The drive from our house in south-east London to Mum’s flat in Oxford should have only taken an hour and a half, but a snow shower turned into a blizzard, the M40 froze into a vast slab of blackened ice, lorries jack-knifed across the lanes and our ancient, unheated Saab gave up trying to grip the road altogether. We were marooned.
It was the day before Christmas Eve. Our son Otto, eleven, and our daughter Pearl, nine, shivered in the back of the car while I called the AA and my wife NJ begged a coach driver to let her use his toilet. (He wouldn’t.) We were visiting Mum before heading down to Cornwall to stay with NJ’s parents, where we would enjoy a traditional Christmas in front of the telly. And I could picture Mum pacing her flat, straightening place mats, checking her phone every few minutes. She didn’t like it when plans went awry.
Strangely, Mum had chosen to move to a place not far from her former husband. A decade earlier, Nev made his final act of surrender. He gave up his job, sold his flat in Kensington, handed over the entire proceeds to the Brahma Kumaris and with twenty other Yogis moved in to the Global Retreat Centre, a grand stately home in Oxfordshire formerly owned by Rothmans, the cigarette company. On becoming a permanent resident of the Centre, Nev, no longer a groundbreaking and controversial science and medical correspondent, was assigned an official household appointment by the Brahma Kumaris. He was in charge of cleaning the men’s toilets.
Mum’s flat was a fifteen-minute drive from the Centre, although she certainly wasn’t near it for the meditation. In the years after she and Nev split up, Mum forged on with her career. She followed up Sex Is Not Compulsory with an even more incendiary rant called Unholy Matrimony: The Case Against Marriage. She tried to make it a hat-trick of outrage with a proposed book called Do You Really Want Children?, which might make a son feel unwanted if he didn’t realize he had a mother who would knock out any old stuff if someone was willing to pay for it. (In this case, they weren’t.) She moved from her maisonette in Ladbroke Grove to a house in Shepherds Bush to a mansion block in Worthing before settling in Oxford, making money almost as quickly as Nev managed to shed it along the way.
After a breakdown truck ended our nine-hour motorway purgatory, we made it to Mum’s flat, a spotless advertisement for single-woman living: its high-end kitchen featured every utility a person with absolutely no interest in cooking could wish for and its living room had a state-of-the-art 3-D and surround-sound television promising to enhance Mum’s home entertainment experience, just as soon as she worked out how to use it. And for this pre-Christmas family get-together, she was allowing Nev to come over.
‘I’ll never forgive him for cutting you and Tom out of his will and leaving everything to the Yogis, but what’s done is done,’ she said, popping open a bottle of Prosecco as the children, changed into their pyjamas, clutched mugs of hot chocolate. ‘You have to move on.’
Despairing of the oversized beige anorak, brown polyester trousers and Cornish-pasty-like shoes he wore on a daily basis, Mum had also taken Nev shopping.
‘There’s no reason why he has to look like he’s just escaped from a lunatic asylum,’ she said, shaking pizzas off a baking tray and onto the children’s plates. ‘So when I went to John Lewis to get Otto and Pearl’s Christmas presents I took him with me. I bought him a nice cotton shirt, a smart tweed jacket, a pair of brogues and some jeans to replace those shapeless brown monstrosities he insists on wearing. And do you know what? He doesn’t look half bad. Because he hasn’t had a drink in 25 years and he spends most of his life meditating, he’s actually quite handsome … for an old man.’
‘Are you spending Christmas Day with Grandpa Nev, Granny Liz?’ asked Otto, through a mouthful of pizza.
‘No, I am not,’ she told him as she slammed the oven door shut. ‘I did last year, at the Global Retreat Centre, and it was the most miserable Christmas ever. The BKs may be good at penetrating the inner core of their beings, but they don’t know how to throw a party. There was a lecture on the importance of peace in the world and not a glass of wine to be found.’
‘Where is Grandpa Nev?’ asked Pearl. ‘Shouldn’t he be here already?’
As if by Yogi magic, the bell went. The children ran to open the door and there he was, covered in snow, a plastic bag filled with presents in his hand, a Nevvy grin awaiting his grandchildren – and he was wearing his beige anorak, baggy brown trousers and Cornish pasty shoes. Mum screamed.
‘What have you done to the lovely new jacket and shirt and trousers and shoes I bought you?’
‘It’s the strangest thing,’ he said gently, taking off his shoes and anorak outside the flat so he didn’t get any snow on Mum’s new cream carpet. ‘Karma decreed that I was not to possess such beautiful clothes, but merely to have them on loan for a week and a half.’
I looked at Mum. Odin, God of War came to mind.
Nev sat down by the table in the kitchen and cheerfully announced, ‘I lost them.’
Once Mum calmed down enough to let Nev say he thought he might have left his jacket in Birmingham, at a conference on spiritual empowerment, he then told us he had ended up walking eight miles through the snow to join us after his car wouldn’t start and a bus was nowhere to be found. ‘Actually, it was quite delightful,’ he said brightly, as the children darted off into the living room and worked out how to use the 3-D and surround-sound television in the time it took to find the remote control. ‘The country lanes of Oxfordshire were transformed into a winter wonderland.’
‘I’m glad they were so wonderful,’ said Mum, ‘because you’ll be having a winter wander back along them soon.’
‘Can’t I stay the night?’
‘Absolutely not. There’s nowhere for you to go and besides, I don’t want you using up my milk with your endless demands for cups of tea. Who knows when this snowstorm will end and I’ll be able to drive down to the shops again? You’ll just have to trudge back from whence you came.’
Mum did indeed boot Nev out into the cold that night, but he accepted his fate with equanimity, zipping up the beige anorak and pulling a woolly hat down until it met his metal-framed glasses before disappearing into the black.
The following morning, we drove to the centre, slowly, quietly, over the gritted roads cutting through woods and fields hidden by snow. Our car pulled up in front of the grand house and Nev appeared, rushing out to meet us.
‘Quickly,’ he said in an urgent whisper. ‘Follow me.’
He took us to a side door and darted down a long corridor, which ended with steps going into a basement. ‘We’ve got a retreat on and most people will be going to the canteen from the main entrance,’ he said, puffing through the labyrinthine twists and turns of the basement as the children struggled to keep up with him. ‘This way, we’ll jump the queue.’
A smiling Indian woman in a white sari served us rice, dhal and chapattis, and we took our trays to a room in the basement filled with fellow Global Retreat Centre residents, who kept bringing Otto and Pearl gifts: chocolate biscuits, Christmas crackers, BK souvenirs. Few of the Indian sisters had children of their own. They couldn’t help themselves.
Just as Nev was imploring Otto to at least try the dhal, new age music filtered through speakers on the walls. This was for a routine called Traffic Control: for a minute on the hour, everyone stopped what they were doing for a quick reflection on the eternity of the soul. We sat in silence, the children familiar with the drill. When it finished, Otto said, ‘Were you OK last night, Grandpa Nev?’
‘It was a bit mean of Granny Liz to chuck you out,’ added Pearl, ‘but you shouldn’t have lost the new clothes she bought you.’
‘Oh, I had an amazing journey,’ he replied. ‘There were no buses, so I just walked ever so slowly back home. I did get lost for a while, and it did take me longer than I expected, but every time I felt tired I just rested underneath a tree and looked out onto the fields of pure virgin snow under the twinkling stars of the night sky, and I was fine again.’
‘When did you get back?’ asked NJ.
‘Four in the morning. Just in time for the first meditation of the day.’
After lunch, despite his seven-hour hike through the cold and the wet, Nev found the energy to take the children for a ride in the golf buggy the elderly sisters used to get around the grounds. ‘We probably shouldn’t drive it in the heavy snow,’ said Nev, before doing exactly that. We zig-zagged through silver birches and hemlocks garlanded with icicles, past a hawthorn bush where a robin watched us with twitching curiosity, down the long, wide lawn leading to the River Thames, silent witness to our disastrous family boat holiday almost three decades previously. And when Otto and Pearl asked if they could ride the buggy by themselves, Nev let them. Otto promptly pressed down the accelerator and shot off towards a large oak. The buggy careered out of control and slid down the hill before coming to an abrupt halt against the tree, causing a mini-avalanche to thud down onto the buggy and the children inside it.
Nev bounded towards them. ‘Kids! Are you all right?’
Otto and Pearl crawled out of the buggy, knocking off clumps of snow from their heads, and shouted in unison: ‘All right? That was the best Yogi golf buggy ride ever!’
