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.
This heartfelt, gripping book is his account of that family detective story. At the centre of it is one particular shoebox of letters relating to the circumstances of Cellan-Jones’s birth – he only met his father when he was 23. It is the tale of an intense love affair that rewrote just about everything he knew about Sylvia and which explained the eccentricities and depression that had characterised her later life. Along the way, those letters become a poignant social history of Britain in the war years and after, a history illustrated in part by the evolution of the one-bedroom flat in south London that Sylvia rented for 40 years – holding out against “right to buy” and gentrification – in a block that gives this book its title, Ruskin Park.
Sylvia had left school in Birmingham at 14 and married an older man, Leslie Rich, in 1937. The couple had a child, Stephen, during the war, but by then there was a third party in the marriage: the BBC. While her husband was away in the forces, Sylvia had taken on a job as a secretary in the BBC Talks department in Bristol. She worked for the poet and polymath Geoffrey Grigson, commissioning the likes of John Betjeman and Dylan Thomas to deliver wartime content for the corporation. The job opened up a new life for Sylvia, and despite pressure from her husband to quit after the war, she clung to it, advancing in the bohemian world of the BBC drama department. The marriage foundered, and after a disastrous period in bedsits, Sylvia and Stephen finally got to the top of the council waiting list and moved into the purpose-built block at Ruskin Park, with its downstairs laundry room and its well-kept gardens, and its divan bed on which Sylvia slept before commuting across London each day to Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush.
It was at Lime Grove, in 1956, that Sylvia, then 42 and a temporary studio manager, was assigned a trainee assistant floor manager called Jim Cellan-Jones, who, at 25, had arrived at the BBC by a more traditional route – the Dragon school in Oxford, Charterhouse and St John’s College, Cambridge. Until he read his mother’s letters, Rory Cellan-Jones knew little or nothing of the relationship that followed. In his childhood, his father was simply a name on TV credits – director in the 1960s of The Forsyte Saga, among other notable successes. He and his mother would watch and wait for that name – that he always struggled to pronounce – to roll up the screen of their black and white telly.
The letters between Cellan-Jones’s parents open up a drama that would be a match for anything his father brought to the screen, an intimate tale of ardent romance and betrayal, revealing of barriers of class and age and money. Sylvia’s feelings about her pregnancy, her petition for divorce from her first husband, the broken promises of her lover, are all relived in the pages of her letters, which become a little epistolary novel about the desperation and status of “liberated” single mothers in the years before, as Philip Larkin wrote, “sexual intercourse began in 1963”.
The affair caused a minor scandal at the BBC. Sylvia continued to work at the corporation until 1974, but with ever-present anxieties about money and childcare, her career never advanced. In retirement, to her son’s embarrassment, she would tell repetitive stories about her time in the drama department to anyone who would listen, but also watch with pride as Rory became a fixture on the daytime news. Her driving ambition in all those years, her letters suggest, had been to “legitimise” not only her son – she changed her surname by deed poll to match that of his father – but also her own choices and struggles. This book, a different kind of love letter, this time from son to mother, feels like the authentic conclusion of that faith.
• Ruskin Park: Sylvia, Me and the BBC by Rory Cellan-Jones is published by September Books (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
