Ruskin Park E-Book

Rory Cellan-Jones

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 424

Beschreibung

After a childhood of silence and secrets, a compelling journey of discovery – from broadcaster, podcaster and rescue dog tweeter @Ruskin147. Rory Cellan-Jones knew he was the child of a love affair between two BBC employees. But until his mother, Sylvia, died and he found a file labelled 'For Rory' he had no idea of their beginnings or ending. Or why his peculiarly isolated childhood had so tested the bond between him and Sylvia, who was single-parenting two sons in a one-bedroom fl at while working full time through the Fifties and Sixties. 'For Rory,' his mother had written on the file before she died, 'in the hope that it will help him understand how it really was ...' This is a compelling account of what Rory uncovered in the papers, letters and diaries; a relationship between two colleagues (two romantics) and the restrictive forces of post-war respectability and prejudice that ended it. It is also an evocation of the centrifugal force at the centre of all their lives - the BBC itself. Both tender and troubling, the drama moves from wartime radio broadcasts, to the glamour of 1950s television studios, to the golden era of BBC drama. His father may have directed The Forsyte Saga and Rory may have watched him from afar, but he didnt actually meet him until much later, in adulthood, when the damage to his mother's life had already been done. Praise for Always On: 'Delightfully insightful and intensely readable.' - Stephen Fry

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First published in 2023 by September Publishing

Copyright © Rory Cellan-Jones 2023

The right of Rory Cellan-Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Photo on page 90 from Radio Times, 6 November 1953.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, www.refinecatch.com

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

ISBN 9781914613432

Ebook ISBN 9781914613449

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org


CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Return to Ruskin Park House

Chapter 2 Sylvia

Chapter 3 The BBC

Chapter 4 Stephen

Chapter 5 Cellan-Jones

Chapter 6 Television!

Chapter 7 A Pleasant Young Man

Chapter 8 Lawyers

Chapter 9 Meet the Parents

Chapter 10 Early Years

Chapter 11 The Grigsons

Chapter 12 School, Money, Class

Chapter 13 Meeting Jim

Chapter 14 Endings

Postscript A Letter from Jim

Acknowledgements 

Note 


To Sylvia and Stephen


CHAPTER 1

RETURN TO RUSKIN PARK HOUSE

On a showery Sunday afternoon in May 2022, I stood outside the south London block of flats where I had spent my childhood and wondered what I was doing there. Peering up at the second-floor flat, my home for 19 years, I could see the windows were open. Somebody must be in. But when I rang the mobile phone of the woman who had invited me over, my call went to voicemail – four times in a row. The rain started up again and I took shelter by the door to the block. It had been open to anyone when I lived here but now it needed to be unlocked by a flat owner’s key. I felt conspicuous and not a little foolish.

An hour before, I had set off on a journey which I hadn’t made for more than 25 years. Back then, it had become tediously familiar. Leaving the house in West Ealing where my family and I have lived since 1992, I travelled slowly down the traffic-clogged A40. I passed the old Hoover factory, now a Tesco superstore, and a string of some of the least attractive 1930s and 1950s housing estates, heading towards central London. But this time, driven by a sense that if I was on a journey into my past I had better go the whole hog, I turned off and drove down Wood Lane, past my former workplace, BBC Television Centre.

I had first visited Television Centre in the 1960s, taken to what seemed a magical place, more exciting than any theme park, by my mother, who worked in the drama department. As a child, I had delighted in spotting Doctor Who villains in the canteen or peering into a studio at a Blue Peter rehearsal. As an adult, I found that the asbestos-riddled complex where I practised my trade as a broadcaster had lost none of its glamour.

I drove on, retracing the route my mum had taken home in her little yellow Mini or later the MG Midget which I always suspected had been bought for her by an elderly neighbour who was an admirer. I passed the Albertine wine bar, just closed but for many years the scene of much BBC post-programme carousing. This had also been the location of my first meeting with my half-brother Simon in 1985.

Down, through Earl’s Court to the Embankment, past the Royal Hospital. Across Vauxhall Bridge, overlooked by the postmodern fortress that is the MI6 headquarters, into grimy south London. Past the Oval cricket ground, where in 1968, aged ten, I had been left with a sandwich and a ten-shilling note, the price of entry to my first Test match. I sat on the grass by the boundary and watched England’s John Edrich and Basil D’Oliveira – soon to be shamefully dropped from the team touring apartheid era South Africa – as they began to build a commanding first innings total against Australia.

Along Camberwell New Road, still choked with traffic but with some fine Georgian terraced houses that had since emerged from the blackened slums I had seen from the top deck of the number 12 bus in the 1960s and 70s. Then a right turn at Camberwell Green and up past the Maudsley Hospital, where in 1995 my mother and I had met the doctor to hear a diagnosis which frightened me but which she appeared to take in her stride. On past King’s College Hospital, where she had been transferred the following year, and where her life had ended.

Finally, up Denmark Hill, turning off at Champion Hill, just short of the border with leafy Dulwich, to arrive at Ruskin Park House.

My mother, Sylvia Rich, had arrived here in 1955 with her 13-year-old son, my half-brother Stephen. She had written to a friend about the new home: ‘It really is much nicer than the usual Council flats, central heating, constant hot water, quite new, and situated on top of a hill with a delightful little park just outside.’

