This is an enjoyable book based on the author’s mother’s stories and recollections. Anyone who is thinking of putting together a record of family history might take it as a model. Around his mother’s stories the author weaves songs, newspaper cuttings, photographs, and extracts from her cookery books to produce a readable life history.
However, it aims to be not only a life history and a record of one woman’s narrative repertoire, but also a social history. The best bits of social history are probably Ruby Lanham’s accounts of horses and hare coursing. It does give some idea of life in the agricultural depressions of the 1920s and 1930s in rural Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, but the treatment is personal and to some extent “story-fied” by the author’s mother, who was plainly an accomplished storyteller. There is also a fair amount of presentation of self going on in these stories, as Mrs Lanham justifies what she had made of her life. These polished performances may lead to good storytelling, but that is not necessarily the same thing as good history.
Nevertheless, the book does not claim to be a scholarly one, and as a family history it works very well; so we can forgive it this small fault. Overall I enjoyed it, and can recommend There’s a Story That My Mother Told: So I Know It to Be True
as a good read.
