n another life, David Baddiel’s mother, Sarah, could have been an aristocrat living in a big house with servants and married to a rich businessman – or so she imagined. In the early 1930s, her German Jewish parents, Ernst and Otti, had been extremely wealthy; according to a cousin, they owned a painting by Rubens. But then the Nazis took their home, their livelihood and murdered their relatives, so they fled with their baby to England. Twenty-five years later, their daughter was living in a modest house in London’s Dollis Hill with three sons and her husband,
