‘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: