I’ve mentioned already the unsurprising information that I have spent a considerable amount of time in therapy. While there, I was always saying to my therapist that it was difficult to find a template for my type of childhood trauma. Within its wide and varied spectrum of psychological modelling, psychoanalysis has never, I think, alighted upon anything quite so specific. Neither Freud nor Jung nor even R.D. Laing seem to have encountered a case study that led any of them to name a series of later neurotic issues as, say, a Nick Faldo Complex.
Or to put it another way: the writing of a story about a boundary-less mother who flaunted her infidelity in front of all and sundry, including her children, might suggest an intense and difficult drama, but frankly, the gravitas of that tone is scuppered the moment you have to include the phrase ‘golfing memorabilia’. I think one must accept that whatever damage was caused by all this, it is in the end a comedy.
You can’t extract the golf from the story. You can’t even extract it from the sex. I don’t know if my mother slept with David White at our house in Dollis Hill – I’m fairly sure she did – but one thing I am sure is that intimate encounters between them occurred at various golf memorabilia fairs up and down the country, backgrounded by antique tees and postcards of St Andrews and black and white flick books of Bobby Jones’ swing.
There would also have been romantic opportunities provided by big golf sporting events, and I do have direct evidence that my mother and David White took that opportunity at least once. In the mid-1990s my father visited me at the flat I was then sharing with Frank Skinner. My mum was away, and my dad had brought over a card that, he said, she’d left on her desk for me. Well. On the envelope it said David.
I opened the card. It had a golf scene on it. I thought nothing of that, my mother often wrote me cards and notes on stationery inscribed with golfing images.[fn1] Inside was a short message. I read it out, with my father standing in front of me. It said:
To David,
In Memory of the Masters,
when you were my master …
Love
Sarah xxx
Now, many years later, it’s hard to say when exactly in the reading of this card I realized it wasn’t for me: that I was not the David to whom it was addressed. When, that is, it became clear to me that what I was reading, out loud in front of my father, was a love note for David White, a back reference to a torrid time he and my mother must have spent together while watching a major golf tournament in the United States. Probably round about the words ‘the Masters’. But by then it was too late.
My father said: ‘What does that mean?’
I have talked already in this book about my almost physical commitment to the truth. But even I had to tamp it down in this moment. In Memory of the Masters, when you were my master. It’s got a very strong suggestion that the adultery in question involved not just golf but BDSM. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps my mother and David White consummated their love in latex plus-fours and Pringle gimp masks. It was just too much to countenance.
So I just said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘I have no idea what it means,’ I said. Which is weak, but to be fair even if I was, say, Boris Johnson, I have no idea what lie I could’ve told to make what my mum had written make sense, if it had been written to me.[fn2]
One thing to note, again – my father said my mother had left this note on her desk. But she did not have a study. There was a writing desk of sorts, an antique one, in the telly room at 43 Kendal Road, and when I lived there no one used it, but latterly she may have claimed it as her desk. But it would not, my point is, have been behind any actual closed door. My dad could’ve wandered in at any time and seen an envelope, in her handwriting, marked David.
Whether this suggests that my mother, again, subconsciously, or not very subconsciously, wanted everyone, including my dad, to know about her love life, or whether this was genuinely absent-minded, I can’t quite call. It’s possible the truth is somewhere in-between, that the affair had become such an open secret in her own mind by then that any kind of caution had faded. But I do know something, which is that my dad said, on my reading out that card, what does that mean? Which shows that despite her shouting it from the rooftops, he didn’t straightforwardly know about my mother’s affair.