Bad Blood - A Memoir (Paperback, 20th Anniversary Edition edition)

Though a memoir of a difficult childhood, Lorna Sage's light touch and gentle humour make for a far less gloomy reading experience than, say Angela's Ashes or the crop of similar stories that followed in that book's wake. This is largely thanks to her natural storytelling abilities, her dry humour and dispassionate, unemotional view of those around her, which turn the characters into, for the most part, loveable rogues and the authors of the kind of tragic mistakes that are always much easier to understand, and perhaps forgive, with the wisdom of hindsight. Her book is almost a study in frustration: her grandparents in whose vicarage she was brought up, are constantly at war, turning their marriage into a dialogue in hatred which persists long after even the death of Lorna's grandfather. Her grandmother felt that she had married beneath her and in her new home in a remote village on the Welsh borders, lives cut off from the small outings and affectations she had previously enjoyed. Her husband the vicar saw his ambitions for a better posting thwarted, largely due to his inabiltity to desist from womanising - or at least be more discreet about it. The squalor and lack of fulfilment that characterised life in the vicarage pursue the family to their new home on a post-war council estate, where Lorna's father never quite adjusts to the natural disorders of life outside of the army; while her mother dreams of a world in which she actually has a use for the many dresses she buys despite becoming increasingly indebted to her dressmaker. Lorna finds herself having to carve out her place between the feuds and the unfulfilled passions, compensating for her gaucheness with an outstanding academic record built around a love of books and Latin, which offer a retreat from the more dubious pleasures of her new, ironically named home, Sunnyside. Eventually, Lorna overcomes her shyness and diffidence to make some friends and even a boyfriend, by whom she finds herself pregnant, shockingly so since she was not even aware that she had lost her virginity. But having a child does not stand in the way of her academic ambitions and both she and her by then husband both subsequently graduate with First Class degrees, Lorna going on to become a professor of English. The marriage did not survive though the couple remained friendly. Though the focus of this memoir is very much on the three marriages portrayed, and portrayed very movingly and honestly, it also evokes with astonishing clarity the now all but vanished post-war world of the 40s and 50s in which processed cheese and sliced bread had just started to ease the burden on put-upon housewives, stiff crinoline petticoats were still the order of the day for the first school dance, and Shotgunweddings were the only way to salvage respectability for unmarried women who found themselves pregnant. Sadly, Lorna Sage died just a week after her lively and evocative memoir won the Whitbread Biography Prize. (Kirkus UK)

In one of the most extraordinary memoirs of recent years, Lorna Sage brings alive her girlhood in post-war provincial Britain. From memories of her family and the wounds they inflict upon one another, she tells a tale of thwarted love, failed religion, and the salvation she found in books.

General

Imprint:	Fourth Estate
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	July 2001
Authors:	Lorna Sage
Dimensions:	197 x 129 x 20mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - B-format
Pages:	281
Edition:	20th Anniversary Edition edition
ISBN-13:	978-1-84115-043-7
Categories:	Books
LSN:	1-84115-043-6
Barcode:	9781841150437

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