Long Lost Family presenter Davina McCall has often discussed her tumultuous early life, including her earliest memory.
In an interview from 2011, the presenter revealed that her first memory was going to live with her grandmother when she was four. She told The Guardian: “My mum told me she was going on holiday, but I didn’t see her for three months.”
‘I feel terrible, my mum hasn’t come to pick me up yet’
It’s something Davina expanded on in an Instagram Live video in 2020, explaining: “My mum left me at my granny’s and said she was going on a two-week ski trip, and she didn’t know how to tell me that she wasn’t coming back. But that’s how she put it to me, and hoped I’d forget. I was four.”
She added: “I remember the time I was in the kitchen and I looked at my granny. I thought, I feel terrible, my mum hasn’t come to pick me up yet.”
She said that she felt guilty because her grandmother needed to look after, continuing: “She’s still looking after me, she must think ‘Oh, it’s such a pain in the bum having my granddaughter here. I’m still having to look after her.’
“Actually, she loved having me there, but that’s how I was playing it out in my head.”
Tonight (June 11), she’ll continue to look at the upbringing of others on Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace, which she hosts alongside Nicky Campbell. The ITV show returned with its sixth season this week.
Davina would be left at the airport at three years old
Davina was born in 1967 to Andrew McCall and Florence Hennion. They separated when she was just three years old.
Florence would return to her native France, leaving a young Davina in the care of her grandparents. At the age of three, Davina had to fly to the country as an unaccompanied minor.
She told the Sunday Times that her mother would often forget to pick her up from the airport – and she once wet herself as she was so scared.
Appearing on BBC‘s Who Do You Think You Are? in 2009, Davina said: “When you are the child of a divorced parent you are kind of split in two. I didn’t just split in two, I had two countries. I kind of lost touch with a lot of my French family as well and I feel half a person in a funny sort of way.”
Catch Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace on ITV1 tonight at 9pm.
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