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I've mentioned already the unsurprising information that I've spent a considerable amount of time in therapy. Whilst there, I was always saying to my therapist that it was difficult to find a template from my type of child on trauma. Or to put in another way, the writing of a story about a boundaryless mother who flaunted her infidelity in front of all and sundry, including her children, might suggest
an intense and difficult drama. But frankly, the gravitat of that tone is scuppered the moment you have to include the phrase engulfing memorabilia. I think one must accept that whatever damage was caused by all this, it is, in the end a comedy.
That's David Biddil, London based comedian, TV presenter, screenwriter, author and singer. Davis is a story of a secret that lived out in the open, one that shaped his family life. It's also a story about speaking one's own truth out loud with courage and gusto and plenty of humor. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I was born in Upstate New York and Troy, near Albany. I have no memory of that time, but I think it is still quite important because my dad very much what wanted to be a scientist. He was a scientist and he'd got out of working class semi polity in Wales because of that.
And then during the sixties had.
We married my mother, who was a refugee from Nazism, and a baby which she came feeling that they went off to America, which was part of something at the time called the brain drain from Britain, where essentially clever people, mainly scientists, thought there was more work and more money
to be had in America. And so my dad was teaching at a place called Renselare Polytechnic Institute, and two children were born, one of which was me and the other which was my older brother in quite a small amount of time, which suggests that they were having quite
a lot of sex at that point in time. And then they came back to Britain and we lived in a tiny flat in a place called Made of Veil, which I also have no memory of, but my life sort of begins my memory life begins about nineteen sixty nine nineteen.
Seventy when we moved a place in.
London called Dollis Hill, which is not to be clear for anyone who might know London a bit like Piccadilly or Hampstead or Kensington. It's not a place redolent with poetry that you see in Richard Curtis films.
It's a very very mundane part of London. It's rock solid.
Not suburbia in terms of leafy and nice suburbia, sort of inner city suburbia, kind of rough suburbia. And we had a semi detached house there and I lived there with my mom and dad and my two brothers, my then and a kat who was quite an important finger. One key thing in there was a kind of mixed Jewishness, by which I mean my mother was a refugee from Nazism. As I said, her father, my grandfather, had been in a concentration camp Dachau before the war. When they came
to London, they were committed reform Jews. They weren't Orthodox, but they were very committed to still doing all the festivals, providing a Jewish life for their daughter and for her children. I meanwhile, I went to the nearest school to my house where a Jew wouldn't get bullied in nineteen seventy London, which was, as it happened, a very very orthodox Jewish primary school. And so I and my brothers when we
went to school, we wore at yarmockers. I wore something called sitsit, which are an internal like a Mormon style vest, which has sort of tassels that you have to show. If you don't show the tassels at the school, you get into trouble. That Hebrew, I did blessings, I only kosher food at the school, and yet my dad, who was a stone cold atheist, would basically be making me bacon sandwiches for breakfast before I went off to this
school every day. So there was just a mass of incoherent Jewishness that define my early life.
I relate to this more than I can say. Where did that sit with you? I mean having bacon, eggs and shees for breakfast and then going to essentially the ashiva, Like where did that reside for you? Who did you think you were when you were that age?
That's a really really good question, because I guess I've always been massively interested in authenticity and authentically being who I am. It's the thing I've chased in my life and to some extent monetized in my career because as a stand up comedian, the work I do is all
extremely personal. It is all very much based on my family history, and a lot of it is about having had this sort of mixed up childhood and also involved, particularly in the case of my mother, there's this very strange self dramatizing shadow play which may or may not have.
Had anything to do with who she really was. I think it became very.
Important to me because of this as I grew older, even from adolescence, to live authentically, to think who am I? I must be all the time, exactly me. I cannot bear to be not.
Me in any way.
But when I was a kid, it was all pretty mixed up. One thing I am incredibly militantly unashamed about is being Jewish, because even though these were many different types of Jewish as all batting up against each other, my family life was still really fucking Jewish. A lot of Jews have this mixed up child that I think, and I got inculcated very early on into a mistake about the world, which is I think I thought thought that the whole world was Jewish, or my parents' friends,
for example, were Jewish. I went to a Jewish school, my grandparents were Jewish, went to Jewish youth group. And then I guess the shock of realizing when I went to secondary school to high school, oh, it's not there's Jews who are tiny minority, and there are anti ze Mites in Britain. It was too late for my internal self, it was too late for my soul, I think, and I guess I continue at some level even though it's
not true about the world. The world is very much presenting it to us as not true at the moment. But I think I believe that Jews are the default in the world. The Jews are the norm, and everyone else is not the norm. They used to be a Broadway show actually be called When You're in Love The Whole World is Jewish in nineteen sixty seven. I used to have an LP of that show for some reason.
And the whole world is never Jewish, but I thought it was until early age, and I still do in a way and in a way to comfort to me.
David describes as mother as a fantasist possessed of a rich strangeness. These qualities are present in his mom for as long as he can remember, though the layers of meaning of that rich strangeness come into fuller view as he grows up.
