The House is Full of Yogis by Will Hodgkinson
Posted: 04 Jun 2014
Below is review of new book title 'The House is Full of Yogis' in The Times newspaper UK. The book is by Mr Will Hodgkinson, a son to BK Neville Hodgkinson. I think would be a good read.
The House Is Full of Yogis by Will Hodgkinson
Melanie Reid Published at 12:10AM, May 31 2014
Worse things can happen, but this was bad enough. In 1983 a well-off middle-class white family from Richmond fell into the clutches of an Indian religious sect. The takeover was more peaceful than sinister, more humorous than harmful, but it was nevertheless an invasion which, as related in a wry memoir by the youngest child, certainly justifies the subtitle The Story of a Childhood Turned Upside Down.
Will Hodgkinson is the rock and pop critic for The Times, a job for which he has impeccable bloodlines. His upbringing was privileged, liberal and unconventional: his baby-boomer parents were well known newspaper journalists; his mother also wrote feminist books about sex; and he called his Father Nev, not dad. As CVs go, that’s a cool one.
Seismic change came when Will was 12 and his Father, who yearned for a deeper meaning to life than that offered by The Daily Mail, met an Indian swami at a press conference and tried five minutes of meditation. He came home and announced that a golden red light had entered his forehead and “... the bliss that accompanied it was unlike anything”.
But the bliss was to be Nev’s alone. The arrival of the mystic Brahma Kumaris was the end of life as his wife and two sons had known it. Out went fun-sized Mars bars, in came visits from intense people wearing white saris, enforced group meditation, dubious vegetable thali and lumps of toli, “sugary, sticky lumps of oddness”. Will found it strange and uncomfortable and missed the old Nev.
“All I wanted, and I don’t think it was too much to ask, was for everything to return to the way it was.” Instead, it just got worse. They bought a bigger house, where Nev and the Brahma Kumaris took over the ground floor. The mystics preached celibacy and spiritualism; Will tried to meditate accordingly but always ended up thinking about girls instead. Supposedly to escape the weirdness at home, he was shipped off to the progressive boarding school, Frensham Heights, where he merely learnt that his family actually weren’t that odd after all.
Adolescence held special trials. His mother wrote a book called Sex is Not Compulsoryand she and Nev espoused celibacy. They did so publicly, without telling their sons. The first Will knew of it, to his horror, was when they appeared on a TV chat show discussing their sex life, as he and his mates at boarding school were idly sitting watching. As the book created a media storm, a mortified Will sought refuge in music.
There is, therefore, a deep ambivalence at the heart of this charming, entertaining book: while it strives to be laugh-out-loud, what emerges is often more sad than funny. I suspect that in the end it reveals more bitter sweetness, and more of a sense of loss, than the author ever intended.
Love and respect for his parents plainly struggles with regret within the grown-up son who wrote the memoir. “Their selfishness, typical of an educated, post-war generation that put the individual above all else, played into our hands too ... our parents didn’t particularly know or care about what we were up to,” he says.
Hence the humour can sometimes feel contrived and there is an unavoidable, wistful sense of benign neglect. Were his parents really as dreadful and insensitive as they occasionally come across? The journalist mother - fellow writer mothers be warned - who is happy to exploit her family in public as long as it will make money. The self-preoccupied Father who is absent in spirit when most needed, forsaking his children not for another woman but for inner peace with strangers.
Isn’t every memoir, to some extent, either a conscious or unconscious act of revenge on one’s parents? Eventually the Brahma Kumaris got their man and his money. Nev went to live with them full time and Will’s parents divorced. One is left with the impression of a boy who, as a defence mechanism, has tried to turn an odd and sometimes painful upbringing into a cartoon.
Really, how much happier we would all be with ordinary, boring parents.