It was, however, very small – Stephen had the one bedroom while Sylvia slept in the living room on a couch, or ‘divan’ as she called it, which became her bed each night. Then in 1958 I came along and, for a while, until Stephen left home to make his way in the theatre, it was even more cramped, with my cot joining his bed in the single bedroom.

From then on, it was just me and Mum, all the way until 1977 when I left the flat, first to live in West Berlin for six months, then to start my degree in modern and medieval languages in Cambridge.

When I picture the years I spent growing up at Ruskin Park House they have a stain of gloom. From very early on I was miserable there. At first, I suppose like most children of single parents, I had a strong bond with my mother. We would sit at the dining-room table on a Sunday lunchtime eating one of her very limited repertoire of meals – poached eggs, fish fingers, occasionally a flavourless beef casserole – singing along to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ on Two Way Family Favourites or laughing at Round the Horne. The stately old valve radio, the centrepiece of the living room until we got a little portable black and white telly, is the one piece of furniture I still have from the flat. It sits in our attic, waiting for the day when the team from BBC’s The Repair Shop brings it back to life.

But as time went on, Mum grew increasingly eccentric and possessive, before sinking into depression in my teenage years. Spending time alone with her in the flat as she began another rambling story about the goings-on at the BBC became a grim prospect.

I did escape during the holidays, when my mother, trying to hold down a demanding job with unpredictable hours, sent me out of London to stay with her family or with my godparents, whose house in a Wiltshire village had a long garden with a stream running through it. These were times of joyful freedom, while going back to the flat felt like a return to prison.

I escaped but my mum, who had at first so loved Ruskin Park House, did not. In the mid-1970s, the flat-dwellers, always encouraged to see themselves as a cut above most council tenants, were told that they had an opportunity to become homeowners. Under a Labour government, even before Margaret Thatcher came to power, the starting gun was fired on the privatisation of council homes. It was a revolution that gave thousands of tenants a valuable asset just as the 1980s housing boom got under way, and it would transform the politics and economics of Britain.

But Sylvia Rich was not going to be a part of it. She turned down the opportunity to acquire our flat for the sum of £5,000, despite – or perhaps because of – my brother Stephen telling her what a good idea that would be. He was exasperated because she was trapping herself in Ruskin Park House when she could have had a nice nest egg and moved somewhere better. ‘It’s all a con,’ she would mutter under her breath when the subject was raised. She remained a Southwark Council tenant.

As the 1980s rolled on, the flats appreciated in value and a new breed known as the ‘yuppies’ moved in – after all, with Denmark Hill station just down the hill offering a ten-minute journey to Blackfriars, you could be in the City in no time.

By the early 1990s, one-bedroom flats like ours were going for upwards of £25,000, netting a tidy profit for those that had bought them in the 1970s for £5,000. Sylvia, however, appeared to have no regrets. After she died, I found a draft of a letter she had apparently sent around this time to the Conservative Party about a party political broadcast.

She wrote that while she was a Conservative voter she disliked the message in the broadcast about enabling tenants to have the ‘dignity’ of owning their own homes. ‘Are you not equating “possessions” with dignity?’ she asked, going on to claim many buyers had ended up having their homes repossessed. She ended by warning that if the ‘misleading’ statements continued, she would stop voting Conservative and she knew several people who felt the same.

I wonder who those ‘several people’ who shared her views on home ownership were? By this point, she barely knew anyone on the estate, although a young BBC radio producer who had bought a flat on her corridor knocked on her door from time to time to check that she was OK, letting me know if there was a problem.

One of my former BBC colleagues, Ellie Updale, who was born five years before me and spent her childhood in a three-bedroom flat in block B on the estate, has a different story. Her parents, despite some similar misgivings, did buy their flat. Then her father, a sub-editor on the Daily Mirror, died suddenly leaving her mother worried about meeting the mortgage. But things worked out: ‘She’d always worked, my mother. She got through and eventually she sold it and moved to a little flat in Dulwich. And that was the making of her because she was pretty well independent.’

Now, on that rainy afternoon in May 2022, as I looked up at the flat, my mind went back to another Sunday more than a quarter of a century earlier. Then – as now – I had stood outside wondering how to get in. I had grown alarmed after failing to get Mum on the phone and had driven over to check up on her. When I got no response to knocking on the door and shouting through the letter box, I borrowed a ladder from the porter and climbed on to the second-floor balcony and through the open kitchen window. In my old bedroom, I found Mum and an empty bottle of sleeping pills. If she had meant to take a fatal dose she failed. The ambulance came and took her to hospital but she was home again within a few days. It was a stroke that killed her some months later.

A few days after her funeral in 1996, I again drove over to Ruskin Park House, this time to clear out the flat before it was handed back to Southwark Council.

I took the cramped little lift to the second floor and produced the key which we had found pinned inside my mother’s coat pocket after her death. She had always had a terrible fear of being locked out and when I was first given a key insisted, to my great embarrassment, that it was attached to my school trouser pocket on a piece of elastic.