When I was young, my grandparents would occasionally fill in the gaps of their history, this terribly, terribly, unbelievably traumatic history they had in the thirties in Germany, but my mother later on would fantasize about it. So she would tell me, for example, that she could speak German when she couldn't. Later in life, she told me that she didn't believe her parents were her real parents. She believed that her dad was in fact her mother's brother who
had died in the Warsaw Ghetto. And I now understand why she's doing that, because for my mother, that was glamorous. My mother was always chasing a kind of lost glamor, and it, even though it's a terrible tragic thing that she's fantas sizing about, at some levels, she would have preferred to having a live parents, the glamour of her parents or her dad being someone who had died in
the Warsaw Ghetto. And this is as I say, this is what I understand, is that my mother was always chasing, I think, but couldn't find it and found it very difficult to find in dollars hill a phantom glamour. And I think this is because she was born into a family that, if Hitler had not existed in a parallel universe, would have been very, very wealthy. They were industrialists, they were sent me aristocratic in a place called Kernigsburg in East Prussia. They were the sort of mainstays of their
Jewish social class. They had servants. My cousin Michael tells me they had a RUBINTI I don't know if that's true, but I wish it was true so that.
I could look for it.
And I think my mother knew this even though she hadn't experienced it, I mean only as a really young child, because she was born in ninetly thirty nine and only just got out.
So that's an important thing as well.
My mother, I think, even though it wasn't at the front of her mind, unconscious, must have.
Been aware of the nearness to death, of.
The fact that she was only here at all by the skin of her teeth. And I think this was partly what created in her this need to live life as best she could had a very intense pitch, but this pitch was not offered to her because she was actually living in a very dull place with this very working class man with three children.
I mean, your mother was a baby when she came here with her parents. And when you say skin of their teeth, it really was the skin of their teeth. It was a miracle when anybody got out when a tue got out of Germany in nineteen thirty nine, but they came in what was it August, and by September the borders were completely closed, and everyone who stayed was Yeah.
I actually actually didn't know until I started doing some research on it quite recently, just just what a close shave it was. I was always aware of it because I always knew that my mum would been born in March nineteen thirty nine. You know, it was always going to be close. But what I didn't realize was after Crystal that my grandfather had been sent to a concentration camp.
Three hundred thousand Jewish men were sent to concentration camps after Crystal Act, which there is a much away innss of I think I think people think concentration camps are something that happened in ninety forty one when the Final Solution properly started.
In fact, many Jews were sent to concentration camps.
Before that, and he got out again something that people don't realize happened. He got out I think with bribery and under the premise that he would leave. It was basically the dues were allowed out of concentration camps for a short time as long as they were leaving the country, as long as they pledged to leave the country. And the problem with that, of course, is that they would have no entry point to another country. They were writing.
These are just letters that I've seen recently to Jewish Asignum organizations in London pleading to be allowed into the UK. And they had no money at that time, and they had to show as part of this process a thousand pounds It show was.
A huge amount of money obviously.
Then in a British bank account before they would be allowed in it.
They had to have avid davits from.
British systems and all sorts of other paperwork, and then they had a child and the most extordinary letter, which I hadn't really thought about aunt I saw it is a letter from one of these Jewish organizations in London that are trying to help them to my grandparents saying, okay, we will have to redo your visa now to include your child. You know I it seems weird because they
must have known that was happening anyway. The letter says, if you wait another ten days and this is July nineteen thirty nine, by now, we will get you another entry guard. But then you need to go to Berlin to get it stamped, and all of this bureaucracy. It's just infuse, which is it's infused with such.
A high level of anxiety.
You know, when I'm reading it in twenty twenty four now and then when you're reading it in ninety thirty nine, you and your child, it's so extraordinary.
Do you think your mother knew these facts of her history? Did her parents talk to her about it? Or do you think that this was real analyzed intergenerational trauma the kind of ineffable, you know, the things that we sort of pick up and that we maybe can't attach an actual memory to or a language two, but that becomes part of what forms usays the way it clearly did with her.
Well, some of it is fact, I mean the fact that she knew. But my mother's real name I'm using really in a very ironic sense. There her first name was not Sarah. That was the name that you know she used. I thought of her as Sarah, but her first given name was a name given to her, as it were, by the Nazis, forced on her by the Nazis because in ninety thirty nine Jewishly.
Was had to be named from a list.
You had to choose their name from a not very pleasant list and names. A lot of horrible names were on it, and as far as I can remember from it was the best of a bad bunch. And the interesting thing is that although my mother designated herself in later life as Sarah, which is by the way, still a Nazi name, because Jewish children also had to be Sarah or Rachel as their middle names, and I think Moisture or Isaac there were boys had to be their
middle names. But one thing I didn't realize is that my mother was still called from it by her parents when she was living in Cambridge as a child, which is where they lived in Britain.
After the war. I actually did a show.
I did a stand up show based on my parents, and I used to come out afterwards and Q and a and ad lib with the audience. And one time a man stood out, Who's I found this really movie? And said, I actually knew your grandparents, and I've got a letter here from one of them. And he wrote a letter from my grandma to him, written in about I don't know, nineteen fifty two or something, in which she says, I have to go now because it's time for little from.
Its prayers, or because I can.
Hear a little from it crying. I never heard my mother called that, you know, in the wild, as it were, and I found it very extraordinary that then, you know, as a child, she would have been called from it. She would have been called this name that was handed down to them, forced on them by the Nazis.
I don't know.
I don't know how much detail of this that my mother really knew, but that in itself seems to be an unbelievable bobbld of complexity to live with.
On her shoulders.
My father is called was called Colin Badiel is also Jewish in a slightly different lineage that also involved fleeing his grandfather my great grandfather was fleeing from Russian pogroms from Cossacks. I think they were in Latvia, and the story goes I think this might be an urban myth that applies to a number of Jews in the nineteenth century, was that my great grandfather smuggled himself onto a boat and the boat was meant to be going to New York, but was go to New York.
But he didn't speak in English.
When they stopped at Swansea to refuel. Swansea in Wales, he didn't speak an English and he just thought it was the end of the line. So he got off and presumably ten years later, said to someone, excuse me, where is the Statue of Liberty? And they said, no, no, you're in Swansea. And that's why that part of my family is from Wales. My dad was very Welsh, I sort of, you know, come extremely Welsh at some level.
When you tell people in Britain that my dad was Welsh, they will say often, oh, I thought he was Jewish, and I said, yeah, it was Welsh and Jewish. But for some people people find that In Congress it's very interesting, well, people assume where people assumed Jews can come from basically Germany, Russia and New York. He was very working class. His dad used to sell cloth material from door to door. He was essentially a tinker. And my dad was born
in nineteen thirty four. They lived at a terraced house in Swansea that I stayed in on holiday many times when I was growing up. We never used to have nice holidays abroad in the South of France or anything like that.
My dad just used to take us.
Back to Swa and we lived and we stayed in his parents' house. He's not untypical my dad, I guess of that generation, a very very intelligent man, but with always no emotional intelligence. You know. My father was very clever, very funny, incredibly and forward about science. I think in his heart he would have liked to have been an important man of science, a researcher who made great discoveries, and that eluded him because of life.
Because he had three kids, he had to feed.
Them, and so he got a job with a corporation. He became essentially a middle manager for Unilever. But I think that a sign. I think that in all my dad's quickness of mind and funny as there was a.
Lot of rage.
And it's weird because I think of intelligence now as involving emotional intelligence. I think you can't just be well read or good at science and be an intelligent person. You have to have some awareness of what's steaming your way and your inner cauldron. I'm not sure my dad did. I think that is the source of the dysfunctional fit
that happened with my mother. Someone recently asked me how it happens a lot with this story is people said, your daddy must have known about this affair, and I said, well, it's hard to tell, because my father would not express an emotional vocabulary. He didn't have the emotional vocamputery. It seems to me that you have to have an emotional vocamplary to talk me about the fact that your partner
is having an affair. My mum had a very romantic, slightly grand delinquent sense of life, but she was normally enough in my sense of her until about ninety seventy three or seventy four, when I'm about ten, at which point she becomes obsessed with golf and everything to do
with golf and golf memorabilia. I one think about golf is in America, I think people take it more seriously as a sport, but here golf is really thought of her as, if I can use the word, a naff sport played by cilly men with mustaches and silly clothes.
But she did.
She became obsessed overnight in this very extreme way.
She went on to.
Write five books about golf, and the whole house suddenly became covered in golfing memorabilia. She wore golfing brooches, golfing earring, golfing necklace, Every card, every calendar was about golf.
It was amazing.
She just covered herself in golf and golfing. Member really, but I don't think she was actually interested in the sport. She liked children's books. Before that, she had worked as a dental receptionist, but never anything to do with sport. We were interested in football. She wasn't interested in that anyway.
A key element of all of this is that this guy, David White appeared in our life at the same time, and he was a golfing memorabilia collector, loved golf and played all the time, played golf all the time, and talked about golf all the time. So it's not a complex equation to work out that those things might be connected. That this man was around her house a lot, always talking about golf, and she had fallen kind of absurdly
in love with it. Eroto manically. Eroto Mania is an actual word, isn't it for when people fall in love in an over obsessive way.
And you know, we all knew when the golf was a clue.
But my mother was also very very key to tell everybody about this affair.
She would mention it, you know, like just in passing as.
A story, I'd tell about how my brother took one of his first girlfriends to see my mom at her shop, Golfiana. She had a store in an antique market opposite my dad's store. My dad, by this time it was done agra scientist. He lost that jobsly dinky toys cars at an antique store in opposite it was my mom's golfing memorabilia store.
So that's something of a red flag.
Anyway, my brother took this new girlfriend to see my mom, and my mom just mentioned within seconds David White and then turned to this girlfriend, this new new ivors and said my lover of twenty years, and then carried on talking to my brother as if nothing had happened, because you know, she really thought the affair was a plus.
She thought it was glamorous, and he was kind of glamorous.
He was a smooth looking, polo necked, pipe smoking, bearded man, handsome in a kind of nineteen seventies way. I think he used off to shave things like that that my dad didn't. He was more middle class, more you know, clubbable, less Jewish, not Jewish at all. Basically, this was the time, by the way, when in Britain Jews were still not allowed in a lot of golf clubs. Golf clubs were restricted,
not always formerly, but Jews just couldn't get in. I offered, wonder if, subconsciously as well, that to do with my mother trying to overcome this internal jewishness that had caused us so much trouble when she was a child.
