Bad Blood: A Memoir

by Lorna Sage

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Biography Memoir, Autobiography, British Literature, History

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 7, 2000

About the author

The eldest child of Valma and Eric Stockton, she was named after Lorna Doone [1]. Sage was born at Hanmer, Flintshire, Wales, and educated at the village school, then at the Girls' High School in Whitchurch, Shropshire. Her childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s is recalled in her last book Bad Blood. Sage became pregnant when she was 16 but was able to continue her education and won a scholarship to read English at Durham University, only after the university changed its admission rules to allow married couples to study there. Sage went on to receive an MA from Birmingham University for a thesis on seventeenth century poetry.

All of her academic career was spent at the University of East Anglia, where she was Professor of English Literature from 1994. She edited The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (1999) which has become a standard work. In the Preface she wrote: "In concentrating on women's writing...you stress the extent and pace of change, for the scale of women's access to literary life has reflected and accelerated democratic, diasporic pressures in the modern world".

Reviews

[Therese · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is an arrogance in this book. A haughtiness that keeps the reader at arms length. There is something petulant and mincy about her writing, drudging up the mistakes and misery of others, judging it snidely, and throwing it down. A good memoirist doesn't come off sounding like a tattle-tale, or if they are, they let their anger and hurt pour out for justification. Her voice is so, "ha ha look at these pathetic fools..." Unpleasant, despite some poetic writing.

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. It was a surprise to read about the unusual childhood of Lorna Sage, a well known literary critic. While her father was away fighting in World War II, young Lorna and her mother lived with her grandparents in a vicarage in Hanmer, Flintshire. Her grandparents had a terrible marriage and were constantly fighting. Her philandering minister grandfather loved to frequent the pubs. He was very bright and passed on his love of reading to Lorna. Her relatives wondered if Lorna had inherited his "bad blood" because they had many interests in common. Her grandmother was useless when it came to cooking and cleaning, and spent most of her time complaining about men, eating sweets, and missing the comforts of her childhood home.

When Lorna's father returned to their village in Wales, she had a more normal life, but never felt that she fit in with her family. She felt that her parents were so close that they really had no need to let anyone else in emotionally. Reading and running wild outdoors were her salvations.

In the final section of the memoir Lorna became pregnant and married at age 16. She left the maternity ward one day, and took the first of her A-level exams the next day. She and her husband, Vic Sage, both graduated from the university in Durham with degrees in literature in 1964.

The book was an entertaining look at Wales in the 1940s and 1950s. Lorna's experiences as a child were both humorous and painful. The three parts of the book also showed how three different married couples related to their spouses, and how each couple faced the challenges of life. She seemed a bit hypercritical of her parents considering that she was not the easiest child, and later received an enormous amount of support and childcare while she was away attending university. Overall, the memoir was well-written, and was awarded the Whitbread prize for biography in 2001.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lorna Sage's Bad Blood has, like many of the books I review, been on my to-read list for years. I so enjoyed her non-fiction book, Moments of Truth: Twelve Twentieth Century Women Writers, and was eager to read more of her work. Rather than a collection of critical essays, Bad Blood is a memoir of Sage's early life in rural Wales during the 1940s and 1950s, and ends with her University graduation. It was published in 2000, and won the Whitbread Prize for Biography just a week before Sage passed away.

Sage's childhood was 'dominated' by her 'brilliant, bitter grandfather - a drinking, womanising vicar, exiled to a parish' just over the Welsh border with England. After the war, when Sage left the 'gothic eccentricity' of the vicarage, she moved into a nearby council house with her parents and younger brother, Clive. Here, she 'soon discovered that real family life was marked by myths, secrets and disappointments of its own.'

'A dazzlingly vivid account of one girl's coming-of-age in post-war provincial Britain,' writes its blurb, 'Bad Blood is now universally reclaimed as one of the most extraordinary memoirs of the decade.' Hilary Mantel praises it 'both for its generosity of spirit and its intensity as an act of self-recovery', and Claire Tomalin calls the novel a 'classic account of childhood', and Sage herself a 'writer of rare intelligence'. Margaret Drabble writes that Bad Blood is a 'vividly remembered, honest, generous, shocking story... A fine transformation of pain into something redeeming - I don't think that's too grand a word. A very moving testament.'

Bad Blood has been split into three parts, which cover distinct periods in Sage's life - the first her early life at the vicarage in Hanmer, the second her transition to grammar school and living with her parents, and the third her surprise pregnancy at aged sixteen, and her determination to receive a University degree. These sections are peppered with photographs. Of Hanmer, Sage writes: 'So Hanmer in the 1940s in many ways resembled Hanmer in the 1920s, or even the late 1800s except that it was more depressed, less populous and more out of step - more and more isolated in time as the years had gone by.'

Sage had such a gift for capturing vivid scenes and unusual characters. The memoir opens with the following description: 'Grandfather's skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn't get up to much... 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 back pissed and incapable.' Due to the sheer amount of time which Sage spent with her grandparents, who tolerated each other at best, she had very few memories of being with her parents when she was little. Of her soldier father, away at war, she recalls only that she was picked up by him and was 'sick down his back'.

