My Family, page 1
MY FAMILY
The memoir
David Baddiel
Copyright
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
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HarperCollinsPublishers
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2024
Copyright © David Baddiel 2024
Some of this material appeared in the show My Family: Not the Sitcom
Cover images courtesy of the author
David Baddiel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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St Petersburg synagogue image (eFesenko/Alamy Stock Photo); living room image (Andreas von Einsiedel/Alamy Stock Photo); Jenni Murray (Justin Williams/Shutterstock)
Source ISBN: 9780008487607
Ebook Edition © July 2024 ISBN: 9780008487621
Version: 2024-06-17
Dedication
For Ivor, and Dan
Epigraph
To really take the piss out of something, you have to love it.
– Julian Barratt
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
It’s, I’d guess …
Sarah
Sarah
My Family
Sarah
Fame
Sarah, Otti, Ernst
Golf
Sarah
Sarah and Colin
Sarah and David White
Sarah
Ivor and David White
Ivor
The Masters
Colin
Dinky Toys
Irene and Stuart
Comedy
Sarah and Colin
Sarah, Colin, Henry, Sylvia
Neglect
More Neglect
Zulaka
Dementia
Not Me
Colin
Sarah
Colin
Dan and Colin and Dolly
Colin
Sarah
Sarah
Colin, Peter Alliss
Colin
David White
Sarah
Colin
Colin
Cats
The Mother and the Father
Coda: Me
Picture Section
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by David Baddiel
About the Publisher
It’s, I’d guess, 1977. Which would make me thirteen. I’m in our back garden. Our back garden is a wilderness. It has a large tree in the middle that sheds a lot of leaves which never get raked. Beyond that is an area of mainly bald grass – mainly dried mud would be a better description – bounded by a hedge. In front of the hedge is a shit goal. I don’t mean a poor life-ambition. I mean a junior football goal, a toy, basically, with blue posts and orange netting. It has been out there for about four years at this point and is 97 per cent rust. The netting, although obviously originally holey, as netting tends to be, is full of holes.
I’m not playing football, though – despite that being the reason why I usually go into the garden. I’m facing the goal, but I don’t have a football. A man I don’t know that well is standing very close behind me. He has his arms wrapped tightly around me. He has his hands placed on top of my hands. He is asking me to swing my hips towards him.
It’s not abuse. In case you’re wondering. Well, maybe it’s a type of abuse, but it’s a very particular sort, and not the sort that normally crops up in a misery memoir. Which this isn’t. He’s got his arms wrapped around me and his hands on mine and he’s asking me to swing my hips towards him because I’m holding a golf club. By my feet is a golf ball. His name is David White, he is my mother’s lover and he’s doing his best to teach me how to play golf.
So yeah. It’s a type of abuse.
Sarah
My mother’s funeral took place at Golders Green Crematorium on 5 January 2015. She died on 20 December 2014, but a combination of grisly factors to do with her having to have an autopsy and Christmas – the juxtaposition of those two things feels wrong, but they were juxtaposed – meant she wasn’t actually sent to the flames until just over two weeks after she died.
A lot of people turned up, which is always a good sign at funerals. It suggests my mother had a lot of friends, which she did. I, however, only recognized a few: Norma Glass, Bill and Ruth Mulligan, Naomi and Tony Inwald. You don’t know these people and they aren’t going to feature much in this book, but I’m listing them because I find their names very evocative of growing up where and when I did – Dollis Hill, in north London, in the 1970s. I find something redolent of that time and place lies within the very sonics of the words Tony Inwald.
But most people at my mother’s funeral I didn’t know. She was someone who, at various stages in her life, had adopted different – and obsessive – personas. Her last, the one she chose for her sixties and seventies, was: Jew. This hadn’t not been her identity when she was younger, but it wasn’t on the front foot. In the early nineties, my parents split up – it’s amazing, you might find as you read on, that it took them so long – but they got back together at the turn of the century, and lived in Harrow, where my mum suddenly decided to become a big macher[fn1] at a nearby synagogue, Kol Chai. Kol Chai, in case you have a preconceived notion of what a synagogue looks like, does not look like this:
It looks like this:
Like a bit of Brookside Close that even Barry Grant would feel nervous about entering.[fn2] Its design does not speak, perhaps, to the deep mysticism and history of the Talmud. But it’s a sweet place, and my mum very much decided it was hers, and later in her life was forever organizing events there, trying to get me and my brothers and our kids to come along. She died on the same day that she had arranged, at Kol Chai, a Kaddish – a ceremony remembering the dead – for her own parents: a memorial she never made it to.
While waiting in the grounds of the crematorium, on a particularly pathetic-fallacy-observing funeral morning of grey skies and drizzle, I was approached by a group of older people, most of whom I assumed were members of Kol Chai. Up to this point, generally, when older Jews came up to me, I knew what they were going to say. They were going to say: ‘We really loved your Who Do You Think You Are?’[fn3] This is because older Jews were usually not that keen on the sweary and often not-very-nice-Jewish-boy style of comedy I had spent most of my career practitioning,[fn4] and so were overjoyed when I did a proper BBC 1 documentary with loads in it about Jewishness.