You know, I'm just thinking about the way that no, this wasn't a secret. And at the same time, the tagline for this show is the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves, and to me, the secrets we keep from ourselves are often the most interesting or poignant the way in which this affair sort of lived in your family and was out in the open because
your mother was out in the open about it. But at the same time, and one of the things that comes up and I find really moving, is that you have all these documents, right, so you have this artwork that your older brother made. You know that it's supposed to be I guess about family or who his dad is or whatever. And in every single one of these child's drawings, somebody smoking a pipe. Yeah, you just think like wow, you know, like I mean, just what would
a child therapist do with that? Like pipes are smoking pipes? I mean, it's it's.
Yeah, I know, I love that it was. I think one of the key things for pout David White that he smoked a pipe. I think you could take that in many ways, one in the Freudian way that there's something a bit you know, sexual about a pipe, bit panic about a pipe. But also there's something that is sophisticated about a pipe, or there was in nineteen seventy three, there's something absurd about a pipe. But there's also something
fatherly about a pipe. My mother would archive everything she was a kind of archive ast the hoarder of her own life. So she's left and I have them and use of the book, every love letter, every poem she wrote, any poems, many erotic poems to David White.
She copied all of these.
She would send them to him, but she always keep copying and captable. And she also got a magazine called Pipeline, which is a pipe smoker's magazine, and she always just brought that because she was thinking, Oh, how else can I service a service my lover's interest not just golf, I must become interested in pipes as well. It's poignant, but it's also funny because the specifics of this relationship
are comic. And there might have in other ways in which I could have told this story, or I could think about this story as completely somber and tragic and moving and damaging. But in my heart, Danny, I find it more moving because it's funny. I think that what lifts it from the damage is the comedy and gives it joy. And the secret that I've discovered as I've decided to research this and find out about it in order to write about it and talk about it, is
how deep my mother went. You know how many artifacts golfing pipe and how many letters there were. Things keep cropping up, and I just think that's another level of extraordinary obsession and extraordinary flagrancy about this love. When she died, me and my brothers were sorted through stuff in my parents' house and we were depressed, you know, because our muma died. It was bleak, and she had died very suddenly and rather horribly, and it's not nice sorting through your dead
mother's stuff. But then my younger brother, Dan, who is sort of angrier than me about the whole infidelity David White thing, and I think feels more damage by it, suddenly came up to me and said, oh, I found this at the back of the cupboard. You might want it. I was going to smash it, but you might want it. And he handed me a mug, a coffee mug with a picture of David White on it on both sides of the mug. And I didn't tell my older brother
that we found that. But next time there was a break in the sorting through stuff and a call for a cup of tea, I secretly did it, and then I just handed my brother his tea in that mug. And he laughed and laughed, And that's my point. You know, for a moment, there was laughter in that house of death, and that's very important for me, because comedy is very salvational for me, for want of a better word, it's what lifts these moments from being too sad and too grim.
What is there to do with that other than to make comedy out of it? And do you think you would have become a comedian? It's pass to pull this apart, but do you think that this is what made you a comedian or do you think that being a comedian and having that innate talent is part of what saved you and allowed you to kind of work through things that otherwise might have ended up feeling like anger.
It's a really hard question, I think for me to answer. I know that I think of comedy as an enormously useful buffer or reworking of things that are too grim to deal with. And I don't think of my mother's affair as too grim to deal with. I do think of her death as appalling the way it was. And immediately after my mother's death, we had to go and tell my father, who was already deep into dementia, that my mother was dead, and despite their very, very rocky
and flawed marriage. I think I say in the book that theirs was a very ragged form of love. He was incredibly upset and vulnerable, and me and my older brother we had to try and comfort him.
We did that.
We hugged him, told him everything would be okay, that means, and then forty five minutes later we had to do it again, and then again and then again.
For a year.
At the end of that, my dad started doing this thing, you know. He would just do this dimastic and say, where is she? Where's the mother? That's what he called my mother. He would always call it the mother. I would have to tell him that she was dead later on, you know, about a year later. He wouldn't react quite in the same kind of fall and crumbling way. He would sort of go, yes, yes, yes, I knew that, and then start saying, so, I'm a single man.
Now, perhaps I should get out on the pull, which for.
Any if you know that expression, basically maybe I should go out and try my luck were in the singles market. And it's awful, it's terrible, And it was so in character for my dad and funny, you know, and Basically, if anyone point to me towards comedy, it was my dad. My dad used comedy as a form of denial. He would definitely prefer, you know, rather than dealing with a difficult situation. He could make an aggressive joke about it at someone else's expense.
But you know, I am.
Not a person who believes in God. I don't believe in any kind of great pattern to life. I think that essentially we are just dust here for a little while in what John Updyke called brilliantly this complex interval of light. And I think the only thing, really, the only thing that for me, takes all this somewhere else,
is laughter. Really, if I was to believe in God, I would say his greatest gift to us is laughter, because it allows us to process and deal with things that otherwise would be intolerable.
