Customer Reviews

Bad Blood: A Memoir

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

Holy moly! You wanna talk about a dysfunctional family? Here it is. It's during the years of WWII. The author's father is off fighting for God and country, and her mother is having a delayed adolescence, so author Lorna Sage is shipped to her grandparents house somewhere in rural England. Her grandparents are weird, weird, weird, but it is their very faults that ultimately make Sage, a well-known and powerful literary critic, into the person she becomes.
Her grandfather is a debauched, intellectual, furious and infuriating vicar whose idiosyncrasies were seemingly limitless. Her grandmother's rage at her lot in life and the man who was responsible for it (and by extension, ALL men) never once abates - and you almost champion her for her constancy.
Bad Blood reads as wicked fun with a strongly feminist underlying message. I loved it.

This memoir seems just the sort of thing that I usually devour with great gusto, but somehow it didn't grab me. I had to push myself through part one, early life with grandfather, until the pages began to turn for me. The story and characters were fundamentally interesting enough, but I thought overly drawn out to the point that the liveliness was drained away.

I grew up in the same 1950's in England and apart from her randy grandad shared many of the same experiences, feelings and general discomfort with the miserable, narrow social conditions in England. Put another way a perfect breeding ground for the english character of inhibitions, repression of feelings, violence and fear of economic success riddled with Edwardian class distinctions of no value/relevance in the 50's. Jealousy of the American post war success and hide bound by genteel poverty everywhere it was not surprising that England's social scene exploded in the 60's and 70's. I left England for the US many years ago to escape the trapped kingdom of the mind and the pathetic lack of real freedoms, nostalgia is the UK's greatest industry and the more books like this that appear will help people understand that england's "ennui" is not that attractive after all !

I read through this book in a long afternoon, finding it totally engrossing. The story is about a young girl growing up under the roof of her grandfather, an intellectual vicar who led a double life of sex and booze, and her grandmother, an angry, disappointed anti-intellectual diabetic who lived for the treats of going to movies, candy, and scented soaps. The two detested each other, and their daughter wore herself out and sacrificed her personality to keep the household going in a very marginal way. The daughter had a daughter of her own, the author of this memoir, Lorna Sage. I don't think the point of this story is that her life was a nightmare, though it was hardly happy. It was about how, as humans, we all just keep making messes of our lives, generation after generation, and we all have our own family history and genetics which determine our strengths and our devastating flaws. Lorna inherited her grandfather's "bad blood", along with his use of books to escape both the place he was in (an isolated, wet, postwar depressed backwater), and the mess he was actively making of his life. In the middle of this mess, Lorna used this gift to survive, and even to struggle out of the quagmire by getting an advanced education.

What struck me most about this book was the meticulous detail describing the way various personalities interact.

The individual features prominently here; every character has his or her own set of hopes, desires, and frustrations. It's like watching a set of machines going through their individual routines, bumping into each other and causing emergent pathologies as feed-forward loops escalate their built-in tendencies, innate or shaped by the past.

The author is ruthlessly candid about her own part in these stories.

This is a beautifully written, literary, earnest book about the author's early years in North Wales. Her grandparents and both parents could have become mere caricatures in someone else's telling of the story, but Lorna Sage chose just the right words for her descriptions. Her friends as well as parents and grandparents come to life as she takes us right into her youth, including my favorite line from the book where she is talking about her friends and their budding sexuality as young teenagers and she said we were "fed up with being young". I've never heard it put quite that way and I loved it.

I've read several memoirs by literary types, and I always love how they found escape from their lives at home in books. I always come away with a list of books to read, and I am always grateful that these ladies (and occasionally men) have written their stories. This book began with some very tough family situations and I didn't love it right away, but I ended up loving it and not wanting it to end.

The story of an unexceptional childhood - mild neglect, some poverty and a very filthy home - neither sordid nor tragic nor eventful enough to be compelling reading. Especially for a person raised in India the dysfunctionality level of childhood/family seems average. The only redeeming feature is Lorna Sage's writing style. Witty and insightful. Normally this should raise a book to atleast 3 and a half stars but somehow this one does not quite make it past "interesting enough to read when there's nothing better to do". To use review cliches since they work so well in describing a book, it is readable but far short of unputdownable.