Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 9 April 2015

Let’s hope and pray they are still hibernating

Thinkstock Photos 
issue 11 April 2015

It’s April. It’s spring. The daffodils and the cowslips are in flower. The birds are chirping merrily. But where are the tortoises? There were two of them, a big one called Alice and a small one called Gertrude. They have been in my care since last summer when a friend, their owner, moved from her London house, which had a garden, into a flat nearby, which hadn’t. So the tortoises came up here to my house in Northamptonshire to be looked after by me.

I put them in a patch of garden, about 20 yards by 15, surrounded by walls and yew hedges. Within these was erected a chicken-wire fence, buried into the ground so that they couldn’t escape; and there they stayed happily from June until the autumn when the weather got cold and they disappeared, presumably to hibernate.

Tortoises can live a very long time.

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