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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