Will Hodgkinson - The House is Full of Yogis

Then it began.

‘I hope you don’t think for a minute that you’re the captain of this ship just because you’re a man,’ Mum squawked, like a peacock whose tail had been yanked. ‘I can do a much better job than you. I can play tennis better than you, I can earn more money than you, and I can damn well steer a boat down the river better than you. I’m no longer going to be the woman you wish me to be, or fear me to be.’ Her captain’s hat wiggled with indignant satisfaction at that particular line.

Nev pushed up the bridge of his glasses. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You’ve had your turn. Now it’s mine.’ Whether she was talking about driving the boat or life in general she didn’t specify, but as we were going along a wide, quiet stretch of the river with no lock, island or pleasure cruiser in the way, Nev gave a light smile and said, ‘Of course you can drive the boat, although I can hardly see how you’ll be able to do a better job than me. Do you want me to explain the basics to you?’

‘Stop patronizing me, you male chauvinist pig,’ she said, jerking him out of the way by the scruff of his v-necked tank top and grabbing the wheel.

Mum cranked the boat up a gear and sped off down the river. This caused the wind to catch her hat and for it to fly off her head. It only fell down onto the deck below, where Dominic was listening to ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’ on a Sony Walkman, but Mum twisted round to see where it went – and forgot to take her hands off the wheel. The boat swerved violently towards port, or, as she kept insisting on calling it, starboard.

‘What are you doing?’ yelped Nev, who had made the elemental mistake of trusting Mum enough to steer the ship while he went to the toilet. He leapt up the narrow steps, but it was too late. She launched the boat straight towards the bank.

‘Stop panicking,’ she shouted, in a panicked voice. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

What nobody had explained to Mum was that going near the bank on a river doesn’t just run the danger of hitting it with the side of the boat; you can also run aground. Her deep hatred of mud, water and nature in general meant she had never explored rivers, and didn’t realize that they start off shallow and get deeper in the middle. The boat slowed down, made an angry grunt, and came to a halt.

‘What’s going on?’ she said, hair billowing about in the wind. ‘There seems to be something wrong with this vessel. Did you get ripped off again?’

‘We’ve run aground.’

‘Don’t be stupid. The boat is still in the water. We’re surrounded by the bloody stuff.’

‘The bottom of the boat is stuck in the mud.’

‘Mud! I’ll soon get us out of it,’ she said, slapping her hands together as if preparing to defeat an old foe. Dominic handed her back the captain’s hat. She adjusted it to a jaunty angle, and then she turned the engine on. Before Nev could stop her she did the one thing you mustn’t do if you run aground: rev up and attempt to move forward. This only serves to push the boat deeper into the riverbed.

‘Stop it!’ Nev shouted over the roar, trying to wrestle her away from the wheel. ‘Turn the bloody engine off.’

‘All right, keep your hair on,’ she said, bumping him out of the way. Then she did the second thing you mustn’t do: put the boat into reverse. The mud sucked up into the propellers. Nev switched the engine off.

There was a brief moment of silence, save for the moo of a cow.

‘If you had been listening when I was getting instruction on how to drive this thing,’ said Nev, gasping, his chin remaining unmoving with stoic solemnity as beads of sweat collected in the lines of his forehead, ‘you would have known better than to do that.’

‘If you’re so smart why don’t you get us out of this mess you’ve caused, Mr Smarty Pants?’

The river brings out the best in people, or at least in some people, because a boat of a similar size stopped to help. A middle-aged couple – small, round and in matching blue shorts and tight blue vests, like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, only married – told us to check in the hull for any leaks caused by damage to the bottom of the boat. It seemed to be all right. They said we mustn’t turn on the engine. They moored their boat against ours and told us boys and Mum to step onto it. Mum kept her nose upwards and her gaze in the opposite direction as the man stuck out a short, wide arm to help her across. The couple tied a rope to the front of our boat and pulled us out like a knife through melting butter. They looked at one another and nodded in satisfaction.

Once we were all back on the boat, and Mum was persuaded that it was a good idea to let Nev drive for a while, it settled down.

‘What kind people,’ said Nev, as the boat moved steadily along the centre of the river and resumed its calm mechanical hum, ‘they really saved us back then.’

‘They were so fat though, weren’t they?’ Mum replied, back on her folding chair with a glass of wine. ‘Why do fat people insist on wearing clothes that are too small for them? Do they simply not look at themselves, or can’t they see what the rest of us have the misfortune to see? There’s a term for it, you know. Body dysmorphia.’

Nev shook his head and looked to the river before us, rather than his wife, who was applying lipstick, as she added, ‘Surely these boats come equipped with mirrors.’

Will and I stayed on the roof of the boat, forcing woodlice and spiders into gladiatorial battles, making them form a tag-team against a caterpillar or simply throwing them overboard to face their watery deaths.

By the evening, it looked like Mum had given up trying to be captain of the ship. Nev dropped anchor next to a small island in the middle of the Thames at sunset. Dominic was the first to explore it: he pushed through tangleweed and bracken before disappearing out of view. He ran back, screaming, chased by an angry goose. The water was shallow enough for even Will to venture into the river, up to his waist in the murky green as rays of light flashed across the tiny ripples. A swan glided past, followed by a line of fluffy grey cygnets, horizontal question marks aligned by nature’s symmetry. Tom, never the most physical of boys, stuck his foot in the water from the side of the boat, decreed, ‘cold,’ and scrabbled about in the hamper for a biscuit. Dominic and I pushed off and swam into deeper water as Nev and Mum watched from the boat, sitting next to each other, smiling. I have no idea what they were talking about, but in that brief moment it seemed like they were pleased that they had children, pleased at how life had panned out, pleased to be with each other and to laugh at the world together.

Sitting on a blanket under the canopy of a willow tree, wrapped in towels, we ate cold sausages in bread rolls with tomato ketchup. Mum brought her folding chair onto the island and sank into it while Nev poured Coca-Cola from a two-litre bottle into plastic cups.

‘It’s wonderful to see the boys so happy,’ said Mum. ‘It’s like a scene from Swallows and Amazons . I used to love that book. I remember getting it as a present for passing the eleven-plus and going to grammar school. My brother failed, of course. He went to the secondary modern and look at him now.’

We had heard the story about her glittering education and her brother’s miserable one a hundred times before. I was waiting to hear her compare Uncle Richard to their alcoholic father, who had a minor accident during a brief stint as a lorry driver and used it as an excuse to never work again, but it didn’t come. Instead she said that she was lucky to have such lovely children, and she liked seeing us with our friends, and it was getting late and we needed to get into our pyjamas and clean our teeth.