Opening the door, the familiar smell of the overheated flat hit me, overlain with the extra layers of dust accumulated while it had lain empty for the last two months. Looking around, it struck me once again how sad a picture of her life the flat painted. Much of the furniture was cheap and flimsy, dating back to the 1950s when Sylvia and Stephen had moved in. Stephen’s earnings as a child actor at the Old Vic had helped buy him a bed and a wardrobe but a tea chest served as a side table and old orange boxes as bookcases, and they were heading for the dump.

In the bedroom, the wardrobe was stuffed with cheap women’s clothing, much of it acquired from charity shops, and some of my old school shirts, which Mum had taken to wearing – after all, they were only slightly shabby. But hidden at the back I discovered two extremely elegant 1950s evening dresses, one a long, white, silk number. We later handed them to a friend’s two teenage daughters, who were delighted with their glamorous new party outfits.

Stephen’s wedding reception, 1967. Sylvia in fur stole, with Joan, Rory and Bunty.

It was as I began to open drawers, look under the bed and investigate behind the dressing table that I became aware that there was something far more valuable here. Everywhere, there were bundles of letters – hundreds, possibly thousands of them – along with folders full of BBC memos, my school reports and legal documents relating to custody battles and child maintenance arrangements. It seemed she had never thrown away any letter she had received and kept carbon copies of just about every one she typed, either in her BBC office or at home on the portable typewriter she had brought back from work.

I immediately recognised the handwriting in hundreds of letters from her two sisters, my aunts Bunty and Joan, who had attended her funeral days earlier. I had known that they had written to each other at least weekly – my mother used to read out selected items of family news to me while I stifled a yawn and pretended to be interested. What I had not realised was that she often typed her replies and kept carbon copies.

As I skimmed through some of these letters, a correspond­ence stretching over 50 years, I got the first inkling of something that was to become more evident when I looked more closely over the coming weeks. Yes, there was plenty of humdrum stuff – ‘just bought a new winter coat from Lewis’s’. But there was a total intimacy between the three sisters, Sylvia and Joan willing to share the details of their equally dramatic and sometimes disastrous romantic lives with Bunty, happily married but always with a kind word of comfort or advice. And between them they painted a vivid picture of what it was like to be a woman in Britain from the 1940s to the 1990s, especially one who wanted more from life than just domestic routine. What’s more, I began to realise that my mother, who left school at 14 and had appeared to read little more than the Sunday Express when I was growing up, had a real gift for writing, her letters peppered with pungent descriptions of her colleagues and friends.

Next, a small, dark blue 1945 diary with ‘B.B.C.’ stamped on the cover fell out of one folder, and beneath it I found a sheaf of letters from the war. With her husband away in various non-combatant roles around England and then in Washington DC, she found herself a job in the radio talks department in Bristol. By day, she was mixing with poets and artists and giving her boss Geoffrey Grigson the benefit of her opinion of their scripts; by night, she was sheltering from bombs or going dancing with American officers. Oh, and taking a few weeks off in 1942 to give birth to her son Stephen.

There appeared to be mountains of letters telling the story of her separation from her husband, sparked by his distaste for her BBC job, and her move to London in the 1950s to work in television drama. I kept on reading, engrossed in the stories that unfolded about characters I thought I knew so well – my mother, my brother, my lovely aunts and cousins – but eventually I realised time was passing and I had to get on with the job. I scooped everything up and took it down to the car to examine more closely at home.

A few days later, I was trying to sort this sprawling archive into some sort of chronological order when I came across one batch of letters that made me catch my breath. They were in a small rectangular red box with ‘Charmed Life by Kayser’ printed on the lid, which must have once contained a pair of stockings. In blue biro, in my mother’s familiar handwriting, I saw this: ‘Keep for myself & Rory later.’ Opening it, I first saw a brown envelope with another message: ‘For Rory, to read and think about in the hope that it will help him to understand how it really was.’ Inside was a bundle of love letters which told the story of how I came to be born and how I was very nearly given away to lead a different life under another name. But there were also clues to an entirely different woman to the one with whom I had grown up.

It would take me years before I was ready to undertake the journey this accumulated pile of paper invited me on. Years before I was able to begin to reconcile the greyness of my teenage years with a resourceful, beautiful woman working in those post-war years. But in 1996, with a young family and a career at the BBC which I felt at the time had stalled, it did not feel right to immerse myself in the past. Yes, I still had a whole series of questions about the circumstances of my birth but the answers might prove hurtful to at least one person I had grown close to in recent years. Better to leave well alone for now.

In 2021, a freelance journalist who knew a bit about my background contacted me about a story idea she was trying to sell to the Telegraph. Its letters pages had been full of people reminiscing about what they found when they cleared out their parents’ homes – didn’t I have a story about that? I told her my tale about the letters and it appeared in the Sunday Telegraph under my byline.

Writing the article sent me back to the filing cabinet stuffed with the letters I had not looked at for years. I wondered what had happened to the flat in Ruskin Park House and once Covid restrictions were removed, I sat down and wrote a letter, addressed to The Householder. I explained some of the story of my family’s involvement with the flat and asked whether I might visit. I put it in the post and waited … and waited. Four weeks later there had been no reply. I decided on one more try, just in case the letter had not arrived, resending it with a covering note.

