My Family, page 13
As it happens, I’m not being completely honest here, as I don’t really think you need to have that specific visual evidence to corroborate the information that honesty is what people took away from the show. Clearly, I’ve knowingly included the screenshot of the good review I got from Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, because I want you to see it. Similarly, earlier in this piece, you didn’t need to know that My Family: Not the Sitcom had a long run in the West End, followed by tours in Australia and Canada. Or that it was nominated for an Olivier award.
As a self-proclaimed honesty addict, let me also tell you about the one bad review this show got, from Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail, who considered it a form of ‘revenge’. It made him feel sad for my family. Interestingly, because I’ve been in therapy for a long time, I’m prepared to give this idea the time of day. It is entirely possible my over-honesty about my parents is a form of revenge. I think it’s possible some of the anger I may have towards them for their unbounded non-parenting when I was younger has got sublimated into comedy. But the truth is always complex. Because I think in that sublimation, revenge gets mixed with memory and the softening that comes with time.
I did leave some things out of that show. I left out – I see I’m not doing it now – the time my dad burst into tears in our kitchen, apparently triggered by the pressure of having to read out some Hebrew at the synagogue at my younger brother’s bar mitzvah, but almost definitely actually triggered by being made redundant at the same time as, however much he was not noticing the details, knowing something was going very wrong with his marriage. I was in the adjoining room (the breakfast room). It was the only time I was ever aware of him crying, and still now, as I think of it, I find it strange and unsettling and upsetting. The noise he made was weirdly similar to the wounded walrus sex noises in his bedroom.
But much less funny. Which is why I left it out of that show.
The only people who could, I think, raise a valid objection to the material in My Family: Not the Sitcom were my brothers. Neither of them to be honest were that keen on the basic premise. After I emailed Dan (who lives in America) a few months following our mum’s death, to tell him I was thinking about doing a warts-and-all comedy show about our parents – he wrote back, simply: ‘You’re not doing it.’ Ivor, I spoke to in person. He came round to my house and sat down and said: ‘Look, we could talk about this for two hours, and go back and forth on it, but I may as well just ask you upfront: are you going to do this?’ And, without hesitation, I said: ‘Yes.’ Which I guess tells you something about the sliver of ice in the heart of the writer/comedian – or about the Nora Ephron mantra, which means the same thing, that everything is copy – but there is something else. I knew before I had written or performed the show that it would, in its own way, be an act of love. A show that celebrated the warts. Or, more specifically – but I think this is of necessity borne out of love – an act of reclamation. Because, as I’ve said, my mother died abruptly, the lack of time, the lack of dying time, meant there had been no long goodbye, no mobilization of memory. What I was trying to do with My Family: Not the Sitcom, and already had an instinct about before I even started it, was – this sounds creepy, I think, but hey – reincarnate her. To describe her in such detail – and to leave nothing out – that she would truly come alive again on stage. Not truly at all, of course, but in the sense that people use that phrase – to push it as far it could go. And then – obviously I didn’t know this in advance – perform it across the world for two years, thus giving me, with a whole load of people who never met her, the chance to properly say goodbye.
Despite his misgivings, Ivor came to the first night. At the end, for an encore, I came back on stage to do a Q&A. When I announced this to the audience, I saw many people in the crowd, theatre critics, other comedians, various great and good, with their hands up, but I said: ‘Sorry, I’ll answer any questions in a minute but first of all, I need to know what my brother thought. Ivor? What did you think?’ I looked out into the room – the light was blinding and I couldn’t see him, but I heard his voice, which is much like my own, say: ‘I loved it.’ And then he added, ‘I loved it because it felt like she was in the room.’
