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’m embarrassed that my attempt at American sounds more like a sixteenth-century scullery maid from the West Country. I feel displaced, discombobulated, by having to move an iota away from myself.

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.