Sarah

My mother’s affair with David White might seem like a complicated thing to write about publicly. Which it is. But one thing should be obvious: my mother was not ashamed of her affair with David White. On the contrary. She was proud of her affair with David White. She considered – in a very seventies way – that having an affair was glamorous. Even with Roger Whittaker here.

She was always very keen to let people know about her affair. My brother Ivor tells a story about how, sometime in the early nineties, he took a new girlfriend – her name was Tracey Blezard – down to meet my mother at her stall in Grays.[fn1]

My mother chatted a little to Tracey Blezard and then started talking to Ivor. At one point, the name ‘David White’ came up. Without pausing for breath, she turned to Tracey and said, ‘My lover of twenty years’, before turning back to Ivor to carry on chatting, as if nothing had happened.

A caveat: my lover of twenty years is, I think, an exaggeration. It is hard to know exactly how long my mum’s affair with David White lasted. It is hard, because, as I say, she was proud of it, and also a fantasist. She was very happy to take what might conventionally be thought of as a negative – whether that be having an uncle who didn’t make it out of the Warsaw Ghetto (but maybe he was my father?) or a marriage that wasn’t working (but I had a passionate affair) – and turn it into something self-dramatizing and, in her mind, glamorous. This makes the facts themselves hard to come by. After she died I spoke to various friends about this. One of them was Ruth Mulligan, already mentioned as one of my parents’ few non-Jewish friends. Ruth came to see the West End show I did, My Family: Not the Sitcom, which covers some of the same ground as this book. She told me backstage afterwards that – and this didn’t surprise me – she knew all about the affair: my mother was forever telling her about it. But she believed the truth was that it may in fact not have lasted more than a few years at its height in the late seventies, and perhaps been revived in one-off meetings (at Golf Collector events, which my mum was always going to) through the years. Ruth said she thought it ‘fizzled out’ after a while.

And yet my mother never gave up on golf. Which may have been a way of demonstrating that she was never going to give up on David White, however much he had given up on her. It may even be the case that her unending dedication to golf and golfing memorabilia constituted a type of revenge. Or, more complicatedly, a type of revenge-cum-plea: revenge mixed in with an element of ‘Look, given your particular interests, how much I am someone who you should have as a lover.’

I include this information while thinking that the facts, the numbers, of my mother’s affair don’t really matter. She believed in their love much as she believed in – in some ways, they were inseparable – her love of golf.

I devised and hosted a Radio 4 show once, Heresy, and at one point a discussion about the nature of public apology led a woman in the audience to tell a story about how her boyfriend had upset her. She’d asked him to apologize, which he did, but then she’d asked him to post the apology on Facebook. I said, why? She struggled to answer, and I suggested, ‘Is it because nothing has any meaning any more unless it’s on the internet?’ In other words, broadcast. Public. My mother, I think, felt that way about many things, including her affair with David White. At some level, it only had meaning for her if people knew about it, or at least, her version of it.

Whatever the actual longevity of their affair, my mum’s obsession with golf lasted the rest of her life. Even when her beloved father died, she had his favourite leather chair re-covered in this fabric:

I mean, I assume she had to have it re-covered in something, as he’d no doubt been fucking prostitutes on it.