Bad Blood: A Memoir. Lorna Sage

hand from someone whose intellect was briskly contemporary – mostly, indeed, ahead of the pack – yet whose life and mind had been forged in another age entirely.

      Bad Blood, though, is much more than a social history of the war baby generation (Sage was born in January 1943 while her father was still away fighting). It is instead a story of absolute singularity involving one of the great tragi-comic characters of contemporary English literature, the Revd Meredith-Morris of St Chad’s, Hanmer, a rural parish situated in that thick finger of Wales which crooks oddly into Shropshire. The Old Devil is there for less than a hundred pages but he manages to dominate the whole book, with his great gusts of unhappiness, his boozy self-pity and of course his random lusts, which include trysts with the district nurse and his teenage daughter’s best friend. It is the Revd Meredith-Morris’s Bad Blood that circulates through the narrative long after he himself is gone, tainting everything it touches including little Lorna whose growing appetite for boys and books is darkly attributed to her grandfather’s sticky, vicious bequest.

      Nor is it just the people in Bad Blood who are particular. Sage locates Hanmer precisely in time and place, giving us a muddy, midgy rebuttal to any expectation that the tale we are about to hear will be a pastoral one. This is Britain in the last gasp of the tenant farming system, before agribusiness rationalised production into huge regional food factories. The mud is Flintshire mud, rich and sucky and good for beef, though bad for stuck wellingtons. There are big dirty labouring families complete with the obligatory daft son and rusty machinery that takes an age to get going. Few of Sage’s readers will have experienced any of this at first hand, yet her extraordinary achievement is to make us feel that this story is somehow ours too. So while you may not have spent your early years living on rations, you know what a sly punch in the playground feels like. You may not have worn the complicated underwear that was de rigueur for older schoolgirls in the 1950s but you know what it is to feel uncomfortable in your own skin. Hanmer may have class gradations that seem as quaint as anything from Jane Austen, but which of us does not recognise that feeling of falling foul of some social tripwire we were too slow to see coming?

      Still, the last thing Bad Blood wants is soppy identification on the part of its readers. Indeed, one of the most bracing things about the book is Lorna Sage’s indifference to making us like her. This blonde princess locked up in the gothic vicarage has bugs in her hair not because of some extraordinary drama of neglect or cruelty but because no one can be bothered to do anything about it. Her gaze, she tells us, is shifty and her default state sly. Had you known her as a child she almost certainly would not have wanted to be your friend, nor you hers. There is nothing remotely cosy here. And any idea that Sage is writing a misery memoir or asking for our pity is simply obscene.

      The great joy of the book – and it is a joy – remains the way that this comic nightmare is delivered in the cleanest and clearest of language. As Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia, Sage was sometimes required to be dense in her academic prose but you can really feel her exultation when she writes, as she did in her much-admired reviews in the Observer newspaper, for the Common Reader. She had a huge admiration for those authors such as Anthony Burgess who hacked to pay the bills, and a corresponding determination to reach the widest readership possible. And her talent is gloriously on show here, with that miraculous ability to conjure the Hanmer landscape, tricky turns in Britain’s post-war social development, and the inside of a priapic vicar’s brain, all without boring or baffling the reader for a moment.

      Despite her scepticism about the coerciveness of certain kinds of stories, Sage does give us a happy ending of sorts in Bad Blood. She tells us how her life played out in ways that are clearly a matter of quiet pride. The Bad Blood, it seems, had finally been faced down. There was, though, one bit of the story which her sudden death in January 2001 left unfinished. She had been thinking about her memoir for so long. Now here it was, an enormous hit, making her famous around the world. What would she have done next? Another volume of autobiography? A novel even? Or more of that brilliant literary criticism which seemed to crack open the world of contemporary fiction with such deceptive ease? We will never know now and that, perhaps, provides the most tantalising ending of all.

PART ONE

       I The Old Devil and His Wife

      Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. He’d have liked to get further away, but petrol was rationed. The church was at least safe. My grandmother never went near it – except feet first in her coffin, but that was years later, when she was buried in the same grave with him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime’s mutual loathing. In life, though, she never invaded his patch; once inside the churchyard gate he was on his own ground, in his element. He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable.

      That, though, was when they were still ‘speaking’, before my time. Now they mostly monologued and swore at each other’s backs, and he (and I) would slam out of the house and go off between the graves, past the yew tree with a hollow where the cat had her litters and the various vaults that were supposed to account for the smell in the vicarage cellars in wet weather. On our right was the church; off to our left the graves stretched away, bisected by a grander gravel path leading down from the church porch to a bit of green with a war memorial, then – across the road – the mere. The church was popular for weddings because of this impressive approach, but he wasn’t at all keen on the marriage ceremony, naturally enough. Burials he relished, perhaps because he saw himself as buried alive.

      One day we stopped to watch the gravedigger, who unearthed a skull – it was an old churchyard, on its second or third time around – and grandfather dusted off the soil and declaimed: ‘Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well …’ I thought he was making it up as he went along. When I grew up a bit and saw Hamlet and found him out, I wondered what had been going through his mind. I suppose the scene struck him as an image of his condition – exiled to a remote, illiterate rural parish, his talents wasted and so on. On the other hand his position afforded him a lot of opportunities for indulging secret, bitter jokes, hamming up the act and cherishing his ironies, so in a way he was enjoying himself. Back then, I thought that was what a vicar was, simply: someone bony and eloquent and smelly (tobacco, candle grease, sour claret), who talked into space. His disappointments were just part of the act for me, along with his dog-collar and cassock. I was like a baby goose imprinted by the first mother-figure it sees – he was my black marker.

      It was certainly easy to spot him at a distance too. But this was a village where it seemed everybody was their vocation. They didn’t just ‘know their place’, it was as though the place occupied them, so that they all knew what they were going to be from the beginning. People’s names conspired to colour in this picture. The gravedigger was actually called Mr Downward. The blacksmith who lived by the mere was called Bywater. Even more decisively, the family who owned the village were called Hanmer, and so was the village. The Hanmers had come over with the Conqueror, got as far as the Welsh border and stayed ever since in this little rounded isthmus of North Wales sticking out into England, the detached portion of Flintshire (Flintshire Maelor) as it was called then, surrounded by Shropshire, Cheshire and – on the Welsh side – Denbighshire. There was no town in the Maelor district, only villages and hamlets; Flintshire proper was some way off; and (then) industrial, which made it in practice a world away from these pastoral parishes, which had become resigned to being handed a Labour MP at every election. People in Hanmer well understood, in almost a prideful way, that we weren’t part of all that. The kind of choice represented by voting didn’t figure large on the local map and you only really counted places you could get to on foot or by bike.

      The