A few days later, my phone rang, an unfamiliar number flashing up on my screen. It was a young woman called Christina, who introduced herself as the girlfriend of Alex, who owned the flat. They had received my first letter but it had been a busy time and they’d not got round to answering – but yes, I’d be very welcome to visit the following Sunday. I put the phone down and did a little dance around the kitchen, excited but also a bit nervous about returning to Ruskin Park House.

But now I was staring up at the flat with a sense of anti-climax – maybe Christina and Alex had decided my visit was a bad idea after all? Then my phone rang. It was Christina, apologising – she’d had her phone on silent and missed my four calls. She rushed down to let me in and we made our way up to the second floor in the cramped lift, one of the few things that hadn’t changed – apparently it still sometimes smelled of pee.

Along the familiar corridor – now carpeted – to the door. Christina produced a key and we were in. I had been bracing myself for a wave of emotion, perhaps even tears, but I felt … fine. Perhaps because the flat was almost unrecognisable. Gone was the battered furniture that took up far too much space and the threadbare living room carpet that had helped make it feel dusty, cramped and overheated.

A new wooden floor, minimal furniture and the windows and balcony door flung open gave the place a light, airy feel. They say that when you return to places you knew as a child they feel smaller but this felt like a bigger space. I wandered down the hall and peered into the galley kitchen where in December 1976, as I sat eating a boiled egg, my mother had handed me an envelope containing the news that I had won a place at Cambridge. I seem to remember her patting me on the shoulder but there was no great emotion from either of us at this momentous news which signalled that I would be escaping from Ruskin Park House.

Then I sat with Alex and Christina, showing them the few black and white photos I’d brought with me on an iPad – me as a small baby in my mother’s arms looking out over the trees; me aged about four on the balcony blowing bubbles.

Then Alex explained how he had come to buy the flat during the pandemic in 2020 and had been just as delighted to move in as my mother and Stephen had been 65 years earlier. He, like Christina, worked in the arts and appeared to have a keen sensibility about architecture and firm ideas of what he wanted from his first home. He had seen another Ruskin Park House flat featured on a website called The Modern House, aimed at design and architecture aficionados. It described the estate as ‘a wonderful modernist development’ and one of the few of its era ‘to retain most of its period features, including Crittall windows, a laundry and exquisitely tended gardens’.

Really? I thought to myself. I’d grown up in a modernist masterpiece with white steel framed windows that had been period features, and I hadn’t noticed? Yes, I did remember sitting in the basement laundry watching our weekly wash go round and trying to avoid the women who wanted to mother me, but as for exquisite gardens – well, a few municipal begonias was about it. Still, Alex’s enthusiasm was genuine. ‘It was the first and only flat that I saw,’ he said.

But what did he like about it so much? I asked, trying to keep the tone of incredulity out of my voice.

‘It is old and well built and was in a location that kind of had everything. It’s next to a park, it’s next to the hospital. It’s next to the amenities and Camberwell – it’s connected.’

As a cat meandered lazily down the hall and onto the balcony – Mum, no feline fan, would have shuddered – I reflected that he was right. The flat was desirable and he’d snapped up a bargain in the early days of the pandemic when the housing market briefly stuttered. He and Christina, a costume designer, had made it into a beautiful home with a calm, restful vibe.

But what a story the flat told of changing Britain. From the 1950s, when a woman with a teenage son arrived, probably to disapproving whispers – where’s her husband? – which grew louder as she suddenly acquired another child without a man appearing on the scene. Through the 1960s, when the younger boy ends up with a place at a fee-paying school, funded by the local authority as part of a vast levelling up scheme. Then the 1970s, when he gradually wanders a little further afield into a London scarred by IRA bombs, while at home the power cuts of the three-day week see mother and son eating their evening fish fingers by candlelight. Through the giddy 1980s and 90s, the era of privatisation when the older residents died or sold up, replaced by young professionals, and into the twenty-first century, when Ruskin Park House is christened a modernist gem and my own children start looking at former council flats in places like Bermondsey, which my mother regarded as beyond the limits of civilisation.

When I picture the flat it is still in 1960s monochrome or the muddy Kodak Instamatic colours of the 1970s – somewhere to escape from, somewhere to be embarrassed about when the parents of friends with houses and gardens asked where I lived. But as I left Alex and Christina they looked relaxed and content in their perfect little home.

I had one last look around the estate, noticed that the playground where I once kept a nervous eye on rough kids who might push me off the roundabout had been replaced by a car park, and headed home. I felt relief. My journey into my past had been fine; I reckoned I had emerged emotionally unscathed. But there were questions and memories niggling at me. My mother had been dead for a quarter of a century; my father had died just a couple of years ago. I had two serious health conditions: a malignant tumour behind my left eye, which had been spotted in 2005 and had needed regular treatment ever since; and a recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. It felt like I needed to take stock of my life while there was still time.

I knew that if I wanted to understand my own story, how my parents came together and split apart, why my father disappeared from my life until I was 23, what had made my difficult, eccentric, cussed old mum such a captivating figure to him and others, and why the BBC had played such a big part in all of our lives, there was only one place to go. Back to that filing cabinet full of fading old letters.


