"Lorna Sage, professor of English at the University of East Anglia, has written an almost unbearably eloquent memoir of the unlikely childhood and adolescence that shaped her. Nothing else I have read, save Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman, 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." So reads the review of this book in The Guardian.
In a sense this is what autobiography is about: the ways in which your own story is not really yours at all, but a version of the tale of your parents or grandparents. These are the ways in which you become, as Steedman puts it, "not quite yourself, but someone else", and this is what makes it such a dissatisfying genre for those wanting a reassuring or comfortable description of the growth of an individual mind.
The "fierce monogamy" of Sage's parents took on a violence of its own: their intimacy allowed no one in and made orphans of their two children. Her father, a distant figure, happiest during the war when he had a role and a mission, later gallantly protected his spouse from the passions of her family - and particularly those of Lorna, fiery and bookish and thus an inheritor of Grandpa's bad blood.
It is Sage's Byronic grandfather, the local vicar, who provides the centre of the story, and around whom Sage forges her identity. Cursing a marriage that has neither love, understanding nor imagination, he turns to a life of unabashed wickedness. Indulging in lust and drink, he becomes for his granddaughter a "defiant and grandly outrageous" figure in his self-defeating recklessness, a Gothic outsider with all "the glamour of the undead". (I despised the man as I read about him).
In Sage's celebration - or invention - of the glamorous alter ego beneath her grandfather's desperately limited life, Bad Blood is at its most gripping, and its most moving touch is her tribute to his thwarted ambition and ridiculed desires. Finding an old pocket diary for 1934 and decoding the banal secret life it records -"It was the diary of a nobody" - she quotes his hurt at being "taunted" by his teenage lover, a friend of his daughter, for resolving to escape the philistine values of the parish and the vicarage and to start a new life as a writer. "That freelance existence never materialised for him," his grand-daughter writes; "here are his words, though, in print at last." The vicar of Hanmer is redeemed from the "squalor of insignificance" he fought against. The heir of his bad blood has rewritten his story, giving to its grim drudgery the grandeur and dignity of a Greek tragedy.
A central theme in Bad Blood is places and spaces, and how we learn to shape ourselves around them. Hanmer, on the borders of Wales and England and where Sage spends the first part of her childhood, becomes a metaphor for the suffocation of living "in-between": between the second world war and the 1960s, between the covers of books when there is no space left elsewhere, in the limited space between other people's lives. People and houses are imprisoning.
It is only in the printed word that Lorna can breathe; even then she feels Grandpa looking over her shoulder as she reads. Sage is interested in lives that don't fit: family black sheep, misshapen marriages, homes too small to house either the hatred of their inhabitants or their exclusive love. Either way, other people are hell. Having lived sandwiched between these two marriages, Sage, believing she is still a virgin, unwittingly finds herself pregnant at 16 and embarking on her own marriage. Both she and Victor, the child's father, are doing their A-levels.
It is here that the story closes, and it is given a happy ending. A daughter, Sharon, is born; Victor and Lorna both gain firsts in English from Durham University, and both join the English department at the new University of East Anglia. There are no doubt many other endings she might have chosen, but Sage breaks off at the point at which her life, if not her blood, became her own.
PS Sage's era pretty much echoes my own. She was born four years before I was but her life and mine are divergent. Such grandparents as I knew were principally my paternal grandmother of whom I was so very fond, and a maternal stepmother with whom I never connected. She was rather distant, and cold. My family life was dominated by the father figure, my mother being the ultimate home-maker but with no encouragement to have a life, however minor that component might be, of her own. A few aspects of Lorna's teenage life echo my own though. I also met my husband at a tender age, seventeen, and he was eighteen. We had hiccups but married when I was 21 and after a very brief working life I was confined at the age of 24. With two more children before I was 29, I never went back to a conventional working life. Lorna Sage discovered her ability and passion for words at a very early age, it would be years later before I would discover the real delight in reading and writing a little bit of prose. I also got science and that is a whole other story...........
My favourite line from Sage's book:
"Being five foot three, tongue-tied and blonde I mostly passed muster, except that I was so unskilled in small talk that I sometimes blurted big words (hypocrisy, or pretentiousness), which jumped out of my mouth like the toads in the fairy tale before I knew it."
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