Bad Blood: A Memoir. Lorna Sage

occupation and sons hadn’t been called up unless there were a lot of them, or their families were smallholders with little land. So Hanmer in the 1940s in many ways resembled Hanmer in the 1920s, or even the late 1800s except that it was more depressed, less populous and more out of step – more and more islanded in time as the years had gone by. We didn’t speak Welsh either, so that there was little national feeling, rather a sense of stubbornly being where you were and that was that. Also very un-Welsh was the fact that Hanmer had no chapel to rival Grandfather’s church: the Hanmers would never lease land to Nonconformists and there was no tradition of Dissent, except in the form of not going to church at all. Many people did attend, though, partly because he was locally famous for his sermons, and because he was High Church and went in for dressing up and altar boys and frequent communions. Not frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through, however. Eventually the Church stopped his supply and after that communicants got watered-down Sanatogen from Boots the chemist in Whitchurch, over the Shropshire border.

      The delinquencies that had denied him preferment seemed to do him little harm with his parishioners. Perhaps the vicar was expected to be an expert in sin. At all events he was ‘a character’. To my childish eyes people in Hanmer were divided between characters and the rest, the ones and the many. Higher up the social scale there was only one of you: one vicar, one solicitor, each farmer identified by the name of his farm and so sui generis. True, there were two doctors, but they were brothers and shared the practice. Then there was one policeman, one publican, one district nurse, one butcher, one baker … Smallholders and farm labourers were the many and often had large families too. They were irretrievably plural and supposed to be interchangeable (feckless all), nameable only as tribes. The virtues and vices of the singular people turned into characteristics. They were picturesque. They had no common denominator and you never judged them in relation to a norm. Coming to consciousness in Hanmer was oddly blissful at the beginning: the grown-ups all played their parts to the manner born. You knew where you were.

      Which was a hole, according to Grandma. A dead-alive dump. A muck heap. She’d shake a trembling fist at the people going past the vicarage to church each Sunday, although they probably couldn’t see her from behind the bars and dirty glass. She didn’t upset my version of pastoral. She lived in a different dimension, she said as much herself. In her world there were streets with pavements, shop windows, trams, trains, teashops and cinemas. She never went out except to visit this paradise lost, by taxi to the station in Whitchurch, then by train to Shrewsbury or Chester. This was life. Scented soap and chocolates would stand in for it the rest of the time – most of the time, in fact, since there was never any money. She’d evolved a way of living that resolutely defied her lot. He might play the vicar, she wouldn’t be the vicar’s wife. Their rooms were at opposite ends of the house and she spent much of the day in bed. She had asthma, and even the smell of him and his tobacco made her sick. She’d stay up late in the evening, alone, reading about scandals and murders in the News of the World by lamplight among the mice and silverfish in the kitchen (she’d hoard coal for the fire up in her room and sticks to relight it if necessary). She never answered the door, never saw anyone, did no housework. She cared only for her sister and her girlhood friends back in South Wales and – perhaps – for me, since I had blue eyes and blonde hair and was a girl, so just possibly belonged to her family line. She thought men and women belonged to different races and any getting together was worse than folly. The ‘old devil’, my grandfather, had talked her into marriage and the agony of bearing two children, and he should never be forgiven for it. She would quiver with rage whenever she remembered her fall. She was short (about four foot ten) and as fat and soft-fleshed as he was thin and leathery, so her theory of separate races looked quite plausible. The rhyme about Jack Sprat (‘Jack Sprat would eat no fat, / His wife would eat no lean, / And so between the two of them / They licked the platter clean’) struck me, when I learned it, as somehow about them. Looking back, I can see that she must have been a factor – along with the booze (and the womanising) – in keeping him back in the Church. She got her revenge, but at the cost of living in the muck heap herself.

      Between the two of them my grandparents created an atmosphere in the vicarage so pungent and all-pervading that they accounted for everything. In fact, it wasn’t so. My mother, their daughter, was there; I only remember her, though, at the beginning, as a shy, slender wraith kneeling on the stairs with a brush and dustpan, or washing things in the scullery. They’d made her into a domestic drudge after her marriage – my father was away in the army and she had no separate life. It was she who answered the door and tried to keep up appearances, a battle long lost. She wore her fair hair in a victory roll and she was pretty but didn’t like to smile. Her front teeth were false – crowned, a bit clumsily – because in her teens, running to intervene in one of their murderous rows, she’d fallen down the stairs and snapped off her own. During these years she probably didn’t feel much like smiling anyway. She doesn’t come into the picture properly yet, nor does my father. My only early memory of him is being picked up by a man in uniform and being sick down his back. He wasn’t popular in the vicarage, although it must have been his army pay that eked out Grandfather’s exiguous stipend.

      The grandparents weren’t grateful. They both felt so cheated by life, they had their histories of grievance so well worked out, that they were owed service, handouts, anything that was going. My mother and her brother they’d used as hostages in their wars and otherwise neglected, being too absorbed in each other, in their way, to spare much feeling. With me it was different: since they no longer really fought they had time on their hands and I got the best of them. Did they love me? The question is beside the point, somehow. Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the time. They played. They were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen it out self-righteously. I want. They were good at wanting and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old. Also, they measured up to the magical monsters in the story books. Grandma’s idea of expressing affection to small children was to smack her lips and say, ‘You’re so sweet, I’m going to eat you all up!’ It was not difficult to believe her, either, given her passion for sugar. Or at least I believed her enough to experience a pleasant thrill of fear. She liked to pinch, too, and she sometimes spat with hatred when she ran out of words.

      Domestic life in the vicarage had a Gothic flavour at odds with the house, which was a modest eighteenth-century building of mellowed brick, with low ceilings, and attics and back stairs for help we didn’t have. At the front it looked on to a small square traversed only by visitors and churchgoers. The barred kitchen window faced this way, but in no friendly fashion, and the parlour on the other side of the front door was empty and unused, so that the house was turned in on itself, against its nature. A knock at the door produced a flurry of hiding-and-tidying (my grandmother must be given time to retreat, if she was up, and I’d have my face scrubbed with a washcloth) in case the visitor was someone who’d have to be invited in and shown to the sitting-room at the back which – although a bit damp and neglected – was always ‘kept nice in case’.

      If the caller was on strictly Church business, he’d be shown upstairs to Grandfather’s study, lined with bookcases in which the books all had the authors’ names and titles on their spines blacked out as a precaution against would-be borrowers who’d suddenly take a fancy to Dickens or Marie Corelli. His bedroom led off his study and was dark, under the yew tree’s shadow, and smelled like him. Across the landing was my mother’s room, where I slept too when I was small, and round a turn to the right my grandmother’s, with coal and sticks piled under the bed, redolent of Pond’s face cream, powder, scent, smelling salts and her town clothes in mothballs, along with a litter of underwear and stockings.

      On this floor, too, was a stately lavatory, wallpapered in a perching peacock design, all intertwined feathers and branches you could contemplate for hours – which I did, legs dangling from the high wooden seat. When the chain was pulled the water tanks on the attic floor gurgled and sang. In the other attics there were apples laid out on newspaper on the floors, gently mummifying. It just wasn’t a spooky house, despite the suggestive cellars, and the fact that we relied on lamps and candles. All of Hanmer did that, in any case, except for farmers