Will Hodgkinson - The House is Full of Yogis

He smiled. ‘The Flying Pigeon certainly livened things up, didn’t it?’

‘It’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.’

And it was. It was even better than the time Nev got us stuck on a cliff on the Cornish coast. We had to be rescued by helicopter, which dropped us down onto a golf course while Mum watched the whole thing from a sun lounger by the pool of the hotel. In my school essay on the subject I added that there was a terrible storm and several people died.

The guests seemed to forgive Nev for his reckless behaviour quite quickly, as it was only an hour or so later that everyone piled into our drawing room with glasses of red wine or champagne and chatted, laughed and made flirtatious gestures towards one another. I used the opportunity to discard the evidence of my Flumps-related gluttony and chuck the empty jar in the dustbin. Nev looked a little flustered as not one but two women purred around him, while Mum held court as she regaled tales of constant harassment by the men of Fleet Street to a group of men who appeared to have somehow found it within their power to not harass her. I had learned that on these occasions it was easy to stay up late if you amused the adults, so I decided the time was right to try out a few of my favourite jokes on them. Before long I was sitting on the lap of the woman with the large cleavage, who kept calling me a gorgeous lad while intermittently pressing me to her bosom and glugging from a glass of champagne.

‘Here’s another one,’ I said, once I had the attention of most of the people in the room. ‘There was an old lady who bought a very large house. It was such a nice house that she felt she should give it a name, so, after thinking about it for at least a minute, she decided to call it Hairy Bum.’

I had them laughing and I hadn’t even got to the punch line.

‘After living in Hairy Bum for a year she started to feel rather lonely in that big house all by herself, so she got a little dog. She called the dog Willy. Willy and the old lady were very happy until one day Willy went missing. The old lady was terribly worried. She searched everywhere but she couldn’t find him. Eventually she went to the police station and she told them …’

I had to stifle a few giggles here.

‘“I’ve looked all over my Hairy Bum, but I can’t find my Willy!”’

They roared. The woman with the cleavage bounced me up and down. Somebody decided I deserved to taste champagne for the first time. Tom might impress them with his erudition and his little velvet jackets and bow ties, but I was knocking them dead with my ribald gags. Sandy sashayed towards the record player and put the David Bowie album on. I think the quarter of a glass of champagne I was allowed to drink may have gone to my head in a not unpleasant manner because I definitely felt a little unsteady as I went to the toilet. The other children who had been there for the fireworks had long gone, but they were a glum lot anyway and talking to strange kids was never easy. Adults could be very entertaining with a few drinks inside them.

Eventually, Mum told me I really should be getting to bed. It must have been around midnight. The Flumps-induced stomach ache returning might have been why, at an hour when I imagine the party was winding down, I was still lying awake, listening to the sound of a man and a woman entering the room next door. I couldn’t hear their voices but after a series of bumps and bangs I heard the woman groaning, and the bed squeaking, and with my limited understanding of what Mr Mott had taught us I came to a simple but most likely accurate conclusion: they were having sex.

Then something else occurred to me. That was our parents’ room.

It couldn’t be them, could it? After all, they had two children already. Perhaps the madness of the night was causing the natural order of things to be upturned. And as gruesome as the sound was, it was reassuring too. It indicated a sense of stability.

I never heard it again. But I did get a Scalextric for Christmas.

Why our father thought it was a good idea to take the family on a boating holiday on the River Thames is one of those mysteries destined to remain unsolved. I invited Will Lee, who couldn’t swim. Tom brought along a French exchange student, a blond boy with a brightly coloured rucksack called Dominic, who thought he was coming to London to see Madame Tussauds. Our mother was entering into her feminist phase, which had previously been confined to buying ready meals and denigrating Nev but which was to reach a whole new level before the holiday was over.

With the benefit of hindsight, Nev should have done what had worked for holidays past: go to the travel agent on the high street, find a Mediterranean package deal, and lie on a beach for a week in ill-fitting swimming trunks while Tom was chained to the hotel room with a bout of diarrhoea and an Aldous Huxley novel, I went snorkelling and got stung by jellyfish, and Mum sat by the pool with a Danielle Steel, a glass of wine and a packet of Player’s No. 6. That way everyone got to do what he or she enjoyed. Instead, Nev set in motion a chain of events that culminated in near death, nervous breakdown, divorce and a devotion to meditation, spiritual study, communal living and the attainment of world peace through soul consciousness that continues to this day.

Before the holiday actually began it did sound quite pleasant. Judging by the photographs of joyous families in the pages of the riverboat hire brochure, it would be a summery adventure in the English countryside that involved drifting down the Thames, waving cheerily to the anglers on the banks and jumping off the side for a swim as the sun sank into the rippling water while Will Lee watched from the deck. Dominic came over a day earlier from the suburbs of Paris armed with a guide to London, a pair of Ray-Bans and a shaky grip of the English language. Will Lee’s mother Penny had, with the kind of everlasting hope only a mother can have, packed her son’s swimming trunks and inflatable water wings.

Our boat, the Kingston Cavalier III , looked impressive when we reached the boatyard: strong and proud against the weeping willows along the bank of the Thames. A large white motorboat with three levels, it had two tiny bedrooms, one with two berths and one with four, a flat roof and an outdoor deck at the back. Dominic went into the boat, came out again, and burst into tears. Tom pointed at the top bunk, said, ‘That’s mine,’ and hurled himself up onto it with a paperback of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian and a yawn.

While Will Lee and I loaded on the suitcases and a large hamper filled with fun-size Mars Bars, cocktail sausages and bottles of wine, Mum changed into her nautical outfit of white three-quarter-length trousers, espadrilles with heels, black-and-white T-shirt and a white captain’s hat. Nev spent an hour with the manager of the boat hire company, going through the boat’s workings, the laws of the river, and what to do when you needed to moor, anchor and guide the boat through a lock, nodding intently throughout. We were each in our own way prepared.

It started off well. Nev steered the Kingston Cavalier III out of the boatyard with calm, Nev-like diligence. When Tom told Dominic that we were heading in the direction of London he perked up, said, ‘Madame Tussauds, c’est la?’ and pointed down the river. Tom gave him a thumbs-up and went back to Russell. At first, Mum seemed content to sit in a folding chair on the deck with a glass of wine and a copy of Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes, and make less than generous comments about the size of the bottoms of the women who hailed us from boats going in the other direction. Will and I climbed onto the roof and stayed there. The lapping lulls of the water and the singing of the birds, even the unchanging hum of the engine, were as restful and as reassuring as the sight of an old friend or a cup of hot chocolate before bedtime. Sunlight streaked through the willows and bathed the river in a golden glow. Cows in the fields beyond the banks bowed their gentle heads to the ground. Crickets chirped. The warmth of the sun soaked the land and brewed a woozy kind of contentment.