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]

Among the various other boys who announced their candidacy for that election was an older boy, a sixth former, standing for the National Front. The National Front, as many of you will know, was a far-right party committed to racism and the repatriation of immigrants. It focused its hate on Black and Brown people, and also on Jews, but that was less trumpeted in its leaflets. However, the boy in question ran mainly on a platform of decreasing the number of Jews at the school. This would not have been a huge imaginative leap, as Haberdashers’ had, until very recently, imposed a quota.

Meanwhile, it was well known that certain teachers very much agreed with those sentiments. One RE teacher was known to have begun a lesson, on Yom Kippur, by saying, ‘Right, we can have a good session today as at last there’s no Yids in.’

My form teacher was a man called Mr W—. I looked up to Mr W—, and indeed across him, as he was extremely wide and muscly, also being the head of rugby.[fn2] One day in my third year, I was taking part in a race on the school track. I was coming last. I have never been good at running. I only like sports that include a ball. In my thirties, I tried to run regularly, for my health, but also because various people told me it’s good for the mind – that while running, they think of many things that put the soul at ease. I think of only one thing: running, and when it’s going to stop.

And so there I was: thirteen years old, in this race, coming around the last corner, keen to get to the end. So keen in fact I fell over, knocking over the boy in front. This was an accident, but I assume from a distance it may have looked like I was trying to cheat, to trip him up so I wouldn’t come last. I wouldn’t normally assume this – it wouldn’t have occurred to me – were it not for the fact that a friend of mine, Ashley Baron Cohen,[fn3] told me he was standing behind Mr W—. Who turned to another teacher, Mr T—, and said, darkly: ‘Jew.’ And Mr T— replied, ‘Of course.’

When Ashley told me this – that my teachers thought that obviously I was a cheat, because I was a Jew – it devastated me. I can still feel the clammy sense of fear, of the safe-world falling away, that this generated in the child-me. I told my parents. And then, in my memory, there is nothing. I mean, I have a sense that they might’ve been a bit shocked. But unlike the much less problematic incident with Saul Rosenberg’s party, they didn’t do anything. They didn’t ring the school and insist on speaking to the headmaster. They didn’t suggest taking me out. They didn’t even talk to me that much about it. Faced with a world without CCTV or iPhones on which audio of wrongdoers can be surreptitiously recorded, there may have been little they could do. But my memory is that they just sort of shrugged. Maybe they thought, You see: Mr Cohen was right.[fn4]