The House is Full of Yogis

‘It’s a pebble. What am I meant to think about it?’

Will closed his eyes. ‘It’s a trilobite. It’s 300 million years old.’

‘Let’s go up to the attic.’

The attic was the best room in the house. Hugh Lee had only semi-converted it, putting in windows and laying down a hessian carpet but leaving the spindly retractable staircase and sloping roof, turning it into a den-like space which Will’s much older half brothers and half sister, now all living elsewhere, had used throughout their teenage years. Next to a record player and a stack of records was a book with a plain brown cover and the words Les Demoiselles D’Hamilton etched in gold down the spine.

‘You have to see this,’ said Will, sitting cross-legged and opening the book on his lap with slow reverence. ‘This guy has an amazing ability to convince women to take their clothes off.’

I looked through the sepia-tinted, dreamy photographs of young women in French country houses, stepping out of tin bathtubs, riding bicycles through the woods in flowing white dresses, and admiring each other’s semi-nude bodies, breasts falling out of thin white blouses. Years later I discovered that the photographer, David Hamilton, had used nymph-like teens as his models, but to me, an eleven-year-old, they seemed sophisticated, fully grown, untouchable. The pictures reminded me of a holiday in the South of France where the women on the beach had gone topless and there was a photographer’s studio in the local town with nudes, posed and artful, in the windows. ‘He’s a lover of the human form,’ said our father, awkwardly, as we passed the studio, before pushing us away from the window and towards the nearest ice-cream stand. Even then, Nev appeared to view the body like other men might view an affair: guilt inducing.

I looked at a David Hamilton image of two girls, their hair in loose, messy buns, sitting on a bed and admiring themselves and each other in an oval mirror. The girls wore dresses, but one of them had pulled the dress up to her waist. She was kneeling. You could see the tan line around her pale white bottom. The photographs were as confusing as they were fascinating. I was used to the sight of breasts because we got the Sun and Mum had told me not to expect all girls to look like Page Three girls, but this was something else entirely: exotic and romantic, otherworldly.

‘I wonder where you meet women like this,’ I said.

‘France,’ Will replied, authoritatively.

I wasn’t sure whether looking at David Hamilton’s girls, and what we called the FF (Faint Feeling) it inspired, should make me feel guilty or not. A few years earlier, Nev had suggested there was nothing wrong with sex. When I asked him about the basics of reproduction he explained that a man put his willy inside something a woman had called a vagina. ‘It sounds horrible,’ I said, but he told me people liked it. On his rather more official talk on the subject two weeks after we moved into 99, Queens Road he sat me down at the kitchen table, took out a textbook, sweated even more than usual, and, as he pointed shakily to an anatomical drawing of the male reproductive system said, in a faltering voice, ‘And here we have the vas deferens.’ The talk was high on technical detail but it left me none the wiser about what you were actually meant to do when the time came.

School wasn’t helping matters. Mine was boys only, which meant girls were less a different sex and more a whole different race. I might have got to meet a few local examples of their kind on weekends had not our parents enrolled me in Saturday Club, a school-run activities service featuring judo, chess, photography and other off-curriculum subjects. There was a way of avoiding the lot of them, however. All you had to do was accompany a certain teacher to the store cupboard and allow him to whack you on the bottom with an exercise book every now and then. Three or four of us sat in there each week, wedged into the narrow space between the metal shelves and the wall. If you hit him back he would say, ‘Ooh, you devil you!’ and pinch your cheek excitedly, but he asked for nothing more. That’s why I felt it was unfair when this teacher was hounded out of the school by an angry mob of outraged parents. Some idiot had told his mother about the store cupboard scene, thereby ruining a perfectly good way of bunking off Saturday Club. From then on I only ever saw the teacher in the changing rooms at the local swimming pool.

The official sex education talk came from Mr Mott, our Rhodesian science teacher with tiny red eyes and a sandy white beard who threatened to whack us with his ‘paddle stick’ should we do so much as snigger at the mention of a spermatozoa. The science room, a poky basement that stank of ammonia and chlorine, was always hot, and he decided to give us the lesson on an unseasonably close autumn morning.