We'll be right back. It was Dad may have tried to turn towards humor. There's a moment when David's breaking the news to his dad about his mother's death, and his dad just crumbles, he falls apart, and it would be the most natural thing in the world to wrap his arms around his father in a hug. But David writes, we are not a huggy family. I hug my kids a lot more than they want. But that does not come from a forty three Kendall road inheritance. But in
a way, doesn't it. One thing we can do with the things that are not the way we would have wanted them to be growing up is that we can grow in counteridentification to those things. We can decide, well, I'm going to be a different kind of parent or partner or human being in the world.
My obsession with authenticity, whatever that means, is I think in reaction to my mother creating, as it were, these personas for herself. These different personas are different boys in their life. But the biggest and long mister, which was golf memorabilia queat golf of them a brilliant nut. But I always thought watching and doing that, even when I was young, I thought, who is this?
This isn't you.
So the authenticity thing is kind of in reaction to that. And I think absolutely the way that I've parented my kids is in reaction to that. I think generationally we come from parents who, on the whole were not brilliant at showing affection. My generation, you know, we had parents, especially fathers who were not brilliant at that. And there's a notion or else simplistic notion of cycles of abuse
being repeated. But there's another idea, which is I think you can grow in counter reaction to the way you were brought up if you were aware enough. It's not easy, you know, awareness, it's not always easy to know where the damage was that happened to you that you don't want to pass on to your kids, or it might be their subconsciously. One thing I talk about a lot
is cats. I'm very obsessed with cats. And there was a cat in our house when I was young, and that cat got all the affection from my dad, got an awful lot of affection, And that's clearly one reason why I'm obsessed with cats. You know, I think people want affection, but sometimes there are blockages, and there were a lot of blockages at forty three Kindle Road where
I grew up. So now I see how that cat ended up as the repository of simple affection because my dad was able to show simple affection to an animal, but he couldn't show it to his wife and not.
Really to his children, And so.
I think that implies that my dad wanted to show affection, that he wanted to receive affection, but he couldn't do it in a straightforward way to his family because it would mean showing vulnerability. But I saw vulnerability on his face when I told him, when me and my brother told him that my mom was dead, and it was so intense, you know, it spoke.
I guess of this huge need, perhaps his.
Whole life, a huge need wanting to be hugged, wanting affection.
Who knows.
It's hard to tell with someone as male and as rejecting of emotion as my father.
Do you think that your parents ever had a conversation about David White or do you think that they ever ever talked about it?
I don't really know.
It's a strange thing how much I know that I don't know that, and how much everyone seems to know around my family that my mother was so flagrant with all this information. They argued all the time, ceratinly. My dad shouted at my mum all the time. My mum didn't tend to respond that much, but my dad was very shouty out. He wasn't a violent man, but he was very loud and very angry. Irritated all the time, aggravating.
I could hear.
Them sometimes arguing through my bedroom wall. I had many things through my bedroom wall, but shouting at her. Once I heard him shout we're supposed to be in love sarcastically, which is a very grim thing to hear your parents shout angrily at each other. But I did never hear him shout your fuckings someone else. Actually, there's an amazing letter that I have seen where David White writes to my mom. It's about some big golfing memorabili snaff who
that they've had. They've basically got into trouble because David White got my mum to sell some dodgy golfing memorabilia on his behalf. It was fake in various ways, and then they were thrown out of the golfing memorabilia society. I mean, it's a long story, a terrible scandal.
But then David White writes my mum a letter saying, come.
On, we need to talk about this because they were loggerheads about it, and my mom suggests that my dad could be the referee, the umpire between them, and then David White writes a letter back to my mum saying, I don't think the good doctor, that's what he calls him.
He says, I.
Don't think he'd be right for this, because I've always found it rather rude and boorish towards me, David White says, in this imperious way.
And what's brittant about that is my dad.
Was rude and borish to everyone, you know, but David White would be the one person who he actually had every reason to be rude and borish to. So that letter implies this weird I don't know, I know what the word is a touch of drama, a shadow play where everyone was going to have a meeting David White, my mom, my dad.
It's the climactic scene.
My dad was going to be the umpire where anyone admitting that what was actually going on was an affair between two of these people and the other two were married, and.
It was your mother's idea. She said that was a good idea.
Yeah, it was my mother's idea.
But it's interesting that David White said I don't want to do it because he's rude and bor it. She doesn't say, obviously, I don't want to do that because we're having an affair and he's your husband. He doesn't say that. He says no. Colin is too rude. Well, the lack of transparency in all the parties is so strange because my mum is talking about the affair all the time and yet not if you see.
What I mean.
That's where it makes it a really interesting family secret, right, because what you just said is the lack of transparency, and yet on the surface of things completely transparent, but not in the way that the people around it are metabolizing it. And also it's to me, at some point this affair kind of loses steam or stops altogether in reality, but does not stop for your mother.
That's true. It's hard to know what the true truth is.
The height of the affair was in the late seventies early to mid eighties, when my mum is in her.
Mid thirties to mid forties.
Is definitely happening then a lot, because I have all the erotic poetry. It's all written then, and the erotic poetry has mundane elements. It tends to detail things like where they've met up. I also have answer phone messages on Casseka. She recorded all of them, and she kept the two of them talking, which often includes her saying, where shall we meet? I booked a hotel, let's go here. By the way, he David White is often quite demuring
about that. He doesn't really seem to want to agree to anything, but he obviously did agree to some of it. And the Erotic Poetry includes some very very graphic references to things that.