Sarah, Colin, Henry, Sylvia
Forty-three Kendal Road, as you may have gathered by now, was an over-sexualized house. My parents both had large stashes of pornography in their bedroom drawers. This was, in a way, yet another form of collecting. My mother’s consisted mainly of editions of Playgirl, which displayed pictures of naked men, invariably looking into the middle distance, invariably with moustaches. My father’s were more exotic, hardcore magazines he’d picked up on travels abroad, principally Color Climaxes. I don’t know how old I was when I first came across these – hard not to say oo-er following that, but fortunately or unfortunately, I was definitely too young for that innuendo to work. I’d say I was about nine or ten, and though immediately fascinated and drawn into the beginnings of a lifelong addiction, I didn’t understand where most of the bodily fluids I was seeing spattered across various bodies came from.
Certain habits are set in you very young. I don’t mean the obvious habit here. As I said earlier, Ivor has always been more responsible and organized than me, as befits the older brother. He has complained to me often in later years that I was much more slapdash when it came to returning my father’s pornography to whatever order it would’ve lain in in his bedside drawer after, um, use. Ivor, he has since told me, was religious about this, being, apparently, terrified my parents might cotton on to his illicit viewing of my dad’s stash. I wasn’t so methodical. Once I took a copy of Color Climax out of their room and into the bathroom. Before I’d really got deep into this particular edition, however, I heard someone coming up the stairs, so hid it under the laundry basket (an item I can still see clearly: cylindrical, padded, off-white with roses). Then forgot about it. Sometime later, while in bed, I heard my dad in the bathroom shouting, ‘What the fuck is this doing here?’
But to be honest, Colin and Sarah weren’t so great at keeping their pornography hidden either. Once they left a copy of Club International on the breakfast table. In the middle of the table, like it was a condiment. Like, ‘What would you like with your Findus Crispy Pancakes, David; some very fulsome pubic bush?’ Club International, by the way, was a British pornographic magazine. That’s the sort of thing they were called in the seventies: Club International, Penthouse, Mayfair. I think there was a belief in the 1970s that wanking was aspirational.
My parents were negligent in general with leaving inappropriate material around. Every year for our holidays we went to Swansea. This, while we’re on the subject, was part and parcel of the mundanity of my childhood. I apologize to anyone from Swansea reading this, and it’s apparent from more recent visits that it is now an extremely vibrant place, but between the years 1970 and 1982 the city was not an exciting destination to holiday for a child/teenager. Don’t get me wrong, I was excited to go to Swansea. I was particularly excited when we graduated from staying at my grandparents’ terraced house in Glanbrydan Avenue to a BnB in Sketty Road, because it meant the three of us boys stayed in one room. I can still remember Ivor saying in his sleep, ‘Can I have some lemonade?’, which gives you some sense of the wildness of Baddiel hopes and dreams in those years. More importantly, there were cooked breakfasts every morning.
But still, Swansea wasn’t the most upbeat holiday destination. Later, in my early twenties, I went with two friends to the Gower Peninsula, to Three Cliffs Bay, and thought: How ridiculous that my parents never drove us the half an hour out of Swansea to here, where the beauty is extreme. Ridiculous, but typical: my parents weren’t very bothered with beauty. Maybe my mum was, or might have been, if more had been available. Meanwhile, days out were mainly at the Mumbles, which is also beautiful in parts, but we spent almost no time in those parts, instead hanging out entirely in the caravan park, where Colin’s old friends Martin and Norma Glass had a two-bedroom Stirling with chemical toilet. They did, to be fair, also have a SodaStream, an item that could transform still liquids into fizzy ones, which seemed the most exciting idea in the world (I imagine Ivor may have mentioned this in his sleep as well). Otherwise, we would go by ourselves to Swansea Bay, whatever the weather, where the tide went out so far that trying to get to the sea felt like walking back to England.
And we spent really a lot of time at my grandparents’ house, not doing very much: watching TV, playing board games, reading. One summer, when I was about fourteen, my dad was reading ‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ by Spike Mulligan and left it on a table in my grandparents’ living room, where me and Dan were sitting with Henry and Sylvia (pictured out for a walk, probably in the Mumbles, here). Which might not seem that negligent except my dad should’ve remembered his mother’s tendency to pick books up at random and read from them out loud. She picked up and read, in a stentorian voice, this imagined conversation between Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill. She intoned it all carefully, I remember, leaving a pause after WAUGH and RANDOLPH for the dialogue.