CHAPTER 2

SYLVIA

Just before Christmas 1996, five months after my mother died, I was having a tearful moment in our kitchen in Ealing. The Christmas tree had been decorated and the turkey had been bought, but it had just hit me that Mum’s annual visit wouldn’t be happening. I do cry easily – at emotional scenes on TV or in films, when I heard I was to become a grandfather, even occasionally in the early days of my BBC career about work, to my great embarrassment. When I was a keen young producer on Newsnight in 1984, a report I was overseeing about the miners’ strike fell apart on air, leaving the presenter floundering. Afterwards, a rather excitable programme editor bawled me out in front of the whole programme team and I felt the tears coming, managing to escape to the gents’ loos in the nick of time. The next morning, I woke to the news of the IRA bomb at the Conservatives’ Brighton conference hotel which had nearly killed Margaret Thatcher and when I arrived at the office in Lime Grove, I found the same programme editor in charge. ‘Forget about yesterday,’ he said, ‘I want you to get involved in designing a model of the Grand Hotel for tonight.’ And nothing more was said about my emotional moment.

But until that Christmas, I had hardly shed a tear over Mum. Perhaps it was because, since Stephen’s sudden death in 1994, I had seen myself as head of the family, organising the funeral, finding out about the will and generally holding things together. But somehow the thought that I would no longer have to go over to Ruskin Park House to fetch her for Christmas lunch, sit through more meandering tales of her BBC career, increasingly incoherent with each new glass of whisky, and then drive her home again with the used wrapping paper she’d snaffled from the floor as we opened presents, got to me.

‘She was always such a pain at Christmas,’ I sniffled.

My wife, Diane, came over and gave me a hug. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said, ‘she was a pain all year round.’

Which was true. She was difficult, demanding and increasingly eccentric. Whenever I want to remember how I thought about my mother in the last years of her life, I take a look at a photo from my wedding day. It was taken by the official photographer and shows a group gathered on the steps of Ealing town hall in west London in April 1990. Diane and I have just emerged from the register office and are flanked by our parents. Diane’s mum and dad, who met while serving on a gun site in London during the war and then brought up four children in a Lancashire mill town on meagre resources, are looking proud but slightly nervous. Diane says she remembers them feeling slightly socially awkward.

My father, a handsome man in his late fifties, has forsaken his usual open-toed sandals and corduroys for a sharp suit and tie, and a pair of highly polished shoes.

My mother, then 75, is wearing a dress I am pretty sure came from a charity shop and has a plaster above what looks like a black eye. Both Diane and I have broad smiles but I am clinging on to Sylvia’s arm as if concerned that she might fall.

What is not clear from the photo is just how anxious I was that day. Not about getting married, or whether the wedding would go ahead smoothly. It was a modest affair – the ceremony at the register office followed by a lunch in a village hall in Richmond – because we were paying for it all ourselves, not wanting to trouble our parents for a contribution. No, the reason for my nerves was that this was the first – and it turned out the last – time that I saw my parents together in the same place. I had only met my father for the first time nine years earlier at the age of twenty-three, when I contacted him suggesting a meeting was overdue.

His wife, Maggie, and my three half-siblings were to join us later at the reception. My anxiety was not really about them, even though, like Diane’s parents, I too felt a little awkward with my newfound family, who seemed rather posher than me, but about how my mother might behave. By then Sylvia was well into her batty old lady years – the Oxfam dress was an improvement on her usual wardrobe which relied heavily on those threadbare school shirts I had left behind when I moved out of our flat. She had always been superstitious, but now when I visited her in Ruskin Park House I would have to start by picking up any knives she had dropped on the floor. For her to retrieve them was apparently bad luck.

She had also become increasingly critical of every move I made in my life. When, four years earlier, I had given up my BBC staff producer job in London to chance my arm as a TV reporter on a contract in Cardiff, she had been appalled – I was throwing away my security in pursuit of a gamble that might not pay off. After a 40-year battle to bring up two sons on her own and give them the chance of some stability, she made it clear that my actions amounted to a betrayal.

As for my love life, it always seemed she only really approved of a girlfriend once we had split up. She was also remarkably prudish, embarrassed by any mention of anything even vaguely explicit on TV – ‘This looks very boring,’ she’d say, moving to switch channels – and seemingly disapproving of sex before marriage (funny, given my origins). A couple of weeks before the wedding, we had told her that Diane was expecting a baby in September and she had immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was why we were getting married. Pointing out that we had been engaged since the previous September cut no ice.

From the town hall, we were driven by my best man, David, a junior doctor proud of his black Ford Escort convertible, to the reception. David, already possessed of a soothing bedside manner, knew my mother and her eccentricities, and his next task was to keep an eye on her.

At the reception, a crowd of friends and family gathered outside in the spring sunshine for a glass of sparkling wine before a sit-down lunch of cold meat and salad. It was Grand National day and my family on my mother’s side – lovely, warm, gossipy people who liked a flutter – promptly set about organising a sweepstake. Meanwhile, I watched nervously as my mother glided around with a drink in her hand, buttonholing people to deliver long anecdotes about her life at the BBC. (Or so I imagined – I learned later that another subject had been the merits of one of my previous girlfriends.) But fortunately, she mainly latched on to her Birmingham family, who nodded along tolerantly to stories they’d heard many times, rather than to my friends or, God forbid, my Cellan-Jones family. At lunch, she was seated between my new father-in-law, a quiet patient man who was deaf in the ear on her side, and my brother Stephen, well used to handling her. I tensed up when Diane used her speech to announce that she was keeping her maiden name and then, to roars of approval, that she was expecting a baby. I glanced along the table at my mother and saw her purse her lips momentarily before joining in the applause. After that, I relaxed and enjoyed myself and the day ended without any major embarrassment.

