This Much Is True

She was the most intelligent yet untutored woman that I ever met. In other circumstances, she could have been the head of a company or leading the government, but she came from a poor background, and she was always conscious of that. Like Charles Dickens, she had sprung from the lower-middle class. It’s an uncomfortable situation: hampered by poverty and strongly aspirational, she observed keenly the class distinctions which exist in England. She wanted to speak well and meet ‘the best people’. She was anxious always to separate herself from the ‘common’. The odd thing was that she was endlessly generous to anyone poorer than herself. But she was squeezed in the trap of ‘class’ — and feared being at the bottom of the social scale. She was a passionate and determined social climber. Her dictum: ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, that counts.’

My mother, Ruth Sandeman Walters, was born on 24 January 1905 in Walton Road, Kirkdale, Liverpool, where my grandfather Sigismund ‘Siggi’ Sandeman had a second-hand furniture business, although he put himself down on the census as an auctioneer.

Jews have lots of names: their birth name, their Yiddish name and, sometimes, the name they chose when they came to England and wanted to anglicise themselves. During the First World War, my grandfather changed the family name from Sandeman to Walters, in order to avoid anti-German feeling: this sentiment was so strong that even the British royal family discreetly shifted their name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor.

Siggi’s parents, Simon and Hanna Sandmann (note the original spelling), came from a small town, Margonin, in the lake district of Western Poland. Grandpa Margolyes came from Amdur (now Indura) in Belarus. I visited there in 2006 while making a BBC Radio 4 documentary called Sentimental Journey with Arthur Smith, to see if any traces of my family remain. There are none. All the Jews were obliterated in 1941, when the Nazis arrived and the Final Solution was put into practice.

Grandpa Walters was born in Middlesbrough in 1867; in fact, he has the distinction of being the first Jew to be born there. In those days, Middlesbrough was in Yorkshire, and Siggi was very proud of being a Yorkshireman. He was one of eight siblings: Doris, Rose Rachel, Jacob, Elizabeth, Charles, Solomon and Augusta.

In April 1892, Siggi — a draper — married Flora Posner, the daughter of Jacob Posner, a furrier. Flora was a teacher at the famous Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane, Spitalfields, the Eton of the East End. Siggi and Flora had four children: Mummy’s older sister, Gusta (short for Augusta); Doris, second eldest; then my mother, Ruth; and a brother, Jacob, who died as a baby because the nurse dropped him out of the pram. Not intentionally, of course — it was an accident.

Shortly after Mummy was born, the family moved to south-east London where my grandfather was one of the founders and first president of the South East London synagogue in New Cross. The building still stands next to the old fire station, but it’s now a Mormon temple. He opened a furniture shop in Church Street, Camberwell, but I think he hoped for more. Much later on, Grandpa Walters went into property, quite successfully, and their last house in Underhill Road, Dulwich, is now worth two million. I wish we’d kept it! Flora and Gusta opened a smart dress and hat shop called Madame Flora in Rye Lane, Peckham. It was such a substantial premises that it was later sold to C & A Modes.

My family story illustrates the archetypal trajectory of a working-class Jewish immigrant family: first, a peddler, then in trade, then in the professions, and then, with me — the third-generation immigrant — in the Arts.

There was always, perhaps, the hint of a leaning towards performance, all the way through my mother’s side, because Grandpa not only fancied himself as an auctioneer, but was also an amateur magician of great skill. He had many books on magic and was always performing tricks. He would flourish an egg out of my ear, throw a pack of cards in the air and catch the one I’d named. Siggi was open, funny, handsome and disgracefully charming. He had the same manipulative charm that I’ve got. Apparently my great-grandfather also had it, and Mummy certainly did. I think there must have been a ‘charm gene’ in my maternal line. When you have it, you know you have it, and you must be very careful not to misuse it. My great-grandfather did misuse it, and most likely my grandfather did too, because everybody seemed to adore him uncritically. (My grandmother Flora did not, however. She was a little sour, perhaps because she knew her beloved Siggi had an eye for the ladies. My cousin Ethel told me he was a devil with the salesgirls in his wife’s shop, and ‘screwed everything that moved’.)