Colin, Peter Alliss

Something I have wondered about, and people have asked me, is: do you think your dad had an affair?

I think this is to misunderstand the life I’m trying to describe here. It wasn’t, obviously, a Puritanical uptight post-war no-sex-please-we’re-British place – I refer you to the copy of Club International on the breakfast table – but conversely, my mum having an affair didn’t mean our house was a 1970s hotbed of wife-swapping and bohemian marital code-breaking. That would have been far too glamorous.

My father, as is manifest, was different from my mother. Where she was incontinent, he was constipated (I’m talking emotionally here). Not with all emotions – not anger, certainly – but if my dad had been having an affair, he would have kept shtum about it. He would not have been doing it because of a desire to broadcast to the world that his life was exciting. It would be because he wanted to have sex with a woman who was not his wife.

Interestingly, my mother would disagree – about my dad having an affair, that is. She often hinted darkly that he was a terrible Lothario, which is borne out by The Answerphone Tapes. I have mentioned these before, but I think they now deserve capitalization. My mother did something – I suspect just by pressing record, because answerphones at the time were basically cassette machines – which meant she recorded all, or certainly a large proportion, of her conversations with David White. I always knew this, but it was only in my second dive into my parents’ archive that I went so far as to buy an old cassette recorder to play them. The conversations with David White are … well, I’ll come to those. Not least because I remain uncertain of the legality of quoting him when – I assume – he didn’t know he was being recorded. I think it’s unlikely my dead mother can be retrospectively sued for phone hacking her lover but I assume I can be, for publishing their conversations.

One of the things about The Answerphone Tapes is that they aren’t just conversations with David White. It’s clear my mother pressed the record button a lot when he phoned. What she then didn’t do was press ‘off’. Which meant many of her conversations were recorded: ones with me, my brothers, friends, business acquaintances. It’s evocative to listen to, something of an audio time machine. I’ve just listened to one in which Peter Alliss – for anyone who doesn’t know, probably the most famous BBC golf commentator of all time – phones her and asks if she has a copy of his autobiography from 1981. He says (I think I can quote him, because he’s dead, and also because this is definitely not libellous), ‘If you do, I have some friends staying and they’d like one.’

She says she’s not sure but will check in the shop – by which she means her Golfiana stall at Grays Antique Market – and call him back. I find it odd that Peter Alliss didn’t have a fair number of copies of his autobiography knocking about or couldn’t get one from a bookshop, rather than from my mother. He was, as I say, a famous commentator, not J.R. Hartley (for anyone who doesn’t know who that is, never mind). But it’s a joy to hear.

Less of a joy to hear is a conversation she had with a lawyer, around when she and Colin were meant to be getting divorced. She talks about buying my dad out of the house, but then says he’ll be getting a new place anyway. The lawyer asks why, and she says, ‘Oh, I think it’ll be easier for him to take all his women there rather than bring them back to the old family house …’

I don’t believe this. Not because I’m in denial. I don’t need – as is perhaps obvious – to defend a saintly version of my parents. I don’t judge my mother for having an affair, so it’s very unlikely – particularly given the issue of, well, balance – that I would think my father a bad man for having one. But I just don’t have any evidence of it. What I do have evidence of is my mum constantly playing out a constructed, dramatized version of her life, and her husband being a shagger fits into that. It fits into that more glamorous, more bohemian sense of what her life should have been that she was always chasing. Also, this was a point in time when divorce was very much about fault, and so she may have been keen to suggest she wasn’t the only one to blame in the infidelity stakes.

I did find something in my parents’ archive that spoke so completely to me of my dad’s relationship with other women I feel I should include it. It was a card. This one:

Again, context is everything. It’s the fact that I found this card buried in a basket of letters and cards and poems written by my mother to David White – all of which are overflowing with extreme idiosyncratic eroticism – that delights me. I think it’s possible its placement there is because she wanted to think of this as something she’d found that confirmed my dad was indeed the Lothario he needed to be to fit into her model of her life.

Except it so isn’t. It’s not just the lack of passionate words. It’s the lack of words. Almost all the words, beyond ‘To Colin’, are expended on one thing, which is identifying who sent this card. You can, I think, sometimes read Sarah Baddiel’s love letters to David White and wonder if he really ever gave her much thought, but if Rita Verma was Colin Baddiel’s lover, then really, something has gone awry in the You Were Always on My Mind paradigm. Because plainly, when writing this card, Rita thought: Will he know who I am? She got to ‘Rita’ and thought: I’d better put my surname. And then thought: Still not sure. Better put where I work. With him. That’ll probably do.

If it’s a love letter, it’s either a fabulous double-bluff, designed to thwart discovery (although my mother obviously thought: Aha!), or there was very little actual love in this love affair. If it is a piece of erotica, it is, as the great Sean Lock phrase has it, a challenging wank.

Having said all that, my dad did have an affair. To be clear: it wasn’t really an affair. Well after the glory days of Golfiana, during their period of separation in the mid-nineties, he had a dalliance with someone he called a Macedonian. That’s all I know. Well, it was a Macedonian woman. And she worked at Grays Antique Market. Selling what, I don’t know. Almost definitely not Dinky Toys, or my dad would have been too furious about the competition to get involved with her. Either way, when I asked him about her, I just got back that she was aggravation.

This seems a little unfair, as it would have been during the beetles-teeming-out-of-the-upstairs-toilet-light years, so anyone willing to go anywhere near Colin Baddiel at this point was, at the very least, open-minded. It also sounds slightly troubling echoes in my mind with Jimmy Savile describing relationships with women in general as ‘brain damage’. However, as we know, almost everything to my dad was aggravation, so maybe the Macedonian can just be slotted into the quite large Venn Diagram of Everything.