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’.
He filled up the boat with petrol and, after thanking the couple that had helped us, glided it out of the marina just before the marina closed. That evening we moored near Hampton Court, where Henry VIII had chopped off the head of Anne Boleyn in order to make way for the significantly more docile Jane Seymour, and ate fish and chips on the bank of the river, Mum sitting a little apart from the rest of us. She stayed by the boat while Nev, Tom, Dominic, Will and me went walking along the Thames. We found a rope, attached to a high bough of a tree, hanging down at the point where the raised bank met the river. Nev swung out on it, manoeuvring his middle-aged but slender body onto the seat of the rope and taking off over the water. Dominic made French-sounding whoops. Will Lee, being small, shot out across the river as if catapulted. Tom somehow managed to step on and off the rope with the same air of indifference he might have had catching the bus on his way to school.
‘Suppose we’d better get back,’ said Nev with a sigh, after an hour of rope swinging and peace.
As Tom, Dominic, Will and I played a game of Monopoly that night, we could hear Nev and Mum talking in the cabin next door. This time, however, it was Nev doing most of the talking. ‘Look at the woman who made me a cup of tea, after I almost caught hypothermia untangling the mess you made,’ he said. ‘That’s the kind of woman I respect. Rather than interfering and criticizing the whole time, she was supportive and helpful. What good have you done on this holiday? You’ve gone out of your way to be as silly as possible; to try and do things you can’t do just to prove a point. And it all went wrong.’
‘I have to stand up for feminism.’
‘Where were your feminist credentials when it was time to dive under the boat? Or are you going to tell me that’s a man’s job? Why didn’t you prove the equality of the sexes when I almost froze to death untangling the ropes and drinking gallons of river water? It’s got nothing to do with feminism. It’s all about your ego and your silly, childish pride and your need to show everyone that you’re the boss, even when you don’t have a … a ruddy clue about what you’re meant to be doing. You don’t stand for anything. You just can’t bear it when the attention is on someone else.’
We sat in the uneasy silence that followed.
‘The main reason I wanted to get a scholarship to Westminster,’ said Tom, as he bought the first hotel of the game, ‘is so I can become a boarder and get away from these people. I was born into this family by mistake.’
‘My muzzer,’ said Dominic, ‘she was to make sex with all of London in the time of the ’ippy.’
For the rest of the trip, our parents communicated with each other through a series of grunts. Torturing insects lost its appeal for Will and me while Dominic cried for most of the following night, tormented by homesickness. ‘Imagine your family is just like ours, but a tiny bit worse,’ Tom recommended. ‘Then being here will become a whole lot more bearable.’
Nev let all of us boys drive the boat on the last three days of our water-bound adventure. Mum sat at the back, still with her nose in the air but now, if not exactly contemplative, then at least quiet. We never made it to the London of Dominic’s dreams, turning back before we got to Richmond, but his guidebook did feature Windsor Castle, and we were heading straight for it.
‘Regardez,’ said Tom to Dominic, as the castle came into view. ‘La Reine habite ici.’
‘And now at the last time,’ said Dominic excitedly, ‘I am getting to see ze real England. Ze England of terrible wars and battles for ze power of ze throne.’
Tom looked at him and said: ‘What do you think you’ve been getting for the last week?’
It was a bright day. Nev managed to moor the boat without causing any further damage. Dominic led the way towards the castle. A large boy in shorts walked past holding two Mr Whippy ice creams, which he took it in turns to lap at: Mum watched him go by, opened her mouth as if about to pass comment, and appeared to think better of it. An elderly couple in grey anoraks sat on a bench by the towpath, a foot away from each other, silently watching the river. Two boys played Frisbee with their father. A couple, younger than our parents, lay on the lawn outside the castle, throwing a gurgling, smiling baby into the air.
Dominic, at least, was happy. We were there for the Changing of the Guard, we went up the Round Tower that was built in the reign of Henry II, and we managed to get quite close to Queen Mary’s dolls’ house. A blue-rinsed authority figure shouted at me after I rapped on the breastplate of a suit of armour once worn by Prince Hal. Will Lee found a spider amidst the gilded splendour of the State Apartments. He picked it up by a leg and hurtled it towards a Van Dyck. Nev bought Dominic a guidebook. Tom informed the woman at the information desk that the guidebook contained an aberrant apostrophe.
Mum had a coffee and a cigarette in the café. She had taken up smoking again.
We arrived back at the boat harbour that evening. The man looked over the Kingston Cavalier III and kept saying ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear’, shaking his head as he itemized the damages with Nev. He told Nev that the bill for repairs was likely to be around two thousand pounds. Nev raised a hand to his furrowed forehead and nodded. He looked at Mum, clenched his fist, and let it fall limply open.
As the