Happened between them.
I mean, it's properly erotic, but not in the sense that one would read it and feel aroused, while I certainly would. Maybe I think one would think, oh my god, I can't believe she's put that in a poem. But you know, it's very graphic and atomically. I mean, I'll be honest with you, Danny, it was weird when I found the Book of Erotic Poetry, because you know, it's very very graphic, and most people would shut it immediately
because it's very mind their mum. But for me, seconds after I found it, the Nora Efron Everything is copy gene kicked in because at that point, which was soon after my mom's death, you know, and I found this the school book. I mean, these poems, she'd written copyright on them, and I think she'd written copyright on them because she would really like them to have been.
Published, you know.
And I didn't have a problem very quickly with how graphic they were, and I thought it's brilliant as well. I thought this is material, which is great, but I also thought there's something beautiful about them.
Even though they're terrible. They are terrible.
Formerly does a poetry, But what's brilliant about them is how much my mother doesn't know what poetry is, which is why she's included these very very extraordinary details of their love making in a way that isn't really poetic and hilarious for that.
Reason, including decidedly unpoetic descriptions of anatomy.
Yeah, there is some incredible lines about the detail exactly what they did together, as well as a lot of this mundane stuff like there's literally one poem which is just about trying to go and meet David White to talk about a golfing fair together, and in the poem it says things like I'm going to meet you in Willesden, which is near Dolly's Hill, and the BBC man, I don't know who he is, a BBC man will be there.
I will wait for you there, And you.
Realize that this is just my mother's diary, but she's put it in Stanzas because she wanted to poeticize her life. She wanted her life to be poetic, even if she was not a poet. I think that if I was someone else, if I was not a writer, not a comedian, I might have been horrified. I might have thought this must never see the light of day. I don't know, but now I thought, this is brilliant, this is material. But it wasn't just that. It wasn't quite as cold
as that. I think there is a coldness to it, whoever it is, even in war. I think there's a sliver of ice in the heart of the writer. Poetry means anything that happens in their life they will seize and turn into story.
Yeah, but also it's true.
I thought my mother's funeral, you know, this idea that she was wonderful and it was lovely and everything else. I thought I was being told. I thought, that's not saying anything about it. Where's she gone? Where is the woman gone who writes very very erotic poetry that somehow isn't erotic and isn't poetry, but it is still somehow amazing.
Where's that wonder everything about my mother is there. There are many many people coming out to me at my mother's funeral telling me that my mother was wonderful, just say over there again, she was so wonderful, so wonderful, such a wonderful woman. Often while I found that disorientating, you know, I wanted to say to them, did you
I actually know her? Not because she wasn't wonderful, but because there was no detail in what they were saying, And it felt to me like a second death, like a second more profound erasure of this incredibly idiosyncratic woman.
If you just idealize someone as we tend to do after they died, and actually their memory fades again, is crushed again, because you can only call them up and make them live by detailing their strangeness, I think, and their idiosyncrasies, and that in humans that's often very flawed specifics, and my mother had a lot of specifics.
When I first did.
A stand up show about my parents, both my brothers were uncertain, unhappy.
Both of them said, in different ways, don't do this.
My younger brother, who, as I say, is angrier about the whole thing, and you're not fucking doing it. And my older brother said, look, I know you, and we could talk about this for hours, but you know you're going to do it, aren't you? And I said yes, And I said, you're gonna have to believe me. It comes from a place of love. And then when I did the show, I came back on stage offers for
an encore. It was a Q and A, just an ad lib Q and A with the audience, and all these people have their hands up and I say that you just have to wait a minute, just everyone. I had to find out, first of all, what my older brother thought. And I look at the room and I can't see him, and I said, Iva, what do you think? And he said, I loved it. And then he said I loved it because it felt like she was in the room, which I found incredibly moving and still do,
because that's job done. That's what I was trying to do. I was trying to make genuinely live again in the way that platitudes at a funeral do not.
That's beautiful. It reminds me of something that William Stafford, great American novelist, was once asked at like at the end of his life, what he would say to his mother, who had died when he was very young, and he said, I would say, look, I wrote all these books for you.
There's something in that. It goes really back to what you said about us anticity, which I found very moving given your childhood and the impossibly mixed messages or you know, just mixed realities that you were, you know, getting between you know, home and the Yeshiva and who are you? And what that blossoms into could have blossomed into something else for someone else, but what it blossoms into for you is an absolute like just inner mandate to be authentic,
to not lie, to not omit. I mean even the idea that like to be fully fully there without editing yourself in a way. And I don't mean on the page, but I mean, you know, when you do your comedy, when you do your shows, which it would seem to me is the huge saving grace for you here, is that you could make meaning out of all of this, including some really really hard intergenerational stuff.
Yeah.
I think that's true even now, Danny, in this moment, when you ask me a question, my response is just to come back with the truth as much as possible, don't filter it.
It never occurs to me.
