When the Sporting Life on 15^th October, 1994, carried a profile on the Newmarket Racehorse Trainer, Geoff Pearce, he stated that the person who had given him the impetus to get going, was Mrs Ruby Lanham, then aged 88.  Ruby Lanham, my mother, was born Ruby Alleston on 27^th December, 1905, at Bures, Suffolk, and she was the eldest of four.  Sadly she died on 7^th February, 1998.

Friends, acquaintances and others would travel many miles to visit mother, who they said was a character.  When I think about it now I realise that they did not say she was a character because she told jokes, played pranks, or because of the way she looked but because she simply sat and told stories: stories from her life, and stories from others who had in turn told her stories from their lives - all from living memory - nothing out of books.

I can hear people, who had suffered bereavement, saying that mother had helped them and likewise those with problems, financial or otherwise.  She would ‘hold court’ at hatchings, matchings and despatchings (christenings, weddings and funerals) with people hanging onto her every word as she related stories from the past, punctuating them with ‘howsomiver’, constantly taking the part of all the various players in the adventure with dialogue ‘So I said to him…’ and ‘He said to me…’  It seemed no problem for her to convert an adventure into a story, in fact she could not tell it otherwise.  She did not approve of reading books, well novels at any rate.  She felt they were a waste of time.  Yet she was a mine of information, and what she did not know she knew where to find or who to get it from.  She, of course, had a Cookery Book but the recipes were handwritten by herself that she had gathered from people around her.  It included everything from her grandmother’s pickle for Suffolk Sweetcure Hams to homemade Cough Mixture, Linseed Tea, or ‘Hoss Oil’ embrocation – all handed down and all to be used.

She hated stories of fairies and dragons and things that she could not believe in.  I believe that this was because she thought that they could not be true, and were subversive to the truth that mattered so much to her.  This, from a person who was exceedingly superstitious – we were never allowed to say ‘goodbye’ only ‘cheerio’ or ‘farewell’ and she would always kiss the gatepost when home from a long journey.  I think that this was her way of recognising the enormous amount of chance that lies in life and all we do.  Furthermore, having worked with old Horsemen, she would tell of their belief in the witchcraft of charming horses with frog’s bone, milch, and secret oils.  When my sister, Audrey, was born with cats fur across her face (mother had put her hands on her face whilst carrying Audrey when a cat was killed on the road) mother knew that the only way to be rid of it was to rub a little of her own spittle on it night and morning, which she did and it went.  She told us of this and how she had learned it, together with a good many more 'non-medical' cures, from Granny Griggs, the old village midwife.  She had seen ghosts and was a strong believer in their presence.

I cannot think of a single storybook that we had as children and we certainly were not read stories at bedtime, so you may think that we had a deprived childhood.  Not so, we may have been as 'poor as church mice' but we were as 'rich as sheenies' in stories – stories of ‘shared experience’ being told all the time and everywhere, but mostly at mealtimes.  They were never told for the sake of telling a story, but always with a practical interest appertaining to a situation in hand, passing wisdom on from the truth of experience learned from the harsh realities of life.  Many of mother’s stories were about horses and often from the hard days in agriculture of the late 1920/early 1930’s.  A time she would say when ‘If you hadn’t got anything boy, you were lucky because you did not have to worry about it, for sooner or later you would lose it’.  These stories of no money, eating from table and chairs with the bailiffs stickers on them, passed on a sense of occasion, thrift, appreciation, place, belonging, opportunity and more.  She was sharing the experiences of life and in it passing on lessons of wisdom through conversation rich in imagery.

In the early 1960’s a friend took me to the first Cambridge Folk Festival.  A young group, ‘The Watersons’, sung a song that I was sure I had heard mother sing, but how could she have seen books on folk songs, I thought, or heard any folk records.  ‘The ‘old goat’ cannot possibly know any folk songs’ I thought.  I was of course wrong and very wrong.  She did know them, but they were never called folk songs.  Sometime later, after much persuasion, she came out with the best part of three verses of this song ‘When first I went a waggoning’ and a lot more traditional songs in fragments, all learned off people around her and passed on by word of mouth in the true oral tradition.  Like most other people I thought if it was not in a book then it could not be ‘proper’ and the same with stories.  It took me a long while to realise that these were traditional songs and that the tradition, in its ever-changing form, still goes on around us all the time.  It took me even longer to realise that we each have our own tradition that is represented within us by all that we have inherited and been influenced by since the cradle, or even before.  It is our culture.  Collectively it can be the culture of the area that we were brought up in or even of a nation.  I had to get away from the false notion that education – well education of the academic sort - had instilled into me that books come first before I could see the truth of the fuller world. Everything is firstly about people.  Stories come from people, and stories that are committed in written words to paper have all come firstly from people, and then are mostly written into books by a third party with an external perception of the culture they portray.  Stories are all around us everywhere and just waiting to be made up as they always have been.  The Tradition is ongoing.  It can be our own culture or it can be a culture witnessed in others.

