ANYTHING TO DECLARE?

A cautionary tale by

Vicki Woods concerning Arthur,

the Moroccan tortoise

I FIND it an endearing national character- istic of the British that in the small things the rule of law lies lightly upon us. We are not a pettifogging people. Don't you quote bye-laws at me. We won't keep off the grass, and we will open on Sundays. We bend the rules. You have to draw a line, of course, and clearly the late Robert Maxwell was a good few yards the wrong side of it, but in the main, we don't like rules and regulations and despise those who lay them down: Eurocrats, town clerks, traffic wardens, tax-collectors, park-keepers, prefects, men from the min- istry and VAT inspectors. There's a level of ordinary, commonplace, everyday sort of downright law-breaking that most Britons cheerfully put up with in them- selves and in other Britons: 'Bloody little tin Hitler. I was only doing 85. Should be out there catching car thieves, not saunter- ing up and down the M4 laying speed- traps!'

So, as we stood at Heathrow and watched the luggage coming up from the Casablanca flight and falling heavily on to the carousel, I was very interested to see what everybody else had done to avoid paying duty on their Berber carpets. Some smartyboots had clearly taken large empty suitcases out to Morocco to bring their carpets back in. We had failed to have this foresight. Some people had bought cheap camel-leather grips in the souk, and had stuffed their carpets inside. We had failed to do this, too. One traveller had stuck `fragile' labels on his camel bag, in order to help this pretence along, You could see the camel bags a mile off, loudly proclaiming `Inside — undeclared Moroccan carpet'. Our carpets had been wrapped up by the Berber traders in black glasscloth and tied up with string. They weren't in disguise at all.

We pushed two luggage trolleys through the green channel, both piled high. The luggage was all mixed up and belonged, variously, to me, to my husband, to my son and daughter and to my daughter's hon- orary godmother. She and I were doing the trolley-pushing. My husband was in a foul mood, and not just because of the carpets.

Two customs officers looked at each other as we swung round the corner and moved to stand in front of us: a young blonde girl and a rather formidable-looking woman around my age. 'Have you anything to declare?' they asked. 'Spirits? Tobacco?' `No, no,' said I, with confident voice and a brash smile. 'Where have you come from?' they asked. 'Oh, ah, from Marrakesh. From Morocco. Via Casablanca.' More brash smiles, from me and the daughter's hon- orary godmother. `Mmm, on holiday were you? How long for?"0h, ah, two weeks, yes? Two weeks.' Did you buy anything while you were out there?' Did we buy any- thing? I find the lie direct about the hard- est thing I ever do in English, but one ploughs on. We both began to speak together, turning from one customs officer to the other: 'Well, a few bits and pieces, didn't we? We bought, erm . . . souvenirs. Wooden ah, boxes. A few souvenirs. And bits and pieces, yes."Mmm, would you mind if we had a look through your lug- gage? Can you bring it over here to this table, please?' We pushed the trolleys over, but the customs officers barely looked at them and looked at us instead. 'Did you bring a tortoise with you?'

Well, it was like being hit over the head with a shoe. I was completely thrown. It was flummoxing. Did we bring a tortoise with us? Why us, for heaven's sake? Do we look like the sort of people who'd bring a tortoise with them? Why a tortoise particu- larly? What's going on? Do they ask every- body who lands from Casablanca if they brought a tortoise with them?

The tortoise, a sleepy little thing smaller than the palm of my hand, was lying in my wicker basket, lightly covered by a pink fringed scarf. Its name, apparently, was Arthur. My daughter had bought it in the souk in Marrakesh that morning for 100 dirhams: it was the only one in the ludi- crously overcrowded cardboard box which still had all its claws on its tiny feet. It was going to have a long and happy life. In England. She refused to change its name to Abdul or Hassan or something more evocatively Moroccan than Arthur. She had bought lettuce to feed it with. She had carried both tortoise and lettuce in a stout box which she had safely stowed under- neath the seat in front of her on the aero- plane and we had transferred the animal into my wicker basket in the ladies' lavato- ry just the other side of customs.

My daughter's colour began to rise. Twelve-year-olds, once they start blushing, blush hard. The young woman customs officer, not long out of girlhood herself, cleverly fixed the blusher with a knowing eye, and lowered her voice to a caressingly gentle level. 'Have you brought a tortoise with you?' she said. Silence. 'We know you had a tortoise. Where is it?' she asked. Silence. 'Little girl, have you got the tor- toise?' she said, and my daughter, now brilliantly encrimsoned, said 'No!' At which point, I realised I couldn't have this. 'I can't have this,' I said. 'No, no, this must stop; talk to me, not to her, she's not actu- ally lying or anything; she's quite right; entirely accurate; she hasn't got the tor- toise; I've got the tortoise, it's here. Look. There you are. One tortoise.'

Arthur crawled slowly across the table towards the customs officers, looking very small. The customs officers said, 'Oh, how cruel!' and I blustered furiously. 'Cruel? Nonsense, not at all, plenty of air and light, only in the basket five minutes, bet- ter placed now than it was in Morocco! Crawling all over each other, losing their claws, look, it would have died in that damn box in the souk!' The senior customs officer said, 'If tourists like you didn't buy them they wouldn't keep them in a box in the souk.' Having heard the same argu- ments rehearsed by my husband all the way out to Marrakesh airport, I opened my mouth but then shut it again.

'Right, what else have you got in here?' asked the senior customs officer, waving a hand at the mass of luggage, and we realised we were going to be in for a long day. We were on a flight from Casablanca. People smuggle all sorts and conditions of stuff from Casablanca. Visions of small back rooms and rubber gloves rose in the mind. My husband, black with rage, began unlocking suitcases, undoing straps, unty- ing bits of string and unrolling carpets. He then lit a Hamlet. He completely ignored the tortoise. He also ignored me, and the sudden, rather puzzling sight of our neigh- bour, the law lecturer, who happened to stroll through the green channel on her way home from holiday and give us a wave. We were clearly going to be the talk of the pub before we got back to the vil- lage.

It takes me forever to pack, and I hate it, but packing is a doddle compared with watching the dainty fingers of lady cus- toms officers gamely unrolling a ball of teenage boy's dirty sock and prodding it for spare tortoises or worse. Every lumpy bundle began to look like two pounds of marijuana, and turned out to be a charm- ing little wooden box, or tray, or picture- frame, and both I and the daughter's honorary godmother joined in the knicker- ravelling, in an attempt to be as helpfully law-abiding as possible. There did seem to be an awful lot of souvenirs.

`May I look in your handbag?' said the young customs officer. Oh, God, the hand- bag. I'd forgotten all about the handbag. I started to gabble about the handbag in a fury of embarrassment and impatience, but I shut up. She delved in, and came out with the most unbelievable object, the size of a rugby ball, carelessly wrapped in brown paper. Not a handbag sort of a thing at all. She laid it on the table and gave me a speaking look. It was a squishy, very Moroccan-looking parcel. I said, `You're just not going to believe this.' She said, 'I think you'd better tell me.' I said, 'I promise you, you won't believe me.' She started unwrapping the brown paper. I said, 'It's a lettuce.' The tatty green leaves of a Moroccan Webb's Wonder began to fall off on to the table and she stared at me as though I was mad. I said, 'It's for the tortoise to eat.' She wrapped it up in eloquent silence and put it back in my handbag.

Then the vet came. She was terrifically cheerful, and wore green wellies and a Barbour. She said to my miserable daugh- ter, 'You've probably saved its life, actual- ly. It's a Kleinman's tortoise, only about two weeks old. It's not an endangered species, but it's vulnerable. It would cer- tainly have died in that box in the souk. It'll go to the Animal Quarantine Station for 14 days and they'll keep it under a sun-

lamp. You might be allowed to keep it after that. You'll have to apply for a Cites permit from the Department of the Envi- ronment. It might take some time, but the tortoise will be fine. It'll go and live with a tortoise expert, near Bristol.' My daughter, who is at school in Bristol, lost her fierce cranberry colour and began to wonder about access and visitation rights. She began to think about Bristol, a relatively calm and ordered English sort of a place where you did your prep and didn't wander through mediaeval souks and smell extraor- dinary smells and see chameleons and flies and poor baby tortoises and donkeys with horribly bleeding flanks, and have men in long frocks popping out of every doorway and shouting 'Thirty thousand camels!' at you.

They gave me forms to fill in. Hours later, having repacked, and gone through certain other embarrassments about car- pets and handicrafts and what a green channel is actually for, I finally asked the senior customs officer how on earth she'd known we had a tortoise. She said, 'It was a fellow-passenger who informed on you. He saw your daughter with the tortoise at Mar- rakesh and at Casablanca, and came to tell us when he got off the plane.' I thought about this for a minute and became filled with murderous rage. I said, 'Was he English?' and she said, 'Oh yes. He's a tor- toise-lover. He's got two tortoises of his own.'

I returned to work on the Monday and rang the customs about an import licence for the tortoise. 'The vet misinformed you,' said the customs officer. '1 thought she was wrong at the time, and she was. She told you we'd detained the tortoise, and that you could apply for it on an import licence, but you can't, because you took it through the green channel. So the tortoise will go to a Kleinman's tortoise expert, and he'll look after it and try to breed from it. You won't see it again, but you can tell your daughter that she certainly saved its life. I'll have to report this upwards. The vet was mistaken to say that we'd detained the tortoise.' I said, 'But you did. You did detain it."Oh, no, we didn't,' said the customs officer. 'We didn't detain the tortoise. We seized the tortoise.'

We then had a brief conversation about the law of the land with particular refer- ence to customs seizures and confiscations, and then she added, in a kindly tone, 'You were well over your allowance on the car- pets and handicrafts, you know.' She brought up the question of the school sneak again, anxious for me not to think badly of him. He was a tortoise-lover, she said, who had clearly been acting magnani- mously, with only the best interests of the tortoise in mind. 'In your different ways,' she added, 'you could say you were both doing your best for the tortoise, weren't you? If that's any comfort.'

Vicki Woods is Editor of Harpers & Queen.