I don't have time to think, how can I frame this in a way that will, you know, look good for me, look good for my mom, look good for my family. I can't do it. And I know that might sound a bit self aggrandizing. It's not meant to be, because you know, I see it at times as sort of almost incontinent, like I'm sort of continent with the truth at some level. Luckily I have enough skill to
shape that being continent into stories. But my instinct when I'm talking, when someone asks me a question, when you ask me, you know, incredibly brilliantly perceptive questions about my childhood, it just triggers in me. I need to tell you the absolute truth as near as I can articulate it.
And that is, at least in part, a response to being raised by a woman who literally couldn't do it. One other thing I'm curious about is, you know you can't know the answer to this. You can you can't know for sure whether your parents ever talked about David White, and you probably can't know for sure the answer to what I'm about to ask you. But do you think that by the end of her life and she died fairly young seventy four do you think that she ever
had that moment of embodying herself? You know, did the fantasist ever rest Was there ever a point where she was truly authentically herself in a way that she would have felt or understood.
I think my mother was someone operated in terms of persona. The way they're about to say that she's someone who couldn't tell the truth is that she's someone who is constantly telling her truth in some way, but it is not quite the truth, because she's fitting herself into personas that are absurd, that are not her, like golf memorabilia, nat or other ones that seem closer to who she is, but still don't feel quite real. So towards the end of her life, she became her persona was more Jewish.
She became like being macha and did a lot of stuff around the local synagogue and was constantly having kiddershes in honor of her dead parents, and that felt closer to who she was, but still to some extent a role that she was occupying. To be fair to my mom, we all maybe occupy roles, although that is partly what I've set my stall out against. I think, how can I try not to play any kind of role, but just be as entirely in myself as possible. But that
might be a role, right. There was one moment actually where I helped my mum manage to come out of character, as it were. I find it weird though, when I think about it. I went round to see them and I wasn't living at home. I was about twenty but already moved out home, and they were having, as they often were, an argument in our front guard, very public argument. We just got out of the car and we're having
a route. But I've watched them have this route. And my dad went into the house and slammed the door, and my mother turned to me and she said, it's so tiring living without an emotional life, so tiring living without an emotional life. And I was really shocked, not because that wasn't true, not because I thought, how dare she say that about my dad? I thought, oh, that's
absolutely right. And that was surprising to me because I thought, how is my mother, of all people, said something so unvarnished, so un self conscious and true. And it shocked me because I thought, maybe somewhat underneath all the layers of self consciousness and persona playing there's a real person with
emotional intelligence and self awareness. But it sort of just flashed in front of me, and then she would have gone back to talking about golf or later Jewishness or the synagogue or whatever else she felt she needed to put in front of her to talk about. My mom didn't really relate to people as people. She tended to relate to them in terms of what she had decided they liked some very small thing that she decided X
likes this, so al focus on that. Like my wife, who is per former writer herself, you know, she pointed out to me that my mom was always.
Getting her champagne because once.
Once my wife said, oh, it was having a last champagne that my mother was there and saw her doing that like it. So my mom was always trying to get her champagne, always very cheap champagne.
But she was sort of a people pleaser in a way.
But the way she would do it would be just to decide, this is what that person likes and then get them that stuff, and no amount of saying, actually, I'm not this person, I don't like it that much would make any difference. Like with me, she gas lipped me when I was a kid in the thinking that I was a fan of these books called Billy Bunter books when I was young. Billy Bunter was written in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, and he's basically Harry Potter,
but with more fat shaming. And I believed that I was a fan of Billy Bunter. And it ended up with her taking me to a thing called the Old Boys Book Club, a societ where they talked about Billy Bunter, where I was eleven and everyone else was seventy. She would leave me there and come back three hours later with all these very old people. And that was because my mother had decided, this is what David likes me, David, this is what David's and I must service what he likes.
And at some level that's what she was doing with David White. David White likes golf, so I must become obsessed with golf. And it was of a weirdly mechanical decision at some level. And the fact that I didn't really like Billy Bunter, I'm just didn't know at the time, but so or that David White might have thought, you know, you know, I want to have sex with you, I don't really want you to intrude on my whole golf world.
That would never occur to her because whatever you liked, she had to provide it in spades, in many, many different ways that were mad.
It seems almost like, you know, you're describing someone who didn't have a center, or didn't have at access to her own center.
That's very true.
One of the extorted things she does is I did a documentary called who Do You Think You Are?
I think in America as well.
It's a genealogy documentary, and my mother's in it, obviously, and there's a bit that was cut because she just starts talking in a very very flirty way, sort of with the camera about her dad, my grandfather who was in Dachau and you know, escaped to Britain and then was interned in Britain because he was in an enemy alien, had this terrible life. She talked him out how I used to go to Soho in London, to the Red Light area, to Berrick Street to have sex with prostitutes.
She doesn't actually say that out loud, but that's what she meets. It's clear and clear that this sort of went on, and she was aware of it when she was a teenager. And what she says, you know, we all knew what he was doing, but we pretended we didn't in this kind of twinkly flirty way. And I'm looking at camera like, what the fuck, what are you doing? Why are you saying this about your dad, my grandfather? But it's your point about her not having a center.
There's some currency in her doing that, immediate currency for her, but it's so wrong. And that's like the golf. At some level, there's currency for her in being obsessed with golf and memorabilia. But it was entirely wrong. My mother was a great empress of wrong at some level.
