Will Hodgkinson - The House is Full of Yogis

‘Oh no!’ she screamed. ‘Help!’

Nev turned round to see his wife forming an arch over the water, her behind raised high above her hands and feet, but he was steering the boat and too far away from her to help. Dominic had escaped downstairs to look at photographs of London landmarks, Will and I were on the roof with our dead, dying and wounded insects and Tom was back on the deck, making the most of Mum’s folding chair while he could.

Theoretically, Tom could have saved her. He was only a few feet away. But he looked at her, raised his eyes, and said, ‘Try not to make too much of a splash.’ Will and I sat and watched, frozen. I looked over at Nev. He had his hand over his mouth. ‘Somebody help me!’ she pleaded, before plopping into the water.

We looked down. For a few seconds all you could see was the captain’s hat, floating between the boat and the wall of the lock. Then Mum appeared, her bouffant flattened, mascara running down her cheeks, spluttering.

‘Quick!’ she shrieked. ‘Throw me something! Throw me something to hold onto!’

Tom looked around, stood up, stretched, and chucked the folding chair at her. It landed with a splash a few inches away from her head before sinking out of view.

‘Oh,’ said Tom, peering over the boat and scratching his head. ‘That didn’t work.’

I threw her a rope and pulled her up to the side of the boat until she reached the ladder that ran along its side. With her waterlogged trousers, black-lined face and dripping black hair hanging in clumps from the side of her head, she looked like a deranged rock star trawled up from the riverbed.

When she dried off, after Nev made her a cup of tea and I got her a dry towel to wrap around herself, she dissolved into self-pity.

‘It was awful,’ she said, shivering. ‘I’ve never been so scared in all my life … I had a moment of blind panic. And I hate getting my hair wet. Why didn’t anyone help me?’

I shrugged. ‘Couldn’t really make it in time.’

‘And I couldn’t leave the wheel,’ said Nev. ‘If I had, the boat might have crushed you when you fell in the water.’

‘I was reading,’ said Tom, picking his nose.

‘This whole holiday was your stupid idea,’ Mum snapped at Nev. ‘You know I hate larking about on rivers. I don’t like the countryside, I don’t like mud, I don’t like water and I don’t like being stuck on a boat with four horrible boys and a useless man.’

Given her track record, you might think that now would have been a good time for Mum to sit out the rest of the holiday and stay in a place where she could cause as little damage as possible, like below deck. And at first, deprived of her folding chair, she did indeed disappear into her cabin and indulge in a much-needed (for us) bout of splendid isolation. But she went back to her old ways the very next day.

It was somewhere around Teddington that she decided to take over once more. Initially, Nev refused to let her. He pointed out that her attempts to drive the boat had not been entirely successful.

‘Would you have me chained to the kitchen, cooking and cleaning?’ she wailed, sweeping her arms in the air. ‘Who paid for our house by scribbling away? Whose brains got Tom a scholarship to Westminster? And yet here you are, trying to be the big man. I must say, I find your attitude highly offensive. I suppose you also think that unmarried women are useless nuisances, spare mouths? I wonder how the sisterhood would respond to this, should I write an article about it.’

‘Why don’t you do us all a favour and put a sock in it?’ Nev snapped, which was quite a strong reaction for him. ‘I’ve never patronized you, and given your horrible cooking, the kitchen is the last place I’d want to keep you.’

‘Give me that steering wheel, you. I’ll show you.’

Mum no longer had on the captain’s hat, but she did her best to look authoritative nonetheless as she stood at the prow of the boat. She kept both hands on the wheel and looked ahead. A pleasure cruiser passed and people on it waved; she ignored them. A bunch of kids on a boat similar to ours pointed at her and shouted, ‘Look, it’s Cher.’

We needed to refuel. We came up to a river marina, but getting into it required a degree of skill. A jetty ran around it and it was, of course, filled with boats. Nev, who had been at the back, taking a series of deep breaths with his eyes closed, attempted to take over for this key bit of manoeuvring.

‘I’m perfectly capable of controlling my craft,’ she announced, pushing him away, ‘even if it does hurt your phallic pride too much to let me.’

‘Liz, you’re going in too fast,’ he said, as calmly as he could manage. ‘Take it out of gear.’

Rather than do as she was told, she decided to try and pull the boat round. We thudded up against the jetty. The harbourmaster came running forward. ‘Turn off your engine!’

Boats surrounded us, but by a stroke of incredible good fortune Mum had managed not to ram into any of them. ‘Do you know what you’re doing, darling?’ said the harbourmaster, a youngish man who swaggered up with the proprietary air of someone used to getting people who didn’t know what they were doing out of trouble. ‘Don’t you think you should let your husband take over?’

Mum lowered her eyebrows, gritted her teeth, and snorted. If steam could have puffed out of her ears, it would have done. ‘I’m going to park the boat by that petrol tank up there,’ she said, pointing at the filling station fifty metres or so in front of us. Then she slammed the engine on – and put the boat into reverse.

Mum’s hands flew up in shock. We shot backwards, straight into three boats. Various people stared at us in horror. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked one silver-haired woman, peering at Mum with narrowed eyes. The woman was wearing a perfectly aligned, pristine white captain’s hat, which matched her fitted blazer. Mum, who with her unkempt bouffant and extended nails now resembled the terrifying children’s character Struwwelpeter, appeared to think the best thing to do was to escape from the scene of the crime as quickly as possible. She slammed the boat into forward. But it didn’t work. The boat strained, and groaned, and cried, and whined, and bleated like a big metal baby, and moved only a few inches. Nev turned the engine off.

He stared at her.

She looked at him with big, wide, apologetic eyes. Her chin wobbled. Then she began to cry.

After assessing the damage, the harbourmaster told Nev that Mum had most likely got the propeller caught up in the ropes of the other boats. The only way to deal with the problem was to dive down and untangle them. Meanwhile, the man on the boat that Mum hit first came out to apply wood glue to our splintered hull. His wife offered to make everyone a cup of tea. The silver-haired lady watched from a safe distance and smoked a cigarette in a holder and turned her head slowly from side to side in a disapproving but satisfied way.

Nev, in his oversized red swimming trunks, lowered himself into the water. He dived underneath the boat and blindly did his best to untangle the mass of knots that Mum had wrapped around our propeller and, it turned out, the rudder. He would come up for air, gasping and spluttering, spit out a jet of oily green water, and head back down again.

It took two hours.

By the time the last stretch of rope was removed from the propeller, Nev was shivering uncontrollably.

Mum dared to reappear, to hand him a towel. ‘Oh, well done Nev,’ she said, breathily. ‘Good work.’

‘Go away,’ he said. For the first time, it really did look like Mum had broken him. But then he disappeared below deck, came back a few minutes later fully clothed, and said: ‘Right’.