Will Hodgkinson - The House is Full of Yogis

Borough

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright Will Hodgkinson 2014

Will Hodgkinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Cover photographs Shutterstock.com

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007514632

Ebook Edition June 2014 ISBN: 9780007514618

Version: 2015-02-06

Once upon a time in the 1980s, The Hodgkinsons were just like any other family.

Liz and Neville lived with their sons, Tom and Will, in a semi-detached house in the suburbs of Southwest London. Neville was an award-winning medical correspondent. Liz was a high-earning tabloid journalist. Friends and neighbours turned up to their parties clutching bottles of Mateus Ros. Then, while recovering from a life-threatening bout of food poisoning, Neville had a Damascene revelation.

Life was never the same again.

Out went drunken dinner parties and Victorian dcor schemes. In came hordes of white-clad Yogis meditating in the living room and lectures on the forthcoming apocalypse. Liz took the opportunity to wage all-out war on convention, from denouncing motherhood as a form of slavery to promoting her book Sex Is Not Compulsory on television chat shows, just when Will was discovering girls for the first time.

Will Hodgkinson grew up in a larger-than-life family. His father, Neville, was an award-winning science writer until he received a calling from the Brahma Kumaris in 1983. He currently lives with them on a retreat in Oxfordshire. His mother, Liz, continues to write for the Daily Mail. His brother, Tom, created the Idler. As well as working as the rock and pop critic for The Times, Will decided it was high-time to record his familys colourful story. Will lives in southeast London with his wife and two children.

A touching account of a family thrust by mid-life crisis into meditation and spiritual awakening [A] sweet, quirkish gem of a memoir an affecting, and very funny, evocation of adolescence

Mick Brown, Telegraph

A My Family and Other Middle-Class Animals let loose in the jungle of Thatchers suburban Britain. The result is a howlingly entertaining memoir that is raw, affectionate and, unbelievably, true

Helen Davies, Sunday Times

[A] charming, entertaining book

Melanie Reid, The Times

I have been banned from reading in bed as it makes me laugh out loud too much Punishingly funny, and wonderfully written

Rachel Johnson, Mail on Sunday

Endearing

Ben East, Observer

[Hodgkinson] has a lovely, light style his set pieces are very funny He is attentive to the minute social divisions that define the British middle classes its a relief to read a memoir that is so affectionate, so moan-free, so reluctant to apportion blame

Rachel Cooke, New Statesman

An utterly charming, funny and touching memoir

Sathnam Sanghera, author of Marriage Material

A rip-roaringly funny read

Viv Groskop, Red Magazine

Thoughtful, heartfelt and so well drawn [It] deserves to become as well loved as My Family and Other Animals

Travis Elborough, author of London Bridge in America

I laughed until I levitated

Jarvis Cocker

For Nev, Mum and Tom

Some names have been changed.

(But most have stayed the same.)

Contents

I dont believe it, said Mum.

She was scratching at two cables of ancient wire sticking out of a dusty hole in the brickwork next to the peeling green paint of the front door, after the Volvo had wobbled over the rubble-strewn drive and come to a shaky halt. Theyve even taken the bloody doorbell.

A year before our father had his Damascene moment, we moved into our first big home.

99, Queens Road was a semi-detached, four-bedroom house on the edge of Richmond, Surrey, which our parents bought for 30,000 from an older couple called the Philpotts. There was no central heating in 99, Queens Road, nor was there a kitchen to speak of; just a Baby Belling cooker, a rattling old fridge and a twin-tub washing machine stranded in the centre of the room like a maiden aunt who had turned up two decades earlier and never left. There was a milk hatch cut into the outside wall that had come free of its hinges.

The Philpotts, who called their 42-year-old sons room The Nursery and who claimed to speak Ancient Greek on Sundays, had ripped out pretty much everything but the bricks. The carpets had gone. There were no light bulbs. If you opened cupboards you found only empty spaces, suggesting the Philpotts had even filched the shelves.

Come on Sturch, said my father Nev, using a nickname with a derivation long forgotten. It might have had something to do with Lurch, the monstrously ugly butler from The Addams Family. Lets go and explore upstairs.

In our old house, my brother Tom and I shared a bedroom, which was less than ideal because of our very different approaches to being children. One Christmas Eve, I came upstairs after kissing our parents goodnight, fully intending to obey Nevs gentle command to go to sleep and wait until the morning to see what Santa Claus had brought, knowing I would wake up at three and feel around in the dark for the happy weight of a stocking at the end of my bed. Tom was in there already, constructing an elaborate arrangement of strings and levers. When I asked him what he was doing he told me not to question things I wouldnt understand.

All was revealed around midnight. When Nev walked in, stockings laden with toys, a hammer hit the light switch, pulling a network of strings running up the wall and activating a camera next to Toms bed. Nevs hair turned into a wild frizz at the shock of it. Satisfied with having disproven the existence of Santa Claus once and for all, Tom dozed off until eight oclock. He was nine years old.

That was four years ago. Out of the way, Scum, said Tom, pushing me aside as he hunched up the stairs of the new house. He looked at the bedroom facing the street, lay down on the single bed the removal men had put in there half an hour earlier, pulled out of his pocket a copy of George Orwells 1984, and said without looking up, Oh, do get out of my room.

There is a photograph in our family album of Tom, an insouciant four-year-old, kicking back in a rusty toy car while I, only two and already so outraged at lifes unfairness that my nappy is exploding out of my shorts, try in vain to push him along. It says it all, really.