However, this group of older Jewish people didn’t say this. They said, first, ‘I wish you long life.’ Which is something Jews say at funerals. Some also said, ‘On simcha’, which means ‘on a feast day/joyous occasion’, i.e. that’s what I hope it is the next time we meet. Both indicate a very Jewish sense of deferred happiness, of accepting that now is bad but soon things’ll be better – and not in the next world, but here, in Golders Green, in Buchenwald. It also indicates something else Jewish, which is that Judaism has only a vague and ambiguous idea of the afterlife. Eternal bliss isn’t really a big deal for Jews; odd, given that it’s the cherry on the cake for most religions. Jews prefer their rewards and comforts, such as they are, in the here and now – in this life. And so they would wish it, in the face of death, long. They would wish their own death far away.
So they said: ‘I wish you long life.’ And then they said:
‘Your mother was a wonderful person.’
And, ‘She was wonderful.’
And, ‘Sarah was truly wonderful.’
On and on with the wonderful, already. I get it. It’s hard to know what to say at a funeral to mourning family members, and ‘she/he was wonderful’ is the safest of bets. But that day so many people whom I didn’t recognize told me my mother was a wonderful person that after a while it became disorientating.
I need at this point to say something about myself. I have what I consider to be an on-the-spectrum (apologies to anyone medically actually on the spectrum, but I do genuinely think the intensity of it is a little neuro-untypical) need to tell the truth. I know this sounds like boasting. I know it sounds like a thing Alan Partridge might say in a newspaper Q&A: ‘What’s your biggest failing?’ ‘Well, if I had to pick one, I’d say I was just too honest.’ Given all that, I still think it’s a real thing. I feel desperately uncomfortable not telling the exact truth, in detail, always. It’s one of the reasons why as a stand-up, I’m a very limited performer. I can’t do any accents, for example. Obviously, primarily, this is just a lack of talent. But when I try to do them it causes me a strange anxiety, and not only because I
To be clear, I’m not claiming this truth urge as David Baddiel’s big moral plus. It has no moral power for me at all. If anything, it seems incontinent, like I cannot contain small, disparate incongruities that most people hardly notice as they move through life. I’m aware: sometimes lying is helpful. Sometimes it spares people difficult emotions.
I used to tell a story onstage, demonstrating my reluctance to lie, through an example of one time I did. This is it:
I was googling something recently and my eight-year-old son was looking over my shoulder and for some reason – I assume because of something one of his friends had told him at school – said, ‘Dad, what would happen if we put the words “sexy ladies” into there?’ And I said … ‘I don’t know.’
It got a laugh. As a result, I was still doing the same gag a few months later. At which point it went:
I was googling something recently and my eight-year-old son – well, he was eight at the time, but he’s nine now – was looking over my shoulder …
This information about my son’s age doesn’t help the joke. It slows it down. It also dates the story. But I could never help myself. I always had to add the truth, to correct the story.
Lying, on the rare occasions I’ve tried to do it, tends not to work out well for me. In the early noughties, I did a sitcom on Sky called Baddiel’s Syndrome. It was not a hit and wasn’t recommissioned by the network. Sometime later at a restaurant I saw a group of people I knew who worked in TV and went over to their table to say hello. All the ones I knew said hello back. At the end of the table, a woman I didn’t recognize got up and said, ‘David! How nice to see you again!’ and gave me an enormous hug. I felt my usual instinct to tell the truth – to say, ‘Sorry, who are you?’ – but it would’ve been very awkward, so for once I swallowed the urge. I said, ‘Lovely to see you too!’ and returned the hug. She sat down, and the others started talking about recent developments at Sky television.
I said: ‘Oh yeah, I was just at Sky a couple of months ago when they cancelled my show. I had a terrible meeting with this fucking awful woman called Kate Barnes.’ At which point the woman who’d hugged me looked up and said, ‘I’m Kate Barnes.’
It was so embarrassing it was like time stopped. It’s hard to describe how I felt in that moment, or exactly what the scene was like – I was about to write ‘everyone stared at me’ – I think they did, but to be honest, all that’s in my memory is the sound of a long, piercing scream. After a couple of seconds, or possibly the entirety of the time-space continuum, I said:
‘I’m sorry.’
But I didn’t stop there. This is how I tried to make it better. I turned to Kate Barnes and said:
‘When I hugged you, I didn’t know who you were.’
I reverted, in other words, to my default position of just telling the bald truth. Judging by her expression, it didn’t help.
By the way, this woman is not called Kate Barnes. So, I can do it: I can change someone’s name to avoid embarrassing them or a libel case. I can, it seems, lie. I just feel bad doing it (particularly in the moment – it’s a bit easier in the recollection-in-tranquillity space of writing).
