The House is Full of Yogis

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.

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.

Mum’s brand of second-wave feminism was in keeping with the 1980s: individualistic and money-based. She argued, inarguably, that there was no reason why her earnings shouldn’t match that of a man doing a similar job, and that girls had not only a right but also a duty to get the best education they could. Given that she entered Fleet Street at a time in the 1970s when it was entirely male-dominated save for the fashion and food pages, you can see why she became so strident. Until recently a woman could not buy anything on hire purchase without a male signatory; an unmarried woman could not get a mortgage; it was not possible to rent a flat with a man unless she was married. On our boat trip Mum was bridling at the choices she had made when she was too young to know better: changing her name, getting married, having children, becoming secondary, in the eyes of the law at least, to a man.

Now she had got to the point in her career where, because Nev was working at the Daily Mail and she was doing big celebrity interviews and lifestyle features for the then more populist Sunday People, she was earning a lot more money than him. Fleet Street was at the height of its powers, with over ten million people reading the Sunday People and the Daily Mirror. Mirror Group’s all-powerful printers’ union demanded high pay to keep the presses rolling and journalists’ wages fell in line accordingly. Cushioned and given confidence by a very good salary, Mum felt that certain inequalities needed to be addressed.

Margaret Thatcher was a role model as far as she was concerned: a working-class woman who had got ahead through her own will and intelligence and put the emphasis on material improvement and self-reliance. Mum also took anything associated with the traditional role of the mother as a sign of weakness. Cooking was subjugation, which is why we lived on a diet of frozen pizzas. Getting involved in our schools – beyond screeching at me when I got a D in maths – was for less intelligent, more mundane women, which meant that she acted with outrage when the PTA asked her to bake a cake for the school fête (after calming down, she offered to buy them one from Marks & Spencer’s). And when she stayed out in the evening and matched the men in her office drink for drink and cutting barb for cutting barb, she was doing it for the cause.

One of the most confusing aspects of Mum’s declarations of feminism was that it was other women who were the most frequent source of her wrath. They were the agents of their own misfortune, apparently. Nev, Uncle Richard, her own father and most other men may not have been up to much, but as Mum told it even they were less pitiable than the old school-friend of hers who had been the cleverest girl in the class, only to get married at eighteen to a man in wire-framed glasses who made the family say grace before every meal and clothed his terrified daughters in matching dresses buttoned up to the neck. As for higher profile feminists, Germaine Greer was only bearable if you agreed with everything she said and Andrea Dworkin was a brilliant and brave pioneer, but wrong in one fatal regard: she equated feminism with hairy armpits. Any sensible modern woman knew that taking care of your appearance with fashionable clothes, matching colour schemes and high-end beauty products does not suggest sexual availability but self-worth. A decent wage and a trip to the salon whenever you felt like it: those were the rightful spoils of the women’s liberation movement.

Will and I tortured no more insects that evening. Dominic didn’t mention Madame Tussauds. Tom stopped reading, even. It was dark by the time we were back on the boat, and we took it in turns to clean our teeth in the tiny washbasin before Mum and Nev said goodnight and closed the door of their cabin. We heard the sound of things crashing and breaking, followed by shrieks of laughter, followed by snoring.

Will and I climbed up onto the roof of the boat and lay on our backs, and listened to the grasshoppers harmonize under the stars. For a while there, it did seem like we were a reasonably functioning family.

It turned out to be a brief glimpse of Eden in what proved otherwise to be a descent into Hell. The following morning, Mum stomped off into whatever town we were near to buy the papers while Nev moored the boat and cooked sausages on a camping stove. She came back holding up a copy of the Sunday People, crumpling in the wind and turned to a page with her article on it. Its headline was: How to Fight the Flab and Look Totally Fab. It had a picture of our mother in a purple velour tracksuit, attempting to jump in the air and smile at the same time. Nev also had a much smaller piece in the Daily Mail. It was about a pioneering, morally complex and potentially revolutionary research programme of isolating embryonic stem cells. It didn’t come with a photo byline.

We continued our pointless journey down the river. When she eventually tired of reading her own article, Mum, back in her folding chair, shouted at Nev, ‘I hope you don’t expect me to play the Little Lady, doing all the ironing and cleaning and cooking. You’re bloody lucky I’m here at all. I should be out writing a feature. Do you know how in demand I am?’

Nev, who was steering the boat, replied: ‘Why don’t you go off and write your feature then? You could even fight the flab if you walked the thirty miles or so back to London.’

‘Don’t be silly. Do you think that just because you’re a man you’ve got a right to tell me what to do?’ She grabbed her captain’s hat and stomped towards the steering wheel. ‘Get off. It’s my turn.’

After a brief tussle, Nev shrugged and handed it over. ‘Just try not to run aground this time.’

We came up to a lock. There was a shriek. ‘Nev! What do I do?’

‘Take your foot off the power,’ he shouted, and she did – but not in time. We hit the brick wall of the lock with a loud crunch.

‘Tell your wife to put the boat into neutral,’ shouted the lock keeper as the boat whined and juddered helplessly against the side of the lock, and Will and I helped Nev tie the ropes. Mum raised her nose in a westerly direction. Nev took over once more and told Mum to get away from the wheel and stay out of harm’s way.

‘That was your fault,’ she yelped. ‘You didn’t tell me how to stop it.’

‘Oh, shut up, you hideous bat. There can only be one captain of this ship and that’s me. Once we get through this lock I’m going to have to assess the damage.’

While we waited for the lock to fill up, Mum decided to tell Dominic and Will why they shouldn’t mistake her for the kind of mum who helps her children with their homework or cheers them on at the school sports day. ‘You’re more likely to find me in a glamorous bar, interviewing a famous celebrity,’ she said, pushing up her hat and leaning against the side of the lock. ‘My career is far more important for me to do all those things silly women do. Anyone can bake a cake. I’m part of an exclusive club which holds the media power in London.’

‘Tower of London?’ said Dominic, hopefully.

‘It’s a miracle we’re not mentally deranged,’ said Tom, lackadaisically. He was sitting on the bank, reading. ‘I’m going to have to spend a significant portion of the money left to me in your will on psychiatric fees.’

‘I just don’t see the point in pretending to be something I’m not.’

Despite this, she did then pretend to be something she wasn’t: a bridge. Once through the lock, we all climbed back on the boat. Mum was the last one on. She pushed the boat off from the side, but being in the middle of a tirade about why on earth working-class people had to walk around with so few clothes on the moment the sun came out, she failed to notice that her feet were going in one direction and her hands, which were raised against a pillar, were going in the other.

‘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.