Ruskin Park: Sylvia, Me and the BBC by Rory Cellan-Jones review – an intimate tale of romance and betrayal

‘Sylvia’s feelings are relived in her letters’: the author’s mother as a young woman in the 1930s. Photograph: No credit required, sent from publisher [email protected]

In 1996, Rory Cellan-Jones had the job of clearing out his mother’s council flat after her death. In the course of that task, he was surprised to discover that his mother, Sylvia, had kept every single letter that she ever received, and carbon copies of all those that she sent – to her two sisters and her two sons, to lovers and lawyers and former colleagues – boxes and files of correspondence dating back to the 1930s.

At the time, Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s longtime technology correspondent, simply shipped the boxes and files back to his own house in Ealing, and they were left there pretty much undisturbed for 20-odd years, partly because of the busyness of his own life. It was only when Cellan-Jones left the BBC, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019, that he started to really read his mother’s correspondence. What he found was not only the story of her life, but also the story of his own.