Product Description

From a childhood of gothic proportions in a vicarage on the Welsh borders, through her adolescence, leaving herself teetering on the brink of the 1960s, Lorna Sage brings to life a vanished time and place, and illuminates the lives of three generations of women. Lorna Sage's memoir of childhood and adolescence brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in the small town of Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire. The period as well as the place is evoked with crystal clarity: from the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather, through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna's mother, to the brink of the 1960s, where the community was shocked by Lorna's pregnancy at 16, an event which her grandmother blamed on "the fiendish invention of sex".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34811 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

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

Review
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)

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)

Doris Lessing
'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, it is as enjoyable a book as I remember reading.'

Customer Reviews

Read it twice
The folks that don't like the book seem to be expecting a dramatic narrative, or a terrible tragedy. For me its magical wisdom is all in the minute observation of human weakness and opportunity. You can really learn a lot about life from this one.

Too long and drawn out for me.
This book leaves nothing to the imagination as too-detailed-descriptions drag on. It`s good to know what places look like - but come on don`t kill it..
I was sooooo depressed with the constant harping on about the overgrown garden - reminded me of my childhhood in our overgrown garden - and i don`t need any reminders of that thank you very much..
While reading this i found my mind wandering to other things - and that`s not a good sign is it ? I didn`t enjoy this at all, but 3 for trying.

Wonderful
I can almost understand why some reviewers thought this memoir boring but I have to say I enjoyed it from start to finish, but especially the opening chapters about the grandfather and grandmother - the descriptions of the grandmother's childhood home were marvellous. The writing is immediate and compelling, very good indeed, in fact.