WAUGH: Ah! That’s better! I’m braver than you, I wear a woolly outer garment. I’m braver than anyone! When a German plane comes over, I never take cover, you know why?
RANDOLPH: Yes, you’re a cunt.
There was a long, long beat of silence, before Sylvia looked up and said, slowly, thoughtfully, as if – sorry – tasting the word: ‘Cunt.’ The letters seemed to hover in the air in front of her. She continued: ‘What’s that?’
I chose, after some small consideration, not to answer her. It looked for a while like no one would. I could hear Ivor laughing – he was in the kitchen grating sugar, he tells me, because our grandparents’ larder was so cold it had coagulated. Then my grandpa said, ‘Oh, that’s terrible. I haven’t heard language like that since the trenches.’
I love that Grandpa Henry said that. It certainly suggests his life had been a little closeted between Armistice Day and this moment in 1978. Then again, it does also suggest he had heard the word a lot back then. Which is a bit worrying in terms of his popularity among his fellow troops. Perhaps on Christmas Day 1914 he was the only British soldier who refused to play football.
Either way, my grandmother sensed something was awry and abruptly shut Spike Milligan’s masterpiece. As she did so, she noticed on the back an obviously – to most eyes – fake quote.
She read that out loud too: ‘“I resign,” General Montgomery.’
‘I’m not surprised after reading this,’ she said, with great disdain, and put the book down.
Neglect
Jerry Seinfeld has a joke about how, for his parents, their children were like racoons. As in ‘I think there’s one about here somewhere but I’ve no idea where it is.’ Without doubt, parents in the sixties, seventies and eighties did not feel they needed to be there for their children like parents do – like I do – now. But even given that, I think Colin and Sarah Baddiel somewhat took the not-being-there biscuit.
It was mainly small things. For example, I was never taught to tie my shoelaces. Actually, that’s unfair. I never learned to tie my shoelaces. My mum had a big flat cardboard model of a shoe she did briefly use to try and teach all three of us, but I found it difficult – I am a weirdo, at some level – to transfer this knowledge from one dimension to three, and soon gave up, which meant having to ask random adults to tie my laces until I was about fourteen. Thus, when eleven, and playing proudly for the North West London Jewish Day School football team, I had to ask the only adult present to do it: the referee, who also happened to be a rabbi. Despite being a rabbi – ‘Better a patient person than a warrior,’ says the Old Testament – his tolerance for an eleven-year-old asking him repeatedly to tie their shoelaces was limited (to be fair, I think he did miss the odd offside while doing so), and he couldn’t be bothered to do it properly, so they kept coming undone. After the third time of asking, he just ignored me and eventually I had to sit the game out in my socks. This is still why, in my heart of hearts, I believe I never became a professional footballer.
But there were more complicated, darker things that went down in my childhood. And in varying degrees, in those situations, my mum and dad were not what Instagram posters, when they post about their parents, call my rock.
When I first went to Haberdashers’, I found going to this new school intimidating. It was a big place and it felt – because it was, in Elstree, near Watford – miles away from home. I’ve mentioned travelling on the Tube to catch the 8 a.m. coach to school. If your parents paid a bit more, you could catch the 8.30 coach. My parents obviously didn’t do that, so I had to catch the earlier one and, because I was an insomniac even then and so very tired in the mornings, I often missed it. If you were caught on the 8.30 coach when your parents hadn’t paid for it, you would be thrown off and have to walk miles to catch a bus to school. This happened to me many times.
I was so unhappy at the school that in my second year I became ill. Well. Kind of. In my house, you were only considered ill if you had a temperature. I’d put this down to my dad, an empiricist, a scientist, but also maybe to both of them not really wanting to be bothered with ill children if there wasn’t something concrete which demonstrated without doubt that they were genuinely ill. One morning when Ivor was nine, he told my mum he felt sick. She took his temperature and because it was normal, off he went to North West. Later that day, after throwing up in class and rolling about on the floor in agony, he was rushed to hospital with appendicitis.
