Bad Blood: A Memoir. Lorna Sage

      

      LORNA SAGE

       Bad Blood

       Dedication

       For Sharon and Olivia

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Dedication

       Introduction

PART ONE

I The Old Devil and His Wife

II School

III Grandma at Home

IV The Original Sin

V Original Sin, Again

       VI Death

       PART TWO

       VII Council House

       VIII A Proper Marriage

       IX Sticks

       X Nisi Dominus Frustra

       XI Family Life

       XII Family Life Continued

       PART THREE

       XIII All Shook Up

       XIV Love – Fifteen

       XV Sunnyside

       XVI To the Devil a Daughter

       XVII Crosshouses

       XVIII Eighteen

       Afterword

       About the Author

       Praise

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      When Bad Blood was published a decade ago it made an unlikely star of its author, the 57-year-old academic Lorna Sage. Sage was already well known to the small but important pool of readers who followed her literary criticism in both newspapers and academic publications, but this was something else entirely. Her account of growing up in a grubby Welsh vicarage after the Second World War, getting pregnant at 16, and claiming the education, career and life which no one – family, school or culture – thought should be hers became the surprise hit of late 2000. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world, won the Whitbread Award for Biography together with the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography and made Sage famous to people who would otherwise never have heard of her. In fact it was all a bit of a fairy tale – ironic when you consider that one of Bad Blood’s chief concerns is to cast a sceptical eye over the stories handed to us in childhood to steer by, regardless of whether they fit or hobble us horribly.

      And then, just as the excitement reached a crescendo in the midwinter of 2000–2001, this late-to-the-party princess was gone. She had been felled by a complicated collision of asthma, emphysema and a fierce smoking habit, which made her cruelly short of breath. It had, though, also granted her the privileges of the chronic insomniac to read through the night, a habit begun in her childhood when she had been made restless by the face-ache of severe sinusitis.

      Sage had been named after the heroine of one of her clergyman grandfather’s favourite books, R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, and if her life proves anything, it is that reading can make things happen. Not just in the old clichéd way – scholarship girl grafts her way to a life her parents could never have provided – but in the sense of giving Sage a keen sense of how stories work to shape our knowledge of self and the world. And how, most crucially of all, if a particular story doesn’t make sense, then you must simply make up a better.

      The irony of the timing of her death would not have been lost on Lorna Sage. Unusually for a literary academic steeped in the critical theories of the Seventies and Eighties that declared the author dead, she was fascinated by the connections between writers’ lives and their works. And as an expert reader of memoir she would have known that you seldom get the neat double ending of text and life that had so spectacularly occurred with Bad Blood. As a result the book remains eerily intact, because there is no author on hand to expand, provoke or riff on it. We are left, as readers, an extraordinary freedom to make of it whatever we will.

      Sage had been working on a memoir about her early life for some time, but it was the discovery of her grandfather’s diaries in the 1990s that suddenly gave shape to the book: it came out quickly, and in such a finished form that virtually no editing was required. These were the diaries, of course, which her grandmother had used to blackmail Revd Meredith-Morris into handing over most of his stipend. Full of details of his joyless philandering, the diaries would have been highly damaging if they’d got into the Bishop’s hands, which was exactly where Sage’s grandmother was threatening to put them unless ‘the old devil’, as she called him, paid up and paid regularly.

      Described like this, Bad Blood sounds like a parochial book, in all senses. Yet when it appeared in the early autumn of 2000 it was a national and international hit, as if people had been waiting for it without quite knowing why. Perhaps it was to do with the fact that the world was now embarking on a new millennium. The mid-twentieth century with its watershed war and the unprecedented social changes that followed was about to be left behind for good. Very soon all the detail from that time – ration books, the eleven-plus, council houses, the nascent NHS, rural buses – would