‘Me and our kid had a tortoise called Bernard,’ my friend TK said.

‘Bernard?’ I said.

‘After Bernard Cribbins. He’d done those records, hadn’t he?’ TK started singing. ‘Tried to shift it, Couldn’t even lift it, We was getting nowhere—’

‘Don’t give up the day job.’

‘It’s mainly evenings, actually.’

TK’s mobile rang. TK is a taxi-driver from Cannock in Staffordshire. He has a variety of ring tones on his mobile. He has different ones for different people so that when he’s driving his cab he can tell who’s calling without having to look at the display screen. One day when I was in his car with him, the phone rang with the Mission: Impossible theme. He said it was one of his regular clients, a woman from Shrewsbury. I asked why she had Mission: Impossible. He replied, ‘Because she’s this big fat lass and I always think it’ll
be impossible to get her in the car door.’ When TK’s wife calls the phone emits a Tarzan yell. This time it was Willie Nelson singing ‘Crazy’. ‘My mate Rich,’ TK said, ‘he’s a psychiatric nurse.’

When TK had finished on the phone – ‘Rich’s done some Mamelukes of the Imperial Guard for me. Lovely paint job. Ink washes and everything’ – he said, ‘We’d wanted a parrot, but our mum had a thing about birds’ feet. Turned her stomach to look at them, she said. So we ended up with a tortoise instead.’

‘Did you teach him to talk?’ I said.

‘You’re a bit of a cheeky monkey, you, aren’t you?’ TK said. ‘No, we didn’t teach Bernard to talk. But we had brilliant fun with him, anyhow.We used to play this game, right.’ TK started chuckling just at the thought of it. ‘We had this 54mm plastic Britain’s German artillery officer. Cap, Luger and binoculars. Came with the PAK 38 50mm anti-tank gun gift set.

‘What we’d do is, we’d stick the officer onto Bernard’s back with some plasticine and we’d pretend he was Rommel in his tank.’

I said that I could see that, though somewhat lacking in firepower, Bernard would have been a reasonable likeness for a panzer.

‘Oh, he was,’ TK said, ‘especially after our kid painted the swastikas on his shell.

‘Me and our kid,’ TK continued, ‘would stick Rommel on Bernard’s back and put him in the middle of the lawn, then we’d take cover in the undergrowth and try and knock him off with rounds of mortar fire. Obviously it wasn’t real mortar fire, it was just clods of soil, but they exploded when they hit the ground, like.

‘The tactic was,’ he continued, ‘to try to disable Rommel’s panzer by first giving Bernard a bit of a fright so he pulled his head and feet in. When that happened Jerry was a sitting duck to Captain Bulldog Brown and the men of 5 Commando.’

TK paused for a moment’s thought. Then he said, ‘Kids wouldn’t get away with it nowadays, throwing clods at a pet. They’d call the psychiatrists in, wouldn’t they?’

I said they would, but that even with recent advances in mental health care the psychiatrists would still probably struggle to help a traumatised tortoise.

‘I don’t think we realised it was cruel,’ TK said. ‘I mean, I really loved Bernard. I cried buckets when he had . . . The Accident.’

TK said that his family had been going away on their annual holiday. They usually left Bernard with TK’s cousin, but this summer the cousin was away too so there was no one he could go to. ‘Me and our kid wanted to take him to Blackpool with us,’ TK said, ‘take him on the beach. But Mum said they wouldn’t let him in the boarding house. “It’s strictly no pets,” she said. We told her we’d smuggle him in and out wrapped in our swimming towels, but she wasn’t having it. Truth is, she wasn’t much more fond of tortoises
than she was of parrots. She said seeing Bernard munching a lettuce leaf put her right off. Said it was like watching a little bald old man chewing a sandwich without his teeth in. Our granddad, in other words.’

So they had decided to leave Bernard in the garden where he would be able to help himself to the plants. ‘There wasn’t anything special,’ TK said, ‘because our dad didn’t care for flowers. He thought they looked untidy. He turned the soil in the beds over twice a year and he weeded them, but he never planted anything. He’d been a sergeant in the Welsh Guards and he couldn’t bear anything that wouldn’t stand up straight.

‘The only trouble was our mum was worried Bernard would escape from the garden,’ TK said. I pictured a tortoise with swastikas painted all over it trundling round the streets of the West Midlands, and I saw her point.

‘Well, our dad had an idea. He drilled a hole in Bernard’s shell, threaded some string through it and tied it to a post he’d banged into the middle of the lawn. He figured that way Bernard would be able to roam around and get to food and water, but he wouldn’t be able to tunnel out under the fence.’

It had seemed like an ideal solution. When they came back from Blackpool a fortnight later, however, a grisly sight greeted them. ‘Instead of just roaming about at random,’ TK said, ‘Bernard must have walked round the lawn in a strictly clockwise direction. Every circuit he made wrapped the string round the post in the centre of the grass. And over those couple of weeks he’d gone round and round and round, and the string had gradually got shorter and shorter and shorter.

‘When we found him he was tipped right up on his back end.’ TK imitated a spread-eagled tortoise, tilting his head to one side and flopping out his tongue. ‘Bernard was bound to that post like an Apache’s captive,’ he said, ‘and dead as a door nail.’

He let the horror of the scene sink in. ‘It was a dreadful pity,’ he said later. ‘Apart from anything else, me and our kid had bought these new Action Men from a shop off the Golden Mile and we’d been planning to use Bernard as an armoured personnel carrier.’

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