Bad Blood (35 page)

 

When the graduation-day picture appeared in the paper, the girl from the next bed in Crosshouses wrote to me saying that she remembered how much I'd wanted to take my exams and was pleased it had turned out well. She sent me a photograph of her family – she herself had five children now – another set of boy twins and a daughter, and here they were, behind them a tiny house and acres of scrubby Shropshire fields in the background.

Deaths: Grandma died in 1963 and joined Grandpa in Hanmer churchyard. Shortly afterwards the headstone fell over, doubtless because the gravediggers and masons had disturbed it, although I like to think she was at it, hammer and tongs, with Grandpa down below.

Vic's father died in 1967 and the local Jehovah's Witnesses must have heaved a sigh of relief, for he had taken to inviting them in when they called and asking them to listen on their knees for hours to Channel 13.

Vic's mother died in 1970, after a lonely breakdown which took the form of borrowing her husband's madness and putting on his airs. The doctors said she was prematurely senile, but it was more a case of the mystery of marriage. She recovered and became her sane, patient self again in time to die of cancer.

My mother died in 1989 of a stroke (her second) and is
buried at Hanmer. It was her death that set me thinking about writing this book.

 

More loose ends: Gail trained as a teacher and married Terry, whom she met at college and who also looked rather like Paul Anka, in Hanmer church. They have no children.

I never got to know Miss Roberts well, although I wish I'd tried harder. She gave me her academic gown when she retired from the high school in the 1960s and was pleased when I started reviewing for the
New Statesman
in the 1970s, not long before she died.

My father, who was and remains bereft without my mother, lives with my brother Clive and his family.

Clive left school at sixteen, has a PhD in engineering and acts nowadays as a consultant when he isn't helping his wife run their pub.

Sunnyside is no more, or at least you wouldn't recognise it. It proved a good investment: in 1964 my parents sold half the paddock to a developer who built two semis and a bungalow on the land; and in 1988 they sold the rest of the paddock and the orchard to another developer who built three Tudor mansions with double garages, using bricks from the stables, which were demolished – my father had retired from business – along with the billiard room, thus turning Sunnyside into a normal-shaped house with a garden. After my mother died, in the 1990s my father sold that too.

Sharon came to live with Vic and me when we left Durham, although she still spent school holidays with my parents. Now she is married and has a daughter called Olivia, but she broke the family pattern by doing both in her thirties, so the generations are back in order. I've broken the pattern too, I'm not bringing up my granddaughter.

Vic and I survived the 1960s, but the contraceptive pill and legalised abortion came too late to resurrect our sex life together and we separated in 1974, although we've remained friends and colleagues ever since. Neither of us has had another child.

I married again in 1979 and thereby hangs a tale. In the bathroom of the council house where Vic's parents lived when we met there was a sturdy stool with a woven seat of green-and-cream cord which Vic's father had made from a kit in occupational therapy between jolts of ECT in mental hospital. When I went to meet my new in-laws in a stockbroker hamlet in the home counties in 1979, I took refuge in a remote bathroom and found there a stool with a woven green-and-cream cord seat. Nothing else in this house resembled anything I'd been used to, but this was
exactly the same
. Later I asked whether the bathroom stool had a history: well, yes, his father had had a bad breakdown in the 1960s and had made it when he was recovering, in occupational therapy, from a kit.

I'm not sure what the moral of the bathroom-stool story is. Perhaps this: it's a good idea to settle for a few loose ends, because even if everything in your life is connected to everything else, that way madness lies.

‘All Shook Up' Words and Music by Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley ©1975 by Shalimar Music, Inc – assigned to Elvis Presley Music, Inc., all rights administered by R &H Music and Williamson Music – All Rights Reserved. Lyrics reproduced by kind permission of Carlin MusicCorp., London NW1 8BD.

 

‘(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear' Words and Music by Kal Mann and Bernie Lowe ©1975 Gladys Music – all rights administered by R &H Music and Williamson Music – All Rights Reserved. Lyrics reproduced by kind permission of Carlin MusicCorp., London NW1 8BD.

 

‘Heartbreak Hotel' Words and Music by Mae Boren Axton, Tommy Durden and Elvis Presley ©1956, Tree Publishing Co Inc.,USA. Reproduced by kind permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, LondonWC2H 0EA.

‘
Speak, Memory!
Lorna Sage's memoir is magnificent and quite impossible to lay aside. What a book for this country now. She makes Hamner, Whitchurch, the shop, the aging 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

‘
Bad Blood
can already be set alongside Edmund Gosse's
Father and Son
as a classic account of childhood . . . it is her story, but in the telling she does it justice, wittily and tenderly, to everyone who helped to form her as she is - a writer of rare intelligence.'

Claire Tomalin

‘My book of the year is Lorna Sage's remarkable family memoir, Bad Blood. It's a vividly remembered, honest, generous, shocking story of a 1950s childhood and a teenage love affair . . . a fine transformation of pain into something redeeming - I don't think that's too grand a word. A very moving testament.'

Margaret Drabble,
Guardian

‘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 a 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

‘Sage writes brilliantly, with humour and compassion. A well-known literary critic, she has turned to autobiography to produce a
tour de force
.'

Michele Roberts,
Independent on Sunday

‘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

‘Lorna Sage has written an almost unbearably eloquent memoir of the unlikely childhood and adolescence that shaped her. Nothing else I have read destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be or describes so well the way in which rage, grief and frustrated desire are passed down the family line like a curse, leaving offspring to live out the inherited, unresolved lives of their forebears.'

Guardian

‘A wonderful book.
Bad Blood
is a personal history written with such insight it makes 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

‘Lorna Sage maybe proof we need that literature really can make something happen . . . Bad Blood tells a story about books as a passport out of childhood hell.'

Marina Warner,
Independent

‘Unfaltering in its directness, elegant, absorbing, abrasive and funny . . . it offers a life and times inextricably enmeshed.'

Hilary Mantel,
TLS

‘There's been no better description of the miseries and constrictions of a period - and certainly it's hard to think of anything like it from a woman's perspective, although many will find echoes of their own past.'

David Sexton,
Evening Standard

‘My memoir of this year is
Bad Blood
- she looks back in some anger but with a passion and compassion that relishes the rasping textures of her childhood and it is vitality of memory rather than revenge that keeps her own wounds green. Nothing better has been written autobiographically about a girl's growing up since Jeanette Winterson's
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
.'

Iain Findlayson,
The Times
Books of the Year

‘This memoir has all the qualities of fiction: it possesses the power, the love of language, the insight and compassion and drama and wit of an imagined world. It is full of strange atmosphere of an intersection between the unreal and the real, a place Lorna Sage perhaps feels herself to have inhabited, and brilliantly, beautifully describes.'

Rachel Cusk,
Evening Standard

‘Bad Blood is much more than an autobiography: it is a brilliant reflection on the nature of family life and family memories; a experiment in exploring the myths of one's own childhood, in capturing the ambivalence that anybody must always feel about their own past and its cast of characters.'

TLS

Lorna Sage was a professor of English at the University of East Anglia. Her previous books include Women in the House of Fiction, The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, and a short monograph on Angela Carter.

 

Lorna Sage died in Januray 2001.

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The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. In accordance with the copyright.
BAD BLOOD
. Copyright © Lorna Sage 2000.

BAD BLOOD
. Copyright © Lorna Sage 2000. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub © Edition v 1. JUNE 2001 ISBN: 9780061738609

A Fourth Estate edition published 2000

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