Confessions from a Package Tour

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

About the Author

Also by Timothy Lea and Rosie Dixon

Copyright

About the Publisher

When the SS Foreskeen finally docks at Antwerp I can hardly wait for the cattle to be driven ashore before leaving the coach. It is very cramped in that hold and after sixteen hours you can imagine the smell – the cattle don’t smell very nice either.

But perhaps I am going too fast. For the benefit of new readers let me start at the end. The end of Confessions of a Lady Courier. I am employed by Climax Tours (‘The Europe the others forgot’ – you must have seen their advertisements?) and my boss is Nicholas Bendon or Justin Cartwright or Benedict Jollybags or Jeremy Rafelsen-Bigg – for some reason that I can never quite understand, he keeps changing his name; something to do with wanting to be more people than he really is, I think. I always call him by his last name – I mean, the last name he has given himself. At the moment it is Reginald Parkinson.

Anyway, Reggy has hired me to take a coach party round Europe – there is also the driver, a strange Latvian called Jaroslov Hammerchick, but he doesn’t really count – not higher than ten, anyway. For days I have been trying to get the coach out of the country but you have no idea how difficult that can be – unless you have read Confessions of a Lady Courier. In the end, faced with gale force winds in the Channel, I am left with no alternative but to take the only means of escape available: a cattle boat travelling to Antwerp. I think it will be calmer once we get round the corner into the North Sea, but not a bit of it. We can’t see much in the hold but my tummy feels as if it is being swished around with an electric mixer. What really frightens me is when, all of a sudden, large quantities of water pour down the stairs. You can imagine the feeling, can’t you? I mean, you feel pretty trapped sitting in a coach in the bottom of a clapped-out cattle boat with the lights flickering on and off – mostly off – without that happening. And the crew! Panamanians they call themselves though it should be Panamaniacs. I have nothing against foreigners but this lot are really grubby. You don’t have to understand what they are saying to know what they mean. I certainly made no agreement with the captain that they were entitled to have sexual relations with any woman in the party under sixty and all this pinching and gesticulating is so vulgar. I do wish our lot would not do it. It only inflames the excitable citizens of Central America more. It is amazing how the most sober women seem to go berserk the moment the boat puts to sea. Maybe it is something to do with the ozone though I can’t see how any of them can smell it. What with the cattle and the cramped conditions the interior of the hold is more like the BO zone.

It is with a feeling of the most tremendous relief that I eventually come down the steps of the coach and set foot on – oh! Filthy animal! Why did it have to do that there? The inside of the boat was bad enough without the quay at Antwerp receiving the same treatment. It always amazes me how such dirty animals can produce all those nice things like butter, milk and those little creamy cheese segments with the pretty labels.

I scrape my shoe against a convenient bollard and look around the cobbled quay carefully. The cattle are disappearing towards a line of railway trucks and I wish that my own problems could be as easily solved. The first night of our ‘magic carpet ride through the cultural cornucopia of historic Europe’ was meant to be spent on the borders of the ‘romantic Rhineland’ but that was three days ago now and there seems little hope of us ever catching up with our schedule. It is half past six in the evening and a lot of those customers not bidding tearful farewells to weak-kneed Panamanians are suggesting very forcibly that they would like to go to a hotel. What am I going to do?

‘Yoo hoo, Rosie! Here I am!’ The familiar voice rings in my ears like the sound of the relieving cavalry’s bugler at the end of a John Wayne movie. I turn, and there she is – Penny! My companion in a number of adventures listed at the end of this book and fellow employee of Climax Tours. Reggy had said that he was going to send Penny to give me a hand but I had not expected her to arrive so soon.

‘Penny!’ I trill. ‘What a marvellous surprise. But how did you get here so soon? You’re looking so fresh and relaxed.’

‘I flew to Brussels and got a taxi. It was terribly easy, darling. Did you have a good trip? I hope you don’t mind me saying so but you’re looking a trifle peaky?’

‘Next time, I’ll take the Titanic if there’s a choice,’ groans Mr Betts, dumping a string bag full of baked beans tins on the quayside – Sid and Martha Betts do not trust foreign food.