Plus her real name sounds really like Kate Barnes.
This digression is in the service of something, which is that, however polite it might have been for those older Jewish guests at my mother’s funeral to tell me she was wonderful, it rubbed up badly against my urge to tell the truth. It felt, to some extent, like a lie. Not least because the thing that bound together all these people telling me she was wonderful was that they didn’t really know her. Not in any sort of detail. And truth, of course, is in the detail.
My mother died very suddenly. It felt like an abrupt and profound erasure, a kind of vanishing. Then, the way she was being memorialized, here, at her funeral, felt to me like a second, even more profound erasure. When people die, the memory of who they were becomes sacred. We can only talk about them as having been wonderful people. But if all you can ever say about your dead relative is that he or she was wonderful, you might as well say nothing. To really preserve their memory – to be true to them, as I understand truth – you must call up their weirdness, their madness, their flaws. Because the dead, despite what we might like to think, are not angels.
Or to put it another way. As more and more grave-faced mourners shook my hand and mouthed the same platitudes, I found myself wanting to snap at them, angrily:
‘OK, what was her real first name?’
To which I imagine they would have looked confused. Maybe one of them would’ve said:
‘Pardon?’
‘If you knew her so well … what was her real first name?’
Bafflement. Perhaps some embarrassed sideways glancing. Eventually, I imagine, this imaginary conversation:
‘Um … Sarah?’
‘No. It was Frommet.’
Long pause.
‘Oh. I didn’t know that.’
‘Then how do you know she was wonderful?’
Which would’ve been awkward and rude and fucked up and, at that moment, unnecessary. So instead, I’ve written this book.
Sarah
When you’re trying to capture the essence of someone, you must look away from stereotypes. That may seem obvious, but if you are memorializing, they can be tempting. The priest with little real knowledge of the departed will be drawn to platitudes, to the woolly positives of ‘He was someone who cared mainly for others’, ‘She was a fabulous mother’, ‘We all remember their wicked sense of humour’. These mantras say nothing; they call no concrete sense of the person to mind.
The way forward is through specifics. People are revealed not in generalizations but in detail, in moments. The rich strangeness of my mother cannot be conveyed in compliments, but in stories, true stories. For example: I mentioned just now my participation in the BBC TV series Who Do You Think You Are? The episode I was in ends with two bizarre moments. First, I give my mother some half-broken bricks. This is because while tracing the maternal side of the family, I went to Kaliningrad, now in Russia, but before the war, Königsberg in East Prussia. While there, I found these bricks on an empty stretch of waste ground where once had stood my grandfather’s brick factory.
A short, but important sidebar. It’s a funny place to have a sidebar, I know, because I’ve just said ‘First …’ and now you’re expecting me to say ‘And secondly’ but instead there’s going to be a few paragraphs containing quite important information before we get there, so it feels like you, the reader, are as it were holding your narrative breath, and that may be uncomfortable. Apologies, but I think this is the right place for it.
Near the beginning of my episode of Who Do You Think You Are? my mother, who was born in Nazi Germany, revealed something that no one else in the family was aware of. There are oddities in her birth documentation (beyond the fact that all of it is stamped with swastikas, which remains eternally, deeply odd, obviously). She has two birth certificates, one dated with what we thought of as her birthday, 2 March, while the other has 11 July. No one was ever sure why – there was a possibility that, due to the various extraordinary difficulties involved in being a Jewish family escaping from Germany in late 1939, a certain amount of forging went on. But at the start of the documentary, sitting in my parents’ front room, my mum said she had never believed her mother, Otti – the woman who I had always thought of as my grandmother – to be her real mother. She thought rather that her uncle Arno, her mother’s younger brother, was her real father.
I had heard of my great-uncle Arno before. As a kid, I once asked Otti, ‘Did you have any brothers and sisters?’[fn1] and she said, ‘I had a brother … but you’ll have to ask Mr Hitler what happened to him’, and I thought: Mr Hitler? The bloke they sing about on Dad’s Army?[fn2]
During the documentary, other facts about him – Arno, not Hitler – emerged. He was eleven years or so younger than my grandmother Otti and something of a playboy. He had just married when my mother was born. This all fits, in fact, with my mum’s thinking, which is that Otti, who was thirty-two at the time of my mother’s (their only child’s) birth – which undeniably would at that time have been thought old to have a baby, especially a Jewish baby in Nazi Germany in 1939 – could not actually have children. But Otti and her husband Ernst were getting out of Germany: and Arno, for whatever reason – well, because most German Jews didn’t, would be the reason – was not. In my mum’s imagination, at some point in spring 1939, the newly married Arno turned up at their house – almost definitely not a house by then, as all their money had been stolen or had gone in bribes, so their flat, lodgings, whatever – and said: please take our baby to England, and safety, with you.
