bad conditions of transport, the petshop man said this might be the last consignment he'd have and Charles – quite brilliantly I thought, when I told him – said in that case they'd be museum pieces. We didn't know whether they were really a pair. According to our reference bo
ok the undershell of a male tortoise is concave and that of a female convex, but when I turned these two upside down in the petshop they were both, with my usual luck, flat. They were the only small ones they had, however, so I bought them in hope. And Charles and Solomon thought they were wonderful.
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.
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.