‘Your bodies will be goin’ through many changes,’ he shouted, marching up and down the room and intermittently bashing a pre-adolescent head with the paddle stick. ‘You will be gittin’ pubic hair. You will find your pinnis goin’ hard at inappropriate moments. You will develop fillings for a gil, or, in some cases, a led.’

‘Yeah, Sultanpur,’ said Christopher Tobias.

Mr Mott allowed himself a little smile. ‘Settle down, you bunch of jissies. Right then. We will now be looking it the female initomy.’

It was so hot, and it had been such a long time since I had had anything to drink, that I began to feel faint. I dared not ask Mr Mott to be excused; that would be asking for trouble. Instead, I tried to concentrate on the matter at hand. ‘Look at this vigina,’ Mr Mott barked, tapping the diagram projected above his head with his paddle stick. Hodgkinson, you little creep, git up here and blerry well locate the clitoris.’

My head was swimming with the heat, but to ignore an order from Mr Mott was to sign your schoolboy death warrant. I stood up quickly. And that’s when the blackout must have happened. The next thing I knew I was lying on the floor while the school nurse, a young blonde woman with large lips and a concerned but accommodating manner, fanned me with a copy of It’s OK to Say No.

It was left to the adult world, the world of parents, to provide clues about what went on between men and women, and the real evidence came at our first party at 99, Queens Road. It was on Bonfire Night, a tradition that brought out the best in Nev because of his deep and profound love for blowing things up, fireworks, fire, destruction and chaos in general. And he really outdid himself that year. Alongside getting a huge box of Chinese fireworks with deceptively delicate names like ‘Lotus Blossom in Spring’ and ‘Floating Stars in the Night Sky’, he took us to Hamley’s to find something special. He found it. The Flying Pigeon was an enormous construction that looked like five sticks of strung-together dynamite. It came with a long rope on which it zipped backwards and forwards.

Nev scratched his chin as he studied the Flying Pigeon. ‘This does look pretty good. But it’s very expensive, and it does say that it’s designed for major displays only and definitely not garden parties …’

‘But Nev. Imagine seeing that thing in action.’

A mischievous grin coursed over Nev’s face. The battle for the Flying Pigeon was over. He was powerless in the face of pyrotechnic mayhem.

The party would be a chance to see our parents’ friends again. Among our favourites were Anne and Pete, an actress and a globetrotting businessman who had been our next-door neighbours in the old house until moving to a run-down vicarage in Faversham in Kent. Despite Anne and Pete not having kids, their home had its own games room complete with table football, a fruit machine from the 1940s and all manner of mechanical automata. Every time Pete came back from a work trip to the States he returned with unusual and unavailable toys, for us and for himself.

‘He was always larger than life,’ Mum said of Pete, as she put trays of baked potatoes into the oven. ‘He had an MG when he was at university, while the rest of us were trying to scrape enough to get a bicycle. He’s one of those working class Yorkshiremen that just know how to make money. He was chasing after me for a while. Not that I was interested. Nev may have his faults, but at least he’s got long legs.’

Guests filtered in. Tom and I were on drinks duties. Tom, wearing a black velvet jacket and a clip-on bowtie, took to the job with a lot more enthusiasm than I did, possibly because it gave him a chance to harangue every new person who came along with his latest thoughts on literary theory, advancements in physics and all-round egghead boffin theorizing.

‘Yes, yes … our mother struggles with the great writers,’ he said to one woman in a silver tiara and a plunge-neck ball gown, as he offered her a prawn cocktail. ‘She can manage Jane Austen and the like, but forget about Proust. Beyond her.’

The house filled up. There always seemed to be a woman with a hand on Nev’s shoulder, leaning forward and laughing with him about something. I carried trays of champagne into the drawing room, and all the glasses got whisked away in a flash. Some adults, usually men, took a glass without bothering to look at me; others, usually women, seemed charmed by the idea of an 11-year-old waiter and thanked me effusively and called me a darling child. With typical flamboyance, Pete brought a crate of champagne and a trade-sized jar of pink and white marshmallow sweets called Flumps. I poured half of the Flumps into a bowl and offered them around, along with the champagne. The Flumps did not prove appealing to adults so I decided to eat a lot of them myself, just so they didn’t feel unpopular.