When my father died I was five, and my Uncle Tickles took me under his wing on a farm, which had no electricity, only hand-pumped water and external sanitation.  He had hardly ever been off the farm but, like all ‘long headed men’, had an acute awareness of the things around him.  He was, by his own admission, ‘As sharp as a bag of chisels’ and ‘As artful as a wagon load of monkeys’.  He would be down the Cart Lodge on a Monday morning with the men when they were having their breakfast, where he would get the gossip, then tell it to us at breakfast, embroidering it with expressions of imagery.  Then if he thought that the tale was good enough, by the time he went down to his local pub on a Thursday night, it would come out as a yarn and, if he liked it, it would be filed in his head for years to come to make a point or a truism - all with humour.  Similarly he made his own songs from local occasions as he rode the tractor, all from experiences.  Like his ‘R-tomic Drillman’, ‘Three dows flew from the creach (three pigeons flew from a spinney with a watercourse running through it)’, ‘Pig feeding calypso’, ‘When you are awfully light on the trigger’ inspired by a dose of the 'backyard trots’ during the blackberry season.  All put together in the same way as his stories – with an eye to the humorous telling of the story.  More important than his stories were the strange little sayings that he used to come out with.  When I think about them now they did not just pass on information but an ability to see things from a different angle and above all they passed on the ability to correlate.  They were not just rhymes about the weather or crops, but, principles of understanding.  He would come out with things like ‘Old dogs for hard roads and a lean dog for a bitch’.  If a young woman got into trouble, or someone else’s wife had gone off or there was going to be a wedding or something like that then you can bet that in all this gossip that a thin fellow would be involved, and he would say ‘Told you boy.  Lean dog for a bitch’ or ‘An old dog for hard roads’ if an old stayer had triumphed over adversity.  He used descriptions like ‘Cold enough this morning boy for a suit of sleeved weskits’ or ‘Cast in yer box’ (as when a horse gets down and cannot get up) if you were late getting up in the morning.  If he wanted you to get on he would say ‘Get for’rad Mrs Gorrod, the cart hang’ and who can fail to see the mental image of a fat lady in the back of a tilting cart, or ‘You can hang round a long time, boy, with your mouth open before roast chicken fly in’ and ‘It is not what you know but it’s knowing what you don’t know, boy, that counts’.  He'd make it sound muddled up on purpose to make you think but it gave you the all important imagery.  If you asked something that you should not he would say ‘Can you keep a secret… well so can I!’  When we were young he would keep asking us about our learning.  ‘If a herring and a half cost a penny and a half, how many do you get for a shilling?’  It taught you to look at things in a different way and to correlate information – figures – measured information into useable wisdom.  A recent Storyteller said that ‘It encapsulated the gathered wisdom of centuries’ and I believe that it did.  Stories were passed the same whether for adults or children alike as long  as you were 'seen and not heard!’ you could listen and you were expected to.

He would use local words that you will not find in national or even Suffolk word dictionaries, like ‘dinge’, ‘dag’, ‘hazeling’, 'sludder' and would even make up his own words as he went along to give better communication to colleagues.  As that great wordsmith, Adrian Bell, said ‘My education only began when I had the privilege of listening to the prowess of expression of Suffolk farm men in their stories’, and George Ewart Evans that champion of ‘from mouths of men’ said similar. 

What of legends.  They did not come from literature or any printed matter but were orally told of local people, such as Ernie Nunn, the huntsman, who ‘Had enough skill with hounds to draw them off when in full cry’, something that allegedly no others had.  Or Lightning Lock, the Scrapman, who was of traveller extraction, very tall and who had an extraordinary reach and would stand on the hill at Long Melford on a Saturday night and take anyone on bare fist for a pound.  Tales of him grew larger and larger – it was alleged that when he fought the Russian at Sudbury they had to take the roof off the Town Hall to get all the people in.

What of myths.  Decisions about the countryside are mostly taken by people outside of the community that they are to be levied upon.  An academic student, or a ‘damn learned scientific man’ would be given a hard time – because all they had was information and not the experience to use it wisely - the experience that can only come by doing the job.  ‘It is only book knowledge’ they would say, ‘Only book knowledge’, and tales would follow how such people had ‘Come a cropper’.  Of course books are a source of reference for information but it is experience that counts, experience from life. Oral Tradition is experience.  The correlation of experience is wisdom.

I recently heard the storyteller Jane Grell and was much impressed by the way that she exhibited her Caribbeaness.  Tickles was just the same and would put all of his culture into what he did.  Our speech with its imagery, our background, our self, our culture is a very important part of our stories.  They may be just ‘reminiscences’ to those people from outside ‘collecting’ oral history as academic information and, of course, not everyone is a storyteller, but there are still a good many natural storytellers around in rural areas - where the tradition of song and storytelling has survived at its strongest. 

All of this is so well explained by Jack Zipes in the society booklet ‘The Storyteller Revisited’.  It concerns essays written in 1936 by that extraordinary man Walter Benjamin, whose mind was as clear as a bell as to what storytelling represents.  It concerns the exchange of experience in which one learns something about ones self and in doing so passes on wisdom to others.  ‘Counsel woven into the stuff of lived life is wisdom’ he said.  ‘Storytelling is all around us and a genuine storyteller is by necessity a subversive’. 

The best book that I have read about the countryside is that written by a farmworker in his old age and is made by his non ‘literacy’.  Lilas Rider Haggard, who edited it, had the good sense to keep in his imagery by way of expressions, his words and his tongue.  It is an important book because it is one of the very few written from an internal perspective of it's culture and that makes all the difference.  On page 181, of the ‘Rabbit’s Skin Cap’, you will find the author's words - written himself from his oral tradition - ‘Experience teaches wisdom’.

CDs of Suffolk traditional singers and storytellers are available from Neil Lanham, The Helions Bumpstead Gramophone Co.,   ‘Ivy Todd’, Helions Bumpstead, Nr Haverhill, Suffolk, CB9 7AT.