Product Description

From a childhood of gothic proportions in a vicarage on the Welsh borders, through adolescence, leaving herself teetering on the brink of the 1960's, Lorna Sage vividly and wittily 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 is a brilliantly written bravura piece of work, which vividly and wickedly 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'. Bad Blood is often extremely funny, and is at the same time a deeply intelligent insight by a unique literary stylist into the effect on three generations of women of their environment and their relationships.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26415 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
'Bad Blood is pretty much in a class of its own! It is a measure of her achievement that she can turn the peculiarities of her own past -- and they are peculiar -- into a narrative that speaks for the whole of post-war Britian! This is not just an exquisite personal memoir, it is a vital piece of our collective past.' Daily Telegraph 'A wonderful book. 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, it is as enjoyable a book as I remember reading.' Doris Lessing

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

Interesting start but ultimately disappointing.
I had heard and read all the hype and this book was strongly recommended by work colleagues but I was rather disappointed. Maybe I expected too much? I found the opening section the most interesting but as the book wore on I found myself losing interest. The last section, about her early relationship with her husband and the birth of their daughter, seemed rushed. I would have liked to know more about that period in their lives, especially how she coped at university with her young child being left behind at home with her parents.

Hamner House of Horrors
This splendid, beautifully-crafted memoir reads like an omnibus edition of the Archers, with a magic realist twist to the tale. The author's family are malcontent Ealing Comedy characters, desperate to be centre stage, but grandpa, the inebriate vicar, really steals the show. Wickedly funny in parts, this book also speaks for a generation of women born in the Forties, who unknowingly were part of a huge social experiment. Unlike many of our mothers who left school at 14, or were educated at home by private tutors, we all went on to university, armed with our S-level distinctions and County Major scholarships, under the aegis of a visionary Labour Government. Many of us took the academic route (like Sage): Firsts, PHds, university lectureships. Others had equally creative lives. My friend, Gail Bracken, and I were the only pupils in our village school to pass the 11+ and go on to the A-stream of the local grammar school. Like Sage, we studied Latin, played hockey and read voraciously. The opportunities ahead of us seemed limitless. Sage's intelligence, resilience, beauty and courage shine out from every page of this haunting, atmospheric, almost hallucinatory piece of writing. Brilliant and brave.

Rekindling old memories
This book was recommended to me by my mother - but not for the usual reasons. A school friend of hers had written it and she wanted to hear my thoughts on it. I must admit to not being very keen on the idea. However, I felt duty bound and so I bought my copy. It sat on my book self for a few months until the guilt finally started tapping on my shoulder and curiosity got the better of me!

I loved the book. It recounts the childhood of Lorna growing a small hamlet in an area know as the English Maelor/Wrexham Maelor in North Wales on the Shropshire/Cheshire borders with Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham all within an hours drive. The area consists of nine hamlets/parishes. My family all grew up in that area. Everyone knows everyone else, no matter which hamlet they grew up in. It was and is a very close-knit community - few people leave and those that do rarely stray far!! Despite the difference of 40 -50 years and ration books - life remains much the same.

I suppose part of my reluctance to read this book was my basic concern that I would find it annoying and irritating - relating life in that area as something different to the way I saw it. In fact - it was so accurate it took my breath away at times. Rekindling old memories - putting nursery rhythms and sayings into context. Introducing different perspectives on the people I knew. She recounted the village relationships and divisions so accurately that I would laugh out loud whilst reading the book.

This memoir is well written and I think well deserving of its award. It truly reflects the attitudes of the times in that area - some of which still exist. Whilst for me it was in many ways a journey back to my childhood, for anyone else it would be an accurate reflection of rural life on the borders of England and Wales. Lorna Sage's style of writing is a relaxed one that is easy to delve into.