Bad Blood presents a multi-generational family portrait; Sage scrapes away at the veneers of her family, and reveals what it has been hidden far beneath the surface. She writes with such sincerity about her somewhat dysfunctional upbringing, spent more with books than people, and describes the changing post-war landscape with such detail. Throughout, Sage's narrative voice is lilting and friendly, and she speaks about such varied things, from fashion, farming, and food, to schooling, swimming, and sharing. I enjoyed the second and third sections of the memoir the most; in these, Sage played a more active role in proceedings, rather than merely telling the reader about her grandparents and parents in rather an omniscient manner.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written memoir of a childhood in Wales, granddaughter of a local vicar, whose wife barely tolerates him and after discovering his diaries, somewhat improves her lot by blackmailing him. Despite his misgivings, his granddaughter inherits his love of books and a few other characteristics, which the grandmother might have considered "bad blood".

Though childhood takes up much of the book, her teenage years are intriguing, for here the family rises above convention and supports Lorna in her time of need, at a time in history when many young women in her position would have been shamed and treated in a worse manner. That she gets through this challenging period in her life, supported by her family and goes on to complete a university education without hindrance, is astounding.

So many great quotes, and wonderful that she managed to get this memoir written and published as her life was coming to an end, it won the Whitbread Book Award a week before she died at the tender age of 57.

More complete review to come...

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bad Blood feels like an unintentional baring of the soul. Without seeming to aim for higher things, Lorna Sage has written an autobiography of true beauty, a stripped down revelation of youth and memory. That she does it with such natural, unpretentious calm just makes the books more a thing of wonder. It feels so effortlessly unconstructed and yet so perfected shaped. She tells the story of her family from the days of her grandparent's arrival in a small, rural parish on the Welsh border till the end of her school days. While it is very satisfyingly complete as it is, I have rarely been so disappointed to run out of pages. Reading Sage's uncomplicated, intelligent and heartfelt prose is pure joy.

It really takes off around the third chapter, when Sage digs out her grandfather's sparse, note-like diary of his first two years as village vicar in Hamner, quoting liberally as she paints a picture of a charismatic, bored young man who doesn't love his wife, and tells the story of his love affairs that shook his marriage and scandalised the village. It is so precariously balance - Sage's love of the grandfather who took her under his wing, whom she loved as an eight year old until he died and left her with a crystalised memory that would never change, and the maniacal, lustful, dishonest and promiscuous figure she finds in the diaries. Sage judges harshly, but she somehow remains on her grandfather's side. Her mother and grandmother are, in some respects, the enemy. Her love for her grandfather reflects her conflicts in personality with them. As the story progresses into sexual awakening, Sage's fate is mirrored in the warnings of her female family members that she is too much like her grandfather. This mixture of regret and bouyant spontaneity is what gives Lorna Sage such a tragi-romantic character, and her story such poignant loveliness.

She is, however, very critical of her grandfather's womanising ways, especially when his attentions fall upon her mother's school friend. The diary provides moments of brief, photographic memorialising. It's a photo album of something familiar and yet totally unbelievable. The setting is equally split between its realism and its idealism. Sage conjures up the 50s with technicolour clarity - her explorations of the countryside, the family outtings to Chester in the car that always broke down, her mother's hatred of cooking and the gradually post-war widening of people's diets, the last horse and cart in Hamner. When the family move, both out of the council house and out of the shadow of dreary poverty, and Sage moves into the stories of her teenage years, the shades of the past fade a little and you feel the arrival of modernity. Through the simple descriptions and well chosen anecdote, Sage brilliantly traces the passing of time both physically and idealogically. There is a sense of the opening up of a century as the war drifts into memory and the opportunities for girls like Sage begin to appear.

The events that cloud and illuminate (the presence of both that makes Sage's writing so wonderful) her teenage years, are both a departure and an independance from the family and the memories that clutter her youth, a breaking out, and also a connection and a playscripted stumbling block. The romance with Vic is a thing of true beauty - from the awkwardness of the school dance to the heat of the tennis court, the mystery of accidental conception and the metamorphosis into sibling affection and love. It is a rapid, sad and beautiful depiction of passion transformed, the trouble it causes, the unexpected happiness that springs from disappointment and difficulty. Behind the touching and inspiring, albeit briefly told, story of their successes at university and the coming together of the family in times of need one sense's the emotions and the trials that they must have gone through, the years of doubt and sadness, to arrive at her position of mature hindsight.

That's the key, the woman inbetween the words. Sage reveals something of a soul without ever forcing herself upon us. Her modesty and her lack of agenda make her story something that most writing aspires to too hard, true beauty through language and storytelling. 9

[Mam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A peaceful, nearly affectionate memoir of a challenging and poverty driven childhood. Lorna Sage is a fine story teller and steps back enough from her own life to let the reader see and feel for herself.
Hers is the story of an angry, philandering grandfather, a grandmother who hated her husband and a little girl who grew up believing that she was as bad as her grandfather.
In post war England, there was grimness and shortages shared by all, especially in remote villages in the countryside and in Wales. Sage details what the privations and fears looked like in one family, one village.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quite excellent memoir. Learning about Sage's deprived, mucky childhood, you will be stunned what she made of herself. (An academic, award-winning literary critic and author.)

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Gail had a gift for intentness. She could caress shapeless moments [...] as if she was stroking a puppy, until they wriggled into life and sucked your fingers."

[This review is dedicated to EVK, my outstanding student, who gave me this book.]

Lorna Sage's Bad Blood (2000) is an extraordinary literary work! I could not believe that it is non-fiction. I felt everything was so real as if it were a work of fiction by a great writer. Non-fiction books almost never feel real to me because they do not transcend the particular, the specific, the individual. Their meaning and reach are constrained by the connection to concrete facts, like a balloon that wants to soar high in the sky but is tied to a child's hand. Fiction books are able to much better convey the truth since they allow the reader to focus more on the humanness in general rather than on particular people or concrete events.

Ms. Sage's prose is