Sandy and John Chubb arrived. John Chubb was some sort of a lord and Sandy, although a working-class girl who had left school at fifteen, had the plummiest voice of anyone I knew: rich, low and gracious. They lived in a huge house in Oxford with two toddlers, where John Chubb spent his weekends windsurfing and Sandy taught yoga in high security prisons, which always struck me as a dangerous career choice for this most glamorous of women. Sandy, looking regal with her thick black hair tied into a bun and a diamond necklace dazzling at her long swanlike neck, came up to Tom and me with presents, even though it wasn’t our birthdays: an album each. She got Tom Transformer by Lou Reed and me Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) by David Bowie. We stared at the cover photographs of these bizarre men, transfixed.

Sandy sat down with us by the record player and put on the Lou Reed album. On the back was a photograph of a butch man and a sexy woman. ‘Which one is Lou Reed?’ I asked her, through a mouthful of Flumps.

Sandy looked at me meaningfully. ‘They both are, Will dear. It’s all about transvestites, and hustlers, and other exotic people from the New York Underworld.’

‘But what are they doing there in the first place?’ I asked her, wondering where on earth the short, muscular, strutting man and the pouting, slender woman would fit in employment-wise to the New York Underworld, which I assumed was America’s equivalent of the London Underground. I certainly couldn’t imagine them in the ticket office.

‘It’s a very different scene over there. Anyway, have a listen to this.’

A song called ‘Vicious’ came on, to roars of approval from the guests. Annie started shimmying with a bearded man, Sandy got up and tried to make a reluctant-but-amused John Chubb dance, Mum was saying something about everyone being so bloody conventional and Pete was cornered by a curvaceous woman who was pressing her considerable cleavage up against him, causing his eyebrows to raise in tandem with the glass of beer in his hand.

I continued to fulfill my role as champagne and Flumps waiter until the Flumps ran out, which was strange because nobody had actually wanted one. Apart from a single Flump that Tom had picked up, stared at, and attempted to jam up my nose, I had, I realized, eaten the lot of them.

Nev appeared, charcoal marks on his sports jacket. ‘OK everybody, let’s go outside. I’ve lit the bonfire.’

It was a huge, bright red pyramid, stacked high with dried branches, planks, an old wooden chair and a punk-themed Guy Fawkes effigy at the top (punks being déclassé in 1981). Nev, Tom and I had been building it for days, adding anything that would burn, and now it was a mighty inferno. Mum brought out the tray of baked potatoes while Nev tied the rope for the Flying Pigeon between the apple tree and a pole holding up the washing line, and I, regretting having stuffed myself with Flumps for the last hour, sat down on the grass and leaned against the large wooden box containing all the fireworks and clutched my stomach.

This was the kind of party I liked, even if I was beginning to wish Flumps had never been invented. There was nothing better than Nev having fun because he spread it in our direction. He liked the same things as us: building dens in the woods, making fires, playing board games and going on Magical Mystery Tours to the local fun fair. He was clearly good adult company too, because all these interesting, lively people wanted to be with him. Mum didn’t like any child-related activities and she probably never had, but she enjoyed a party, while Tom relished having a bunch of adults around on whom to test out his maturity. I was overhearing him declaiming to a silent listener about the life of Dr Johnson, and Mum telling someone about her latest article on why she would rather be interviewing a top celebrity in a fancy cocktail bar than being bored at home looking after her children, when Nev appeared.

‘Sturchos,’ he said, grinning down at me excitedly, ‘I’m going to get it all going with the Flying Pigeon. Want to come over here with me to get a good view?’

‘You go ahead,’ I moaned, waving him away. ‘I think I’ve eaten something that disagrees with me. I’ll just stay here for a bit.’

Nev bounded off, telling everyone to clear the line of fire. If only I didn’t feel like I was going to send a hundred half-digested Flumps hurtling towards the ground I would have been up there with him, as Nev’s passion for anything involving fire and the destruction it wrought was matched only by my own. It was terrible to think that I wouldn’t be close to the mayhem – Nev was much more fun than most fathers because health and safety had never been at the top of his priorities – but my conviction was that if I just sat still for a couple of minutes I could recover from this unfortunate situation in time to enjoy the rest of the party, not to mention the rest of the fireworks in the box behind me.

