Bad Blood: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Lorna Sage (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 19, 2002

Lorna Sage's adventure in autobiography is a searing and funny anatomy of three marriages that brings to life her girlhood in postwar provincial Britain. Her early childhood was dominated by her brilliant, bitter grandfather, a drinker, a womanizer, a vicar, exiled to a remote village on the Welsh borders. His wife loathed him, lived on memories, and shook her fist at any parishioner bold enough to call at the house. From the vicarage Lorna watched the fading away of the old world and the slow dissolve of her grandparents' disastrous Union.

Then her father returns from the army and she moves with her parents and baby brother into a newly built house. Living with her parents, she quickly learns that the world is full of secrets and myths that mark her family -- her mother's thwarted dreams, her father's addiction to work, and the mysterious emotional economy of their proper marriage. Longing to leave, Lorna vows she will never marry of have children, but before long she finds herself having grown up far too fast.

From the memories of her family and of the wounds they inflicted on one another, she tells an extraordinary tale of thwarted love, failed religion, and the salvation she found in books. As a portrait of a family and a young girl's place in it, it is unsurpassed.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nobody's unhappy family was ever quite like that of Lorna Sage, whose ruthlessly funny, excruciating, inspiring memoir Bad Blood won England's Whitbread Biography Award. She grew up in the '40s on the Welsh border, in the crossfire between her grandparents, a bitter, bibulous, bookish vicar resembling Jack Sprat and his short, "fat doll" of an ignorant wife. He preached earthy sermons about how one might prefer for a wife "Martha before dinner, Mary after dinner." His wife's "notion of marriage [was] that a man signed you up to have his wicked way with you and should spend the rest of his life paying through the nose." Grandma blackmailed the vicar with his diary of adultery, in which she scribbled vicious comments invaluable to the family historian. She gobbled sweets; he drank, fumed, and helped make Lorna Sage a noted literary critic. There is much more: the vicar's affair with his daughter's school chum, the cosmic impact of Bill Haley and his Comets, Lorna's precocious pregnancy, and the strange way lives ricochet and echo each other. Sage manages to give her rural upbringing a brooding Gothic poignance and the comic force of Cold Comfort Farm. She describes a moment after her grandfather's death in the vicarage, "where everything seemed to be wearing thin and getting see-through, as though a spell were dissolving." But the shades of her clan won't quite fade, and thanks to this book, they're here to stay. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly

The late British literary critic Sage spent her youth in the home of her grandparents, in the vicarage of Hanmer, a village in Flintshire, England. Her father was off fighting in World War II, her mother off in her own dreamy rerun of adolescence, so young Lorna hung onto the "skirts" of her vicar grandpa, a histrionic, bitterly intelligent philanderer with the "habit of living irritably in his imagination." His idiosyncrasies were almost endearing: he spent days stalking the graveyard muttering Shakespearean soliloquies and blacking out the spines of the books in his library to deter casual theft. Grandma, "a fat doll tottering on tiny swollen feet," considered Hanmer a "dead-alive dump" and never forgave her husband for talking her into marriage and leaving the gynocentric Eden of her family's shop in South Wales. What made her grandparents' marriage "more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement" was Grandma's "refusal to accept her lot" she remained "furious" with her husband and, by extension, with all men, including her daughter's and granddaughter's husbands. In such a dysfunctional household, where "nobody wants to play the part of parent," Sage didn't have the option of passing for normal not that the "functional illiteracy" of her village peers was anything to envy. Ultimately, it was books and sheer orneriness her grandpa's "bad blood" that saved her from the oblivion her mother and grandmother had chosen. Sage finds such delicious ironies in all the awful detail that readers can't help but be entertained., wickedly. (Mar.)Forecast: Sage won the prestigious Whitbread Biography Award (2000) and has received kudos from the likes of Jonathan Raban and Doris Lessing. Her book is perfect book club reading, combining social history and great writing. Expect strong sales.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (March 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066214432
• ISBN-13: 978-0066214436
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,323,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Old Devil, The Harridan, and The Fairy Child, June 1, 2002

By 

sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bad Blood: A Memoir (Hardcover)

These were the three who were the "parent" figures in this wonderful memoir of a child from the edge of Wales who through impressive intelligence and stony determination detoured her "lot in life" and became a noted critic, author and academic.