That didn’t work out so well for Ivor, but I realized I could use it to my advantage. When taking our temperature, neither of my parents – 90 per cent of the time it would have been my mum, but occasionally it was my dad – would stay in the room. I mean, obviously. My dad would’ve been too bored, and my mum would’ve had calls to David White to make. Which allowed me to take the thermometer out and hold it against a radiator or a lamp. Once I figured out I could do this – I must’ve been pretty skilful at it, as mercury thermometers at the time were hard to read, and I’m not sure how I ever prevented ours from suggesting I was about to spontaneously combust – I did it continually. Or at least, for a whole term. In my second year at Haberdashers’ I was off for six weeks. Eventually, they sent me to hospital and put me in an observation ward, where doctors and nurses, would you believe it, stayed with me as I lay in bed with the thermometer in my mouth, and thus I turned out suddenly not to have a temperature. And went home.
I appreciate, by the way, that this is an example of me lying. It may in fact be an example of how I used to be able to lie as a young child, but that changed as time, and things I witnessed at home, went on. Or it may be that it is not exactly an example of lying. Because I was unhappy at the school, and my mental health would’ve been affected. I didn’t feel well, and I needed to demonstrate this to my parents, and knowing that I could only do this through the thermometer, that’s what I did. It’s an early example, perhaps, of what the internet now would call living my truth.
I found it hard to make friends at Haberdashers’ initially. At one of my first classes, our form teacher asked us to say one interesting thing about ourselves. Most boys said something about where they came from or maybe what football team they supported, or whether they collected stamps. Because of my dad’s insistence on the importance of science – and because I was a bit of a twat – when it came to me, I expounded on Pythagoras’ Theorem. I said, ‘The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.’ This led to most of my classmates thinking I was a bit of a twat. It also led to some graffiti to that effect on some school walls, although I believe the word used was Bastard – ‘Baddiel Is A Bastard’, in chalk.
Interestingly, my closest friend from primary school, Saul Rosenberg, went there too. But rather quickly, Saul found other friends. When I tearfully told my mum that he was having a party and hadn’t invited me, she phoned his mum and complained. As we know, this always works. I was invited to the party, but Saul didn’t speak to me.
To be fair, that was an example of non-neglect, of my mum parentally responding to some social difficulties I was having and trying to help. But even then, it was at some level more to do with her than me. For my mother, my friendship with Saul operated as an early version of her tendency to think of people, including her children, in terms of what they liked, rather than anything more complex. As far as she was concerned, me liking Saul, and being best friends with him, was very much a building block of who I was. She often used to refer to me and Saul as being ‘like two peas in a pod’, which wasn’t really true, given that we ate bacon and eggs for breakfast and Saul’s family had three kitchens – two to avoid mixing milk and meat, and one extra reserved just for Passover, when Jews are not allowed to eat any form of bread.
But the incident with Saul leads on to a much more disturbing issue. I have talked about the shock, if you’ve grown up in a Jewish bubble, of realizing the whole world isn’t Jewish. You’d think this would have been mitigated by the demographic of Haberdashers’, where about 40 per cent of the boys were Jews. However, this large proportion of Jewish kids wasn’t universally appreciated in the school, which meant I was confronted with a force I hadn’t been up against before, except in my vague sense of terrible things happening to my family in the (then understood as) distant past: antisemitism. In the 1970s, in my school, and no doubt others, low-level antisemitism was tolerated. In 1979, for example, we had a mock election to go with the real general election taking place that year. I actually stood for it, as an independent socialist candidate. I know what you’re thinking: Oh, you were a bit of a twat. This would be confirmed by the photo of me (apparently wearing – although I can only pray it was in fact a V-neck – a three-piece suit) in the school magazine that covered the election.[fn1]