The great Empress of wrong. Yeah, we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. In the UK, where David lives with his wife Morwenna and there are two grown kids, it must be said that he's pretty well. He's pretty famous, like recognized when he walks down the street kind of famous. He's a comedian, presenter, scriptwriter, author, singer, a multi hyphenate. As they say, fame can be erupting.
Of course we all know that, but David's commitment to authenticity is his own personal shield against all that humor. Fierce intelligence, and the desire to do it differently are his superpowers. Laughter is the best medicine. But one less than funny note is that David White passed away just a few days before this conversation.
David White actually died quite recently, just like a week ago or so. I got told. People are who read the book are always asking me, what did David White think? What does David White think about you doing all this? But I've had very little contact with him. I did write to him when my mom died and said, I thought you should know this that she's died. She was always in love with you. He sent me a letter about but he didn't real respond to it because you know.
I see you in his own way.
He's a man like my father, even though he was a man quite happy to have an affair, which my father was not, but a man, you know, without interest in dealing with emotional complexity. He lived in Slovenia and
never really engaged with anything. When I was unearthing my family secrets of the world, and then his half sister, who came and saw the stage show that I did, wrote to me and said, I think you should know he died the other day, which I felt kind of sad about, because as I think about all this, one thing I should make clear is, you know, I celebrate all this.
I think of all of this as rich.
And strange and funny and weird. And yet there's damaging stuff going on in transgression and narcissism and fairly psychotic behavior in some ways, and it did cause problem and my dad having to live in denying of it in the way that he did was obviously damaging for him, and my mum crossed all sorts of boundaries. But I have lived to find it funny and I'm very glad
of it. I know both my brothers find it troubling, but at the end of the day, often the damage that we work through when we're young is what makes us who we are. And I am happy with who I am, so therefore I do not judge my mother negatively. You know, I think that I don't call it damage in the book, I call it accidental sculpture. So anyway, the point being, for all the trouble and whatever it may have brought, I think my life would be duller
without it. I may not even be a comedian. So therefore, when I found out that David White had died, I was quite sad.
Well, it's also in a way it's the end of that story, right, yes, exactly, Yeah, yeah, I mean all three legs of that stool are gone.
Yeah, the main players have exited the stage.
And that feels sad.
Fame place a strange angular role in all this, because I think fame is a type of mistaken identity. Erica Jong said, the more famous you are, the more people will get you wrong. And that's definitely been my experience that people refract a version of you that they want to see, which won't be who you are, and that's troubling if you're someone who's obsessed with authenticity. I don't really do characters. I just talk about myself in my
children's books. I can create character. The way that I talk as a stand up about my own life and shape my own life for my own voice is a way of combating that mistaken identity. And I think that what I feel from my own family experience is that now I want to be a situation is where there aren't secrets and everyone is being as true and authentic as possible, but there are some things which I've also taken and absorbed.
It's not all counter reaction, you know.
Like within the family that I grew up in, my older brother is incredibly important and he definitely first started turning me onto comedy. He played me LPs and tapes of really funny early British comedy. My dad used to play me Peter Seller's records. Peter Sells used to do these sketch records, and comedy was a saving grace in my house in forty three Kendor Road. And that's one thing about comedy. You know that when you laugh, you're not pretending. It's sort of impossible to be pretending when
you laugh. When you laugh properly, I mean, obviously, people who sit and pretend that Shakespeare is funny are pretending, you know, in the theater they are pretending because they want to hear that they want people to.
Hear they're very clever.
But proper laughing is a version of no pretense, I think, because it's such an instinctive thing, particularly when you lose control, as something that's really funny. And so I think that it would have been for me even back then if I didn't realize it then the fact there was funny in the house. That would be a way of finding authenticity that might have been missing elsewhere. And maybe I've
built on that. I mean not just me, me and WI Whener and our kids have built on it, as it's so key to the way we communicate.
We just communicate through funny.
You would be absurd to match that we spend all our time laughing at each other, but we do spend a lot of time laughing. And I love it that both my kids are really funny.
You know.
That is so important to me because it feels like I've managed to find a way of creating the truth that is most important to me in this current space, in my family space now. And I had some of that when I was young. But I also had this other thing, a wide and crazy untruth that I guess is where I would try and place the way I've gone forward from where I came from.
Here's David reading one last passage from My Family the Memoir.
I knew before I had written or performed the show about my parents that it would, in its own way be an act of love, a show that celebrated the what or more specifically, but I think this is of necessity, born out of love, an act of reclamation, because, as I've said, my mother died abruptly, and so the lack of time, the lack of dying time, meant there had been no longer bye, no mobilization of memory.
What I was trying to do with.
The stage show and my family, not the sitcom, and already had an instinct about before I even started it was this sounds creepy, but hey reincarnate to describe it in such detail and to leave nothing out that you would truly come alive again on stage, not truly at all, of course, but in the sense that people use that phrase to push it as far as it could go.
And then obviously I didn't know this in advance, performing across the world for two years, thus giving me, with a whole load of people who never met her, the chance to properly say goodbye.
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Accur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family Secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Rye, and if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.