The Old Devil was her maternal grandfather, an adulterous, hard living vicar who passed on his love of books and language to his granddaughter. He let down and disillusioned everyone who came into his life, but as Ms. Sage says, "he didn't live long enough to disappoint me," and she adored him. Her grandmother, the Harridan, despised (this really is not a strong enough word!) him and never let him forget it. She never kept house, nor cooked and mostly looked after her asthma. She never went near him "except feet first-when she was buried in the same grave with him." This unlikely pair produced The Fairy Child, the author's mother who lived in girlish wonder all her life. Valma had her mother's contempt for house work but also was imbued with the notion it was her "sacred duty." Consequently, her efforts were constant and the results indifferent. She could not bear confrontation, (small wonder!) and was timid to the point of exasperation. What was important was what was on show. Thus the public areas of the vicarage and the people in it were reasonably tidy, and the private areas of both body and home were filthy. Ms. Sage lived with head lice for over six years, because none of the household would admit that she had them.

In this ménage, no one wanted to be a parent, the grandparents raged and rowed, the mother was a forever-helpless child. Ms. Sage freely admits she was an unlovable child. She whined and pouted and wept; her saving grace was her fierce intelligence and her luck was her beauty, both as a child and adult. Until she was six, she lived with her grandparents until her father came home from the wars. Her mother and father were perfectly matched. He needed someone to protect and she needed the protection, but parenting was not in the picture.

I was amazed over and over at how Lorna persevered to get out of the stifling village life. She made the cardinal error of becoming pregnant at 15, then marrying her 17-year-old lover. She would not let even this become an impediment in her scholastic journey. Both she and husband graduated from Durham University with firsts.

Ms. Sage's writing is so personalized, spare with the driest humor, she is a living presence. She died shortly after being notified she had won the Booker Prize for Biography for this book. I couldn't take in that this vivid presence was gone. I am so grateful she had time to write this fine memoir.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "breaking the rules"; one woman's story, April 15, 2002

By 

Karen Sampson Hudson "Karen Sampson Hudson" (Reno, NV United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bad Blood: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Lorna Sage speaks to us both eloquently and sparely in this story of her days as part of an unconventional family in the conventional Wales of the 1940s and 50s. A happy childhood she had not, and she was nearly doomed to "a lifetime of...impotent makebelieve" as a housewife,by an early pregnancy and marriage. Her intelligence and determination to avoid this fate was supplemented from unlikely sources, some of her 60ish spinster teachers. One of them said, "..at the top of her voice that seventeen was the ideal age to have a healthy baby and get on with your life."

Her mother also helped, by taking care of her daughter while she and her equally young husband attended university and became the first married couple of ordinary student age to graduate in the same subject at the same time, both with Firsts.

Sage's engrossing story is jarring to readers like me, who enjoyed wonderful childhood days. It also will be jarring to childless professional women who today face a different set of conventions, and difficulties combining motherhood and career.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Looking back...., April 3, 2002

By 

E. Capurro (England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bad Blood: A Memoir (Hardcover)

This book was recommended to me by my mother - but not for the usual reasons. A school friend of hers had written it and she wanted to hear my thoughts on it. I must admit to not being very keen on the idea. However, I felt duty bound and so I bought my copy at Heathrow airport and lugged it back to Santiago where it sat on my book self for a few months until the guilt finally started tapping on my shoulder and curiosity got the better of me!

I loved the book. It recounts the childhood of Lorna growing a small hamlet in an area know as the English Maelor/Wrexham Maelor in North Wales on the Shropshire/Cheshire borders with Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham all within an hours drive. The area consists of nine hamlets/parishes. My mother and Lorna grew up in Hanmer. My sisters and I grew up in Worthenbury, the birthplace of my father, approximately four miles away. Everyone knows everyone else, no matter which hamlet they grew up in. It was and is a very close-knit community - few people leave and those that do rarely stray far!! (I guess that makes me something of a rarity there!!) Despite the difference of 40 -50 years and ration books - life remains much the same.

I suppose part of my reluctance to read this book was my basic concern that I would find it annoying and irritating - relating life in that area as something different to the way I saw it. In fact - it was so accurate it took my breath away at times. Rekindling old memories - putting nursery rhythms and sayings into context. Introducing different perspectives on the people I knew. She recounted the village relationships and divisions so accurately that I would laugh out loud whilst reading the book. Lorna lived in the village, my family, being farmers, around the villages. Her reflections on the attitudes towards farmers and villagers are spot on. I also joined the young farmers, with very different results! I was the eldest of three daughters of a farmer with no sons! To see what that refers to - you have to read the book!

This autobiography is well written and I think well deserving of its award. It truly reflects the attitudes of the times in that area - some of which still exist. Whilst for me it was in many ways a journey back to my childhood, for anyone else it would be an accurate reflection of rural life on the borders of England and Wales. Lorna Sage's style of writing is a relaxed one that is easy to delve into. Sadly Lorna died shortly after writing this book - still only in her 50s. If at the end of this book, you like me, cannot believe that her mother was quite the domestic disaster portrayed - I have it on very good authority that she was just that! She quite a legend!