'Lorna Sage has always been among the most acute literary critics of her generation, and this book shows why: because she writes so well herself, with an honesty equal to a story as painful as this. She has transmuted a bad dream into a book of classic poise. This is not a book for children, but neither was her childhood.' Clive James 'Speak, Memory! Lorna Sage's memoir is magnificent and quite impossible to lay aside. What a book for this country now. She makes Hanmer, Whitchurch, the shop, the ailing haulage business, the lightless houses, the mad relations, into the real ancestral England, from which the English have ever since been on the run.' Jonathan Raban 'A wonderful book. Bad Blood is a personal history written with such insight it makes of it a social document of true worth. Women need this kind of book but perhaps men need it more, to give the sort of understanding which we still lack of how girls actually grow up.' Margaret Forster 'This could have been the saddest book you have ever read, but because of Lorna Sage's relish in the details, her exuberant celebration of the vitality of this clever, surviving girl who overcame such difficulties, it is as enjoyable a book as I remember reading.' Doris Lessing
Tragicomic winner of the 2000 Whitbread Biography Award, revealing late literary critic Sage's wretched childhood in provincial England during the 1940s and '50s. Born in 1943 while her father was at war in Normandy, Sage was raised in the squalid village of Hanmer. She lived in the dilapidated vicarage with her subservient mother, Valma, and her warring grandparents: a drunken, womanizing clergyman who felt trapped in the wrong career; and his contemptuous wife, who viewed motherhood and marriage as "devilish male plots to degrade her" and deemed Hanmer a hole full of "dirty" villagers (though her own grandchildren wore rags and had lice). Sage describes with humor her grandparents' violent battles, from which Valma suffered the most. (Once, running to intervene in one of her parents' "murderous rows," she fell down a staircase and lost her front teeth.) Valma yearned to pursue a career outside of home, but after failing her driver's-license test, resigned herself to cooking meat dinners for the family that were "dangerously full of knots of choking gristle and shards and spikes of bone." Sage spices up the narrative by prying into her grandfather's scandalous diary, in which he boasts about seducing Valma's friend. Moving on to her teens, the author divulges that her sexual ignorance, promoted by the era's prudery, caused her accidental pregnancy at the age of 16. The sadistic nuns she faced in the delivery room incarnate the misogynist attitudes that prevailed before the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s. Despite her obstetrician's prediction that she was born only to breed, Sage earned a scholarship to study English at Durham University. By evoking the oppressive atmosphere of an era in which women were often consigned to domestic lots, she reminds us of freedoms that we take for granted. Shockingly frank, but also witty, passionate, and utterly lacking self-pity-and surprisingly uplifting. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
From a childhood of gothic proportions in a vicarage on the Welsh borders, through her adolescence, leaving herself teetering on the brink of the 1960s, Lorna Sage brings to life a vanished time and place, and illuminates the lives of three generations of women. Lorna Sage's memoir of childhood and adolescence brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in the small town of Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire. The period as well as the place is evoked with crystal clarity: from the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather, through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna's mother, to the brink of the 1960s, where the community was shocked by Lorna's pregnancy at 16, an event which her grandmother blamed on "the fiendish invention of sex".
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