In another life, David Baddiel’s mother, Sarah, could have been an aristocrat living in a big house with servants and married to a rich businessman – or so she imagined. In the early 1930s, her German Jewish parents, Ernst and Otti, had been extremely wealthy; according to a cousin, they owned a painting by Rubens. But then the Nazis took their home, their livelihood and murdered their relatives, so they fled with their baby to England. Twenty-five years later, their daughter was living in a modest house in London’s Dollis Hill with three sons and her husband, Colin, an emotionally detached, working-class research scientist who, after being made redundant, sold Dinky Toys on a market stall. For Sarah, the most exotic life got was when the family went on their annual holiday to Swansea. And so, to assuage her disappointment and “block out complex realities”, she embraced a fantasy version of her life with the help of David White, her golf-obsessed, polo neck-wearing, pipe-smoking lover.
In My Family: The Memoir, the comic and Jews Don’t Count author spills the secrets of Sarah, Colin and his own outre childhood in 60s and 70s London. This isn’t the first time their story has been told. Baddiel’s 2016 stage show My Family: Not the Sitcom revolved around his mother’s infidelity and her sudden, improbable interest in golf memorabilia, which was triggered by White and which, equally improbably, she managed to turn into a thriving business. That show also revealed the impact of Colin’s illness: in his later years he had Pick’s disease, a form of dementia affecting the frontal lobe which is known to cause angry outbursts and disinhibition, traits he already possessed in spades.