‘OK everyone,’ said Nev, sparking the wick of the Flying Pigeon with a disposable lighter. ‘Here we go …’

The wick fizzed and sparked. People cheered. There was a high-pitched squeal, like it really was a pigeon whose tail had just been set on fire. A shower of sparks burst out. The pigeon took flight, zipping along the rope, spinning around and sending multicoloured rays of exploding gunpowder out into the night sky … and then it stopped. It fizzled out. Only one of the sticks of gunpowder had been used up.

Nev went to examine his prize item, poking around it to discover that the connection between the first stick and the rest had been broken. ‘Well, I’m not going to see that go to waste,’ he said, and before anyone could tell him not to he ripped the Flying Pigeon off the rope and chucked it onto the bonfire.

It sat there for a few seconds, before blasting into the air in a flash of colour. Then it turned and headed down, straight towards me. There were screams. Nev was running towards it, pipe-cleaner legs leaping forward. It looked like it was going to come down right on top of me – and then it was gone. But I could still hear it fizzing away. Where did it go? It all happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to get up and run before I realized.

From the open-mouthed faces of the people all staring at me, it looked like they had realized too. It was in the box of fireworks.

‘Will, get out of the way!’ shouted Nev. He almost made it over, but it was too late: the chaos began. A rocket screamed its way out of the box and headed straight towards Pete’s admirer, who displayed a nimbleness her curves belied and leapt into a rhododendron bush. A Catherine Wheel span wildly and helicoptered along the ground towards John Chubb’s titled ankles. A psychedelic Mount Vesuvius of dynamite exploded everywhere. I put my hands over my head and crouched as World War III broke out on a suburban lawn. Every time I peeked through my fingers, another firework had escaped. People were running, shouting useless warnings to each other and generally dissolving into panic. There was a red roar behind me for what seemed like ages (actually about a minute). Then it stopped.

I poked my head out. John Chubb and Pete were standing alert and looking up as if defending the party from an airborne invasion. People emerged from behind trees. There were groans but no injuries. I didn’t appear to be hurt.

There was one more explosion, followed by a whizzing sound and the sight of a single white light, floating silently in the night sky, mingling with the stars. It was a parachute firework. I looked up, and then looked at Nev, who was staring at this peaceful, brilliant light in contemplative wonder. He wore an expression I hadn’t seen before: transported and spiritual. He was motionless.

Then he shook himself into action and ran and picked me up from the ground.

‘Sturch! Are you all right?’

‘All right? That was the best fireworks display ever!’

What a dad. Who else could cause a grown-up party to descend into such anarchy? Unfortunately other guests, particularly the women, did not share my enthusiasm. They rounded on Nev as one, screaming at him for almost committing them to a lifetime of blindness and singed hair. And why was his poor son lying there next to an arsenal of lethal fireworks? To see Nev, perspiration clouding up his metal-framed glasses, twitching at his tank top as an army of harridans led by his wife accused him of something approaching child murder was far more disturbing than anything that had happened before.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ shrieked Mum, the ferocity of her coal-black eyes made a little less scary by the fragment of Roman Candle jutting from her bouffant, ‘Will could have been killed.’

‘But I’m fine,’ I shouted.

‘You keep out of this,’ she shouted back. ‘Honestly, Nev, sometimes I think you must have gone round the bend.’

Mum and Pete’s wife Annie went back into the house, arms linked, shooting Nev freezing glances over their shoulders. Pete and John Chubb told Nev not to worry, that nobody was hurt, and that women were mad anyway. Tom stood up, brushed down his velvet jacket, and walked towards the house with his hands clasped behind his back, kicking up dust with his shoes as he resumed his soliloquy on Dr Johnson.

‘Don’t listen to them, Nev,’ I said, as we stood next to each other by the bonfire and watched the flames dance. ‘You did them all a favour. That’s going to be the fireworks night everyone remembers for the rest of their life.’

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.

2

The Boat Holiday

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.