It strikes me, looking again at that picture, that embarrassment was the dominant emotion in my life from the age of around ten until my mother died. I was embarrassed about my home, about my lack of a father, about the clothes my mother chose for me, about the gloves on a piece of elastic running through the sleeves of my school blazer. Embarrassed by my brother, Stephen, who had a self-confidence I never had, dragging me backstage to meet actors he vaguely knew after a play – ‘they won’t want to meet me!’ – or climbing over the fence at a smart golf club – ‘we’ll get caught!’ – to play a few holes for free with me as reluctant caddie. But most of all I was embarrassed about my mother, what she would say, how she would behave.

Now in 2021, when I properly immersed myself in her letters for the first time, I realised that this recurring emotional spasm had warped my view of her. In 1996, a seed of doubt had been planted about my settled view of her when I skimmed through the story of her affair with my father. Twenty-five years later, as I dived deep into the picture the letters painted over the course of her adult life from the 1930s to the 1990s, I slowly began to understand just what a remarkable person she was.

It was the Imperial Airways air ticket to Le Touquet which immediately caught my eye as I was sorting through what I thought of as the Sylvia Archive. It was dated 2nd September 1934, just a few days after her twentieth birthday, and on the cover was her name, Miss S. Parish. Inside were the stubs of vouchers which must have been used for what appeared to be a day trip to the fashionable resort on the French coast. It seemed the trip had started at London’s Victoria station at 0900, with the flight from Croydon airport at 0945. The ticket cost £3 and 15 shillings and included entrance to the Le Touquet casino.

A little further research from me turned up an article in a 1934 copy of Air Transport News, which made it clear that these trips were Sunday excursions, begun in 1933:

The Sunday return trips to Le Touquet which were popular last year will again be operated by Imperial Airways, Ltd., this summer, and there is no doubt that the use of Handley Page 42s or Short Scylla-type aircraft, combined with the low fares charged and the excellent service, will make the Imperial excursions particularly popular.

The £3 15s fare might have included tea at the casino and dinner on the aircraft on the flight home, but whatever Air Transport News said it cannot have appeared cheap to a 20-year-old shorthand typist from Birmingham. And these were the very early days of leisure flights, so anyone climbing on board one of these noisy biplanes must have done so with a great sense of excitement and no little trepidation.

If a day trip to Le Touquet sounded more glamorous than anything I expected my mother to have been up to in her free time, so did my next two finds – invitations to Cambridge balls.

In December 1933, it was the university Medical Society ball, a grand affair with a menu in French, from consommé royale en tasse, through mousseline de saumon and faisan en casserole, to trifle à l’Anglaise. Six months later, she was at the First and Third Trinity Boat Clubs’ ball, with another French menu and a separate dance card with a little pencil. One senses that this 19-year-old with auburn hair and a shy smile was not short of dance partners. Which young university man, I wondered, had invited her to balls, and had he also paid for her excursion to Le Touquet with Imperial Airways? None of this seemed to fit with the story I knew: a youthful social life mostly conducted in Midlands pubs, which swiftly led to a marriage to a rather dull man more than a decade her senior.

Sylvia Parish was born in Warwickshire in August 1914, the second of five children of Frank Cecil Parish – always known as Cecil in a family seemingly allergic to their first names – described on the birth certificate as a farmer, and his wife Alsie, née Jordan. In fact, the baby was christened Alsie Margaret Sylvia. My mother said the strange first name, which she never used, had been spotted on a circus poster by her grandmother. Perhaps she was just desperate for ideas, as her daughter Alsie was one of 17 children from a moderately prosperous Warwickshire farming family.

Sylvia’s sister Cicely Joan, known as Joan, had been born in 1912, then Honor, later known by all as Bunty, came along in 1917, followed by Frank in 1918 and Derek in 1920. Joan, Sylvia and Bunty were extremely close throughout their lives, and later my two aunts played a vital role in my upbringing.

All five Parish children were born at Welford Hill, the 300-acre farm owned – or perhaps rented – by Cecil Parish. My mother made it sound idyllic, a home with a nursemaid for the children and a couple of farm labourers to do the heavy work. Among her papers I found a contemporary newspaper account of the 1910 wedding of Cecil and Alsie, which sounded like quite a grand affair. ‘The presents were numerous and handsome’ it declares. The bridegroom gave the bride a sapphire brooch and a bicycle; she gave him a gold signet ring and gold cufflinks. Among the gifts from guests were Venetian glass vases, a revolving soup tureen and a silver tea and coffee service.

But the Parish family was soon heading down the social scale. Sylvia talked to me with great affection about her ‘dear old dad’, while suggesting she had a more combative relationship with her mother. But she would also sigh and admit that an excessive devotion to the drink and the horses had been his downfall, seeing him slide from being a gentleman farmer to a farm labourer at the end of his life.

