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Amazon.co.uk Review
This is one of those memoirs of a difficult, sometimes violent girlhood, that makes riveting reading--not as harrowing as Andrea Ashworth's brilliant Once in a House on Fire, but every bit as good. Whether this is voyeuristic is debatable, but clearly the author, Lorna Sage, felt she had something to tell, and she tells it vividly. She grew up with an absent father, a quiet and docile mother, and--the two most powerful figures of her formative years--a pair of ferocious, tyrannical, impossible grandparents. Her grandfather is the most striking of all, not least because he was a Church of England clergyman. Sage offers an unforgettable evocation of this bitter, hard-drinking, womanising cleric, as he strides through the desolate churchyard with his little granddaughter clinging onto his black skirts in the wind. "He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had 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." The place, too, is strongly evoked: a small, isolated, squalid village on the English-Welsh border in darkest Shropshire, the very landscape of that haunting writer of the 1920s, Mary Webb. Sometimes, though, Sage's girlhood--we're only talking 1940s and 1950s here--feels more like it is something out of the pages of the Brontës, and indeed she acknowledges this freely. "Perhaps I really did grow up, as I sometimes suspect, in a time warp, an enclave of the 19th century?" That weird sense of anachronism makes this a riveting if sometimes uncomfortable read.--Christopher Hart --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'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)
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This is one of those memoirs of a difficult, sometimes violent girlhood, that makes riveting reading--not as harrowing as Andrea Ashworth's brilliant Once in a House on Fire, but every bit as good. Whether this is voyeuristic is debatable, but clearly the author, Lorna Sage, felt she had something to tell, and she tells it vividly. She grew up with an absent father, a quiet and docile mother, and--the two most powerful figures of her formative years--a pair of ferocious, tyrannical, impossible grandparents. Her grandfather is the most striking of all, not least because he was a Church of England clergyman. Sage offers an unforgettable evocation of this bitter, hard-drinking, womanising cleric, as he strides through the desolate churchyard with his little granddaughter clinging onto his black skirts in the wind. "He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had 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." The place, too, is strongly evoked: a small, isolated, squalid village on the English-Welsh border in darkest Shropshire, the very landscape of that haunting writer of the 1920s, Mary Webb. Sometimes, though, Sage's girlhood--we're only talking 1940s and 1950s here--feels more like it is something out of the pages of the Brontës, and indeed she acknowledges this freely. "Perhaps I really did grow up, as I sometimes suspect, in a time warp, an enclave of the 19th century?" That weird sense of anachronism makes this a riveting if sometimes uncomfortable read.--Christopher Hart --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'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)
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