‘I hope none of the sisters saw us,’ said Nev, pulling the buggy out of the snowdrift into which it had sunk as he looked around for witnesses. ‘I’ll get into terrible trouble if they find out.’
While NJ took Otto and Pearl back to the house to dry off and warm up, I told Nev about meeting a man who, without knowing it, had a part to play in the story of our family. For the last decade or so I had been making a living as a music journalist, and I had recently interviewed Cat Stevens, the soulful, introspective Seventies songwriter whose album Teaser and the Firecat formed a soundtrack to Tom’s and my pre-Brahma-Kumari childhood. In 1977, four years before Nev met the BKs, Cat Stevens became a devout Muslim. He changed his name to Yusuf Islam and gave up music entirely, but shortly before my interview he had started to perform concerts again. It felt like a thawing-out; a reconciliation between his religious beliefs and his past reality as a gifted songwriter with something to offer the world.
‘He was my hero,’ said Nev, puffing behind the golf buggy as we pushed it up the hill. ‘I must have felt that his music revealed him to be a kindred spirit, because on those records he was searching for something and so was I. And although he might have made some silly mistakes, and he became a bit of a zealot, at least he really did it. He didn’t compromise. He knew there had to be sacrifices.’
We reached the top of the hill, where it was safe to switch the buggy on again and drive it back to its garage around the side of the house without incurring the spiritually pure indignation of the sisters. Nev asked how family life was treating us. I told him I was worried about the usual things: money, the future, where it was all going to end.
‘Really, Will,’ said Nev, putting his hands on my shoulders and looking at me with a calm smile, a hint of sadness dulling the edges of his eyes, ‘don’t. Don’t worry about anything. It’s such a trap. Look at how wonderful Otto and Pearl are. Look at what you’ve got with NJ. You have everything you need. If you can find the strength to live in the present, you’ll find that nothing else matters.’
On Christmas Day, as the children sat immersed in the aftermath of the present-opening orgy, NJ helped her mother get the turkey out of the oven, and her father dozed off with a glass of sherry in his favourite armchair, I called Mum.
‘Oh yes, I’m fine,’ she replied, when I asked her if she was happy spending Christmas on her own. ‘I’ve got a glass of wine and a book. By the way, Tom called from Devon. They’re completely snowed in. Trapped. Trapped in that house of horror.’
Tom lived in a tumbledown farmhouse on the wilds of Exmoor with his wife, three children and an ever-changing array of animals, in which he barricaded himself with crates of Barn Owl ale and reams of books, and published The Idler, his magazine extolling the virtues of whatever he happened to be interested in at the time. Mum hated the farmhouse, taking personally Tom’s decision to live in close proximity to so much mud, but our children loved going down there, even if Tom did once call Pearl a silly girl for leaving the gate open and letting his old horse Moona wander out into the farmer’s fields before realizing who the real culprit was: himself. Nev described life in the farmhouse as ‘a wonderfully liberating environment … even if watching a chicken getting served up on the very table it was hopping about on earlier that day takes some getting used to.’
‘You’re not lonely, are you?’ I asked Mum, thinking of how, after a lifetime of telling us that Christmas is just an excuse for people to be silly and sentimental and waste a load of money on each other, she had written an article for the Daily Mail about how miserable she was spending Christmas on her own now that her horrible sons had forgotten their poor old mum and preferred to enjoy the season roasting chestnuts, carving turkey and singing hearty carols in the yielding bosoms of their wives’ families.
‘Actually,’ Mum replied, ‘Nev’s here. He’s got that awful car of his working again so he drove over this morning. We’re going to go for a walk along the river.’
‘I thought you said you couldn’t bear to spend another Christmas with Nev.’
‘Did the children like their presents?’
Mum’s power of selective hearing was definitely improving with age.
This was how the Hodgkinsons saw in Christmas, long-divorced parents spending it together and their sons off with their young families. I wanted to tell Mum and Nev that I loved them, that I appreciated everything they had done for us, but we’ve never been an emotional family and for four people who never stop talking, we don’t actually like to say too much. So I put the children on the phone instead, and I thought of Nev, bumbling along the river bank and saying how everything was beautiful, and Mum, snapping at him for losing all his nice new clothes, and Tom, holed up in his country farmhouse with a jug of Barn Owl ale, holding forth on some theory or other, and I decided that, all things considered, we hadn’t turned out too badly.