Some time around 1922, the Parishes left Welford Hill and farming, for reasons that remain unclear. Their departure followed the death of Sylvia’s grandfather Frank Parish who is listed in the 1911 census as living at the farm with his two sons, Cecil and John. It is possible that Uncle John no longer wanted to carry on with the farm and so everybody moved on.

In any event, Sylvia always talked of Welford Hill as a lost childhood paradise. In a letter in the early 1950s, she described a visit to the farm with her friend Ethel:

We went up to see over our old home now owned by Stratford’s ex-mayor. But it is not as Ethel and I remember it, the garden is uncared for, the creeper torn off the walls, and the farm buildings have been let go and are very ramshackle. It would upset Dad to see it like it is now I think. We remembered it as warm and comfortable with oil lamps and log fires and now it seems bleak with flickering Calor Gas (they haven’t got the electric up the hill yet) – very bare. Maybe our memory paints it rose coloured, I don’t know.

She had taken her young son Stephen – known for a while as Jo – on the visit:

I showed Jo the back stairs by the nursery where my nurse threw my doll down stairs and I screamed and tried to push her after it. We had a succession of nurses, some nice, some not, who left because of the too ardent attentions of Uncle John, who lived in the cottage. The nurses didn’t object I don’t think, but Mamma did.

One of Bunty’s grandchildren got her to recount her childhood memories and, following her death at the age of 101, my cousin Susan, Bunty’s oldest daughter, did some family research. From this account and some census details, Susan put together a picture of a family which, after years of early stability, was constantly on the move. She found that after the Parishes left Welford Hill they never seemed to stick anywhere for long through the 1920s.

Their first stop was the Welsh seaside resort of Borth, seven miles north of Aberystwyth on Cardigan Bay. Why they headed here is not clear, but soon they were back in the Midlands with a house in Malvern in Worcestershire. Then it was into Birmingham and Handsworth, the site of inner city riots in the 1980s but at that time a quiet suburb. Next, outside the city to a bungalow in Barnt Green, and then off to Quinton in Warwickshire.

All this time, Bunty explained, both Joan and Sylvia were being sent to fee-paying schools. The older boy, Frank, had also begun a private school education. But at the next stop, a pub called The Talbot in the Worcestershire village of Knightwick, came the moment of crisis. Today, The Talbot describes itself as ‘a traditional coaching inn which has been an institution of the local community since the fifteenth century’, but I imagine that in the late 1920s, before the age of mass tourism, it was just a local drinking hole and far from a money-spinner.

What is more, running a pub cannot have been the best idea for a man with a taste for drink, and soon Cecil Parish was telling his wife that there was a problem. ‘The money’s all gone Alsie!’ he is supposed to have said.

‘Joan had to leave boarding school and Sylvia had to leave Worcester Girls Grammar, and they were both transferred to King Edward’s Handsworth,’ Bunty explained. ‘Frank and Derek were sent to a boys’ school. We came back to a different part of Handsworth.’

Their new home was a boarding house, mainly for men who were commercial travellers, and for the first time in Bunty’s memory, she saw her father actually doing some work. At the farm he and his brother, Uncle John, had not needed to lift a finger. ‘They paid people such terribly small wages – I think to do potato picking. The women got sixpence a day for a whole day’s work.’ But now Alsie, who was having to cook dinners for the commercial travellers, seemed to think it was time he pulled his weight and sent him out to do the food shopping each day.

Of all the five children, it seems Sylvia was the most affected by the constant upheaval, which by now meant that she and her two sisters were sharing a room for the first time. While Joan got her school certificate and then a job in a bank, and Bunty went as far as starting teacher training, my mother always used to tell me she had left school at 14 with no qualifications. She may have exaggerated her lack of education but what is clear is that there was a bust-up at home which led to her walking out some time in the early 1930s. It seems she had a row with her mother and found herself a bedsit in Birmingham. Her father, always the peacemaker, came to see her and said she could stay there as long as she promised to come home each week for Sunday lunch. Soon she was learning shorthand and typing and had got herself a job as a secretary.

But back to those Cambridge balls and the trip to Le Touquet. How did they happen, and who paid? There is no clue in the Sylvia Archive, although I thought I might find a hint when I came across an envelope postmarked Birmingham, September 1933, addressed in the most ornate copperplate to Sylvia Parish, Beach Hotel, Minehead in Somerset. It appears that the 19-year-old secretary had taken herself off on holiday.

But the letter was a disappointment. The handwriting is beautiful but the style is clumsy, repetitive and not a little creepy. Her correspondent appears to be an older admirer, styling himself Uncle Sam, although making it clear he is not a blood relative, and says he wishes he could be in Minehead too. It seems they are work colleagues, or at least he says he has been to her office many times and he is impatient for her return:

It seems quite dull without the one bright face to welcome me, however I shall be pleased to see you there again, I presume you will be there on Monday. Saunders is away on his holidays, I think Mr K will be at Shirley races on Monday so hope to have the pleasure of a little chat (this is of course private).

Why he wanted a private chat and why Sylvia hung on to this particular letter for more than 60 years was far from clear. There are some family rumours that she had a flirtation with a young man whose family ran Chad Valley, the Birmingham-based toy company, but ‘Uncle Sam’ was clearly not him.

