An Awfully Big Adventure

An Awfully Big Adventure by Bartimeus

An Awfully Big Adventure opens on a Welsh moor where three children — Cornelius James Halliday, his sister Jane, and their elder sister Georgina — are playing at gunboats on a river, pretending to be His Majesty's ships steaming up to Bagdad, with their governess Miss Mayne cast as "the Army." Cornelius James discovers a rifle-carrying stranger, Graeme "Mouldy" Jakes, a Naval officer on leave nursing a damaged hand, resting by the stream. The boy adopts him instantly, and Jakes, shy and starved of female companionship apart from men on shipboard, is drawn into the children's games and eventually invited to visit. He lives with his step-sister, Lady Manners, and her husband Sir Malcolm, at a grand country house near the children's rented lodgings at Glebe Farm. Jakes hosts the children for tea while Lady Manners is away, and Miss Mayne accompanies them. He shows them the portrait gallery, tells them a ghost story about an ancestress's wedding ring, and lets Georgina slip the supposedly lucky ring onto Miss Mayne's finger, where it sticks. Two neighboring young women, Josephine and Alicia Smedley — whom Jakes despises as shallow, slangy modern "sports" — call unexpectedly and, seeing the ring and the children, assume Miss Mayne is Jakes's wife. Over subsequent weeks, with Lady Manners still away, Jakes and Miss Mayne grow close through country outings with the children. Jakes silently falls in love with her, idealizing her almost to the point of dread. On a final seaside picnic before the children's visit ends, Josephine Smedley rides up and again addresses Miss Mayne as "Mrs. Jakes." Miss Mayne, mortified, publicly denies being married to him; Josephine's insinuating reply insults her. Distressed, Miss Mayne reproaches Jakes for never having corrected the misunderstanding earlier. In the emotional aftermath, Jakes blurts out a marriage proposal, but Miss Mayne, believing it merely an impulsive attempt at reparation for the embarrassment, refuses him sharply and forbids him ever to raise the subject again. That night both are wretched; the children sense something is wrong, and Miss Mayne is overheard lamenting that "he never said he loved me." The narrative then shifts to the war: the narrator, Commander Bill Hornby, recounts meeting an old Marine friend, Frank Milsom, who displays an eerie clairvoyant gift, seeing the reflected image of a strange bandaged-handed man conversing silently with a beautiful, troubled young woman traveling with them by train. Hornby is later assigned to command a blockship in a desperate raid on the German-held port of Angerbad, gathering old shipmates — including Jakes, now his Assistant Gunnery Lieutenant, who unexpectedly asks to be transferred to more dangerous service, and young Lieutenant Thorogood, whom Hornby also recruits. At the Admiralty, Hornby and Milsom discover that Miss Mayne is now a stenographer there, and that she and Milsom already know each other — Milsom has fallen in love with her too, and learns from her the story of her unnamed lost love, not realizing until he meets him that it is Jakes. The blockships and storming parties sail on the raid; Milsom leads the Marine assault on the Mole alongside Jakes's demolition party amid ferocious fighting, and the operation succeeds at terrible cost, with Volunteer Reserve Commander Armitage's motor launches heroically rescuing survivors under fire, Armitage himself dying in the effort. Withdrawing through fog, the wounded Milsom confesses to Hornby that he loves Miss Mayne but recognizes she still loves another man — the officer she never named — and resolves to help reunite them rather than press his own suit; before he can name him, a last strafing attack by enemy seaplanes kills Milsom. Back at Headquarters, Hornby contrives a pretext to leave Jakes alone with Miss Mayne in the Director's office, and finds them reconciled, Miss Mayne in tears against Jakes's shoulder. The narrative then presents a sequence of documentary-style episodes describing actual wartime naval exploits: decoy merchant-ship actions against German submarines, the ordeal and Victoria Cross action of Captain Gordon Campbell's ship, a motor launch towing away a floating mine, a sailor's rescue of an airman from a wireless mast after a mid-air collision, a destroyer rescuing Chinese firemen from a burning oil tanker, the salvage of a torpedoed and nearly severed destroyer in the Mediterranean, and the celebrated action of the decoy schooner the "Prize" under Lieutenant Saunders against the German submarine U93. The final section moves to a Japanese village, introducing a sandal-maker, Tani, in love with a poor field-worker girl, Su Su O, who refuses to marry him for want of a dowry, and a wealthy old man scouting the village for girls to recruit to his Tokyo tea-house, to whom Su Su O is being presented.

By Bartimeus · First published 1917 · Genre: Romance, Coming of Age, Literary Fiction · 40 chapters · 75,349 words

First lines

The late afternoon sunlight was slanting across the heather when the "Mantis" came puffing round a bend of the river.

Contrary to the established custom and traditions of British men-of-war, her crew maintained a breathless and high-spirited dialogue with the Captain, who seasoned it with shrill invective directed at a routed enemy, invisible and presumed to be in full flight amid the bracken.

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

World War I · Royal Navy · naval officers · romance · governess · children's games · country estate · Welsh moors · unrequited love · shy protagonist · coming of age · wartime

What this Textopian page supports

An Awfully Big Adventure is listed on Textopian as a novel by Bartimeus, dated 1917 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Contents

More by Bartimeus