Lorna Sage's Bad Blood: Of Books and Sex - Page: 2

"Grandfather's skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on." So opens Lorna Sage's vivid and droll memoir about coming of age in the rural Welsh countryside during the 1950's. Lorna spends a good deal of her childhood tagging along with her grandfather, who teaches her to read when she is four and thus instigates her lifelong love affair with books. Her grandfather is arguably the most memorable character among a cast of eccentric and troubled family and community; he is the “bad blood” Lorna inherits, and it is his influence, his love of literature and his reckless abandon, that she will continue to hold on to.

Bored by marriage and convention, her grandfather was an alcoholic, a failed writer, an unabashed womanizer, and the local vicar--so much for practicing what you preach! On the first page we meet not only the dissatisfied, poker-thin grandfather, "[w]ho was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality," but also the surly, round grandmother. We don’t see her as much as we feel her for the effect she has on her husband, who has "a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable." Later we learn that Lorna’s grandmother hates sex, and by extension, the entire male population. "Sex, genteel poverty, the responsibilities of motherhood, let alone the duties of the vicar’s helpmeet, she refused any part of. They were in her view stinking offences, devilish male plots to degrade her." Animosity, alone, pastes her grandparents’ marriage together.

Her own parents’ marriage defied the 1950’s social grain. Her mother sullied the family by marrying the coal miner’s son. When the memoir opens, Lorna's father is absent, away fighting in World War II. Although Lorna’s mother also lives at the vicarage with Lorna and the grandparents, she is a meek shadowy presence, almost as absent as Lorna’s father. The mother slides into the role of submissive daughter, relinquishing her maternal duties to her parents--hence, Lorna's many excursions with her grandfather.

Sage divines that, like herself, her mother was once close with the grandfather, sharing his love for literature. But, once her mother discovered her father's affair with her teenage friend, she adopted her mother’s (Lorna's grandmother's) prudish attitude and distanced herself from all she associated with her father. She loses interest in reading and inherits her mother’s aversion to domestic duties, only desultorily cleaning and slapping together meals. In fact, while Lorna is young and living at the vicarage, the house if filthy, and nobody takes real baths, opting instead to sponge off here and there. Her family acquires its own definition of dirty. Dirty means no money or lack of social status. It has nothing to do with the lice that take up permanent residence in Lorna’s hair. She is a young teen before the lice are picked clean from her braids. With a cool, dry humor that recalls Beryl Bainbridge, this memoir clearly adds spice to the warped relationships defined by the now stale term dysfunctional.

Lorna’s father returns from the war, her grandfather dies, and the family moves to a new neighborhood of "council homes," forcing Lorna to leave behind her favorite play yard, the church cemetery, and the dark gothic vicarage filled with nooks and crannies inviting escape and solitude. As her grandfather had a habit of fleeing daily from the house, Lorna likewise disappears, preferring to stomp through the countryside for long periods of time. Sage evokes the landscape as lyrically as she delineates people: "Hanmer was a most picturesque place from a certain distance, but close up its substance was a heavy and strange. In the spring the ground sucked at your feet; with every step you could savour the pull of the mud. This was what I liked so much about tramping around the fields, this stubborn resistance in every sticky clod: you could hypnotise yourself with it, just putting one foot in front of anther was so absorbing. This way you could lose yourself until you slowed to a dazed standstill and seemed a very passable village idiot, content to sit for hours in a thicket, unseen, waiting for nothing in particular to happen." Elsewhere, Sage’s literary acumen is manifest in the atmospheres she evokes, Hanmer is a Hardy-esque closed community, and the dark, mysterious vicarage echoes with Brontëan overtones.

When Lorna discovers her grandfather’s diaries, with their cryptic details of his affairs, along with his more quotidian observances, she finds yet another connection between them, their desire to write. Through writing, reading, and promiscuity, grandfather has left his mark. After appearing in the very first paragraph, he continues to mark the pages, for it is with him that she most clearly identifies and with whom she is identified by others: "My mother’s worst insult was to say, 'You’re just like your grandfather.' This was in my adolescence and what she mainly meant…was that I was promiscuous, sex-obsessed. I took it as a great compliment." Moreover, Lorna’s identity becomes more tightly embroiled with her grandfather’s when we learn that he named her, Lorna—from Lorna Doone.

Lorna’s inherited "bad blood" boils throughout the 1950’s, roiling against the decade’s emphasis on conformity, against the provincial school district that disdained rather than encouraged a smart girl’s achievements, and against the circumscribed values of circumscribed communities. Through it all, literature fuels her forward. She not only takes refuge in words but also uses them to build a life, regardless of obstacles. She becomes pregnant at sixteen, marries her boyfriend, and continues to find solace in literature, taking the A-level exams the day after leaving the hospital with her newborn daughter. She and her husband proceed to college together, both graduating with firsts in English. Lorna continues her education and makes literature her career. One can almost hear grandfather’s rebel skirts flapping in the distance…

Of this memoir's many strengths is Sage's sardonic, crisp writing coupled with her emotional detachment, which allows her to bring the characters to life without the burden of one ounce of sentimentality. Her grandfather, although clearly adored, is revealed in all of his non-angelic splendor. Sage explores her family's oddities to explain the charged personalities, rather than to excuse them. Her family may be tainted by "bad blood," but they are just as tainted, she realizes, by the culturally constructed pressures of mid-twentieth century orthodoxy.

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Side note: Lorna Sage died a few days after Bad Blood received the Whitbread award for biography. She died, aged fifty-seven, of emphysema. Hence, it’s chilling to read, six pages before the end of the book: "There [at a pub during college] I learned to drink and smoke."

I learned of her death when I was half way through the book, and I felt a strange sense of loss knowing that this wonderfully lively and self-deprecating voice, which seemingly spoke out loud as I read, can no longer share stories. Of her grandfather’s diaries, Sage asks, "Who is he writing for?" For himself, she concludes, as he makes his exploits real by recording them. She later considers, however, that he also writes for her, "reaching out a scrawny hand across the years." Sage may have written, like her grandfather, to get it down, to make it real. And, like her grandfather, she reaches a hand across the years and makes her story real (and memorable) for us, too.

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Links:

The BBC News Obituary.

"Lorna was hyperacutely calibrated to the way a book lies - in more senses than one. As a critic, she is alert to the unspoken resonances between lines, and the wider rings of thought spreading beyond them." --From Marina Warner’s essay on Lorna Sage’s contribution to literary criticism.

Think you might be interested in reading Bad Blood? Check out the first chapter.