After the Le Touquet ticket, there is a gap in the archive of a couple of years, and then in November 1936 comes the first letter from the man who was to play a key role in her story. It is written on the headed notepaper of the Merkham Trading Co. Ltd, purveyor of calculating machines and other office equipment with its headquarters at Bush House, London, and a branch in Paradise Street in Birmingham. It is from Leslie Rich, known to everyone as Richie, and is the first of many. In fact, there were more letters in the collection I found at Ruskin Park House from and to Richie than anyone else. Which was strange, in that she only spoke of him to me with exasperation and a certain disdain. This first one strikes what is to become a familiar note – it is an apology:

My dear,

I can’t remember anything of last night – not even seeing you.

Judging from my condition this morning I must have been in a pretty hopeless state and I’m frightfully sorry. I do hope after due consideration you’ll decide to forgive me.

My hand is frightfully shaky so I don’t suppose you’ll be able to read this – I can’t!!!

Love,

Richie

She obviously did forgive him but it seems he did not learn his lesson. Because next comes a note scrawled in capital letters on the pages for 24th, 25th and 26th December, torn out of a 1936 diary: ‘DARLING I HAVE STAYED TOO LONG IN THIS PUB PLEASE COME AND RESCUE ME.’

From the following June, 1937, there is a rare typed letter (did he get a secretary at the Merkham Trading Co. to type it?) which strikes a saucier note:

Darling,

Herewith the bathing costume you so ardently desired. If you want any help getting into it please phone me. I have got a new film in my camera which is to be entirely devoted to pictures of your sweet self in this natty little costume.

Yours till the pubs close forever,

L Rich

Nothing then to suggest that the pub-loving amateur photographer was a great catch. She must have had plenty of admirers much younger than Richie, who at 35 was some 13 years older than her. Indeed, she used to talk wistfully to me of a boyfriend called Shadow, who sounded a lot more fun. But in August 1937, she and Richie were married at a Birmingham register office. The marriage certificate describes her as a chartered accountant’s secretary and Richie as a branch manager of a trading company.

Her father is listed as a licensed victualler, although by now he and Alsie seem to have moved on to The Bell in Alcester, with no greater success than at their previous pub. And now we have the very first letter in Sylvia’s own hand. It is to her parents and comes from the Queen’s Hotel in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, where she and Richie spent their honeymoon:

Dear Dad & Mother,

We arrived here quite safely yesterday. It didn’t seem a long journey. Stopped at the Hop Pole at Tewkesbury and imbibed some more champagne.

We’re having a lovely time – had two bathes – one in the pool last night & one in the sea this morning.

Hope you were allright yesterday – did you and Shadow go on the booze?

I liked your suit very much. Will you thank Joan for her letter and I’ll write her later – also Bunty – the Roxy is working splendidly and is a Godsend.

We are both ever so happy and Richie is being absolutely sweet to me so in case you’re worrying about that you needn’t.

Please forgive scribble – in hurry

Love,

Sylvia

This letter, with the inevitable mentions of booze, seems to show a happy start to the marriage. But presumably Sylvia retrieved it from her parents’ papers when they died, by which time she had long since separated from Richie amid some acrimony. In the early years, however, there is little hint of future discord, though I see everything through Richie’s eyes – it was later that she began keeping carbon copies of the letters she wrote, as if determined to wrest control of her own narrative.

In the late 1930s they are living in the Edgbaston district of Birmingham and Richie is continuing to work for the Merkham office equipment company, travelling away from time to time as a salesman. After six years at the accountancy firm DM Saunders, Sylvia has given up work – ‘I left this post on my marriage’ she wrote later on several BBC job applications.

When Richie writes home he quickly resorts to baby talk – Sylvia is Baba and he is Dadda or Poppa, which may say something about how he sees the relationship. While Richie is away at an exhibition in Leicester with his friend and colleague George, Sylvia is given the task of finding them a better place to live in Birmingham than his bachelor flat.

His letters home are a tedious mixture of tales about pub visits and snooker games with excuses for not having written earlier because he is so busy – ‘bad Dadda’. And it seems Sylvia’s mission isn’t going well: ‘Sorry your house hunting has not been too successful but don’t worry – we’ll find something good sooner or later.’

Further letters, in which Richie and his colleagues are driving off for a drink at lunchtime or having a game of snooker – ‘Dadda won!’ – cannot have convinced Sylvia that her salesman husband was having a dreadful time. But my next find seemed to show that she was far from the meek little wife waiting at home. No, she was getting ready to serve her country in the skies above Britain.

A letter dated 19th April 1939 on the notepaper of the Midland Aero Club from its Castle Bromwich Flying Ground is addressed to Mrs S.M. Rich. It begins, confusingly, ‘Dear Sir’ but continues:

I am now pleased to advise you that your National Service Enrolment has been returned to me endorsed to the effect that you may be enrolled as a member of the Civil Air Guard and, under these circumstances, I am enclosing you herewith the necessary forms for your medical examination.

Enclosed is a form explaining that ‘The Civil Air Guard has been formed for the purpose of giving facilities for flying training and practice at special rates to members of both sexes between the ages of 18 and 50 who are prepared in return to accept an obligation to serve their country at home in connection with aviation in the event of an emergency arriving from war or threat from war.’