The Adventure Calendar of Mr Timothy Hope is a seasonal story of unlikely accidents and hair-raising escapes told in 24 letters sent home by Timothy Hope as he journeys in the Arctic Circle. Featuring characters such as the unhinged big-game hunter Baronet Oxshott, the scatter-brained genius Professor Cumulus and the always inventive Timothy Hope, the story is a frequently silly, always exciting sleigh ride across crevasses, through wolf packs, into the heart of Christmas itself.
6th December
My Dear Lady Misericordia,
I hope this letter finds you well.
It certainly leaves me feeling quite the opposite. Very, very opposite indeed. In fact opposite and, a little too frequently, upside down.
I don’t know, my Lady, what image you might have in mind when you think of stowing away on board a ship. If you had read any of the books I set you to read then you might have rather a romantic idea of it, a notion that it is a suitable activity for otherwise idle young people who wish to have reasonably exciting adventures with pirates and be home in time for tea.
I must tell you now, my Lady, that this is bunkum. Dangerous and terrible bunkum. It is, in fact wholly and utterly ghastly.
For a start it appears to me that lifeboats are deliberately designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. I can only assume that this is to give a crew an incentive to keep their ship afloat for as long as possible so they don’t have to ride in the beastly things.
They are certainly constructed in such a way that no matter how you try to sleep in one, at least three bits of it will be sticking into you at any one time. Three painful bits, with splinters in.
They are not adequately insulated, either, which can be a serious drawback when crossing the North Sea in winter. And neither, I regret to inform you, is the tarpaulin covering completely waterproof round the edges. Not just splintered but cold and also wet, then, too.
Most of all... One thing I had noticed in all the sea stories I read was that often the stowaways did not adequately prepare for their journey. Most particularly, they often did not take food with them and then almost always got caught when they had to sneak out to try and steal some from the ship’s galley.
I was not going to be caught out by such a simple failing, and so, before slipping aboard your father’s ship and into the covered lifeboat, I filled my pockets with enough bread and cheese to keep myself sustained on the journey.
This was a mistake. When wet and cold, bread and cheese will combine to make a slippery and unpleasant mush that is even less enjoyable to sleep on than a pointy boat.
Moreover I did not need bread and cheese. I did not need any food. I could not have eaten caviar and foie gras had it been offered to me. In fact just thinking about it would have made me violently ill. Even breathing made me ill.
All I needed was for the boat to stop rocking.
It didn’t though, ever, not for one moment. Instead it rocked and heaved and sloshed and rolled and I heaved and sloshed with it.
We set out under a grey sky, on a choppy sea, and the further we got from land the darker the sky became and the higher the sea rose: great rolling slate waves like the backs of whales, that the ship reared up on and then smashed down with a sickening drop.
All day and all night the sea heaped itself up beneath us and the rain squalled and the wind buffeted and my little lifeboat leaked and swung and thumped against the ship and then leaked some more.
Never stowaway, my Lady, or, if you must, stowaway somewhere nice, in first class, with servants and a clean bathroom.
At one point in the night I had what, in my nauseous delirium, I thought was a brilliant idea. The lifeboat was held over the side of the ship by a pair of joints that allowed it to swing back and forth. A small adjustment to those joints should allow the boat to swing more freely, meaning that even while the ship yawed and lurched beneath it, the boat would stay steady: the rocking would stop!
The rocking did not stop. The rocking got worse. In the dark, in the middle of a storm, in my feverish state, whatever adjustments I made to the joints just made it swing even more violently back and forth. Often now swinging completely upside down, so that I had to hang onto the bottom of the boat in desperation to stop from plummeting into the raging sea below, while the tarpaulin flapped and the mushed bread and cheese flew around my head.
I’m not sure whether it was this unaccountable swinging of the lifeboat or my howling and wailing that alerted the crew that something strange was going on aboard their ship.
They got it into their heads that a grampus had got on board and Oxshott pretty quickly applied himself to finding and shooting this thing whatever it was. He gathered a small force and they ventured out into the stormy night to face whatever was lurking out in the darkness.
They soon traced my cries to the lifeboat and Oxshott whipped off the tarpaulin just as a particularly strong wave flung me out onto the deck in the glaring flash of a lightning blast.
God alone knows what I looked like, drenched in sea water, weeping with illness, spattered about wet food, but it took Oxshott three laps of the deck, pursuing me with a boathook, before he could be persuaded that I was anything human, let alone that it was I, the humble private tutor in whose face he had laughed just days before.
Lord Daunt has sent me below to get cleaned up and to try and get over the worst of my sickness, and I have to say I’m feeling a little better already, although the ship still rocks, along with my stomach.
But I shall have to face him in the morning, and I am very much afraid there will be no adventure now for Mr Timothy Hope.
Yours,
In trepidation and nausea
Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
P.S. We never did find out what a grampus was. Although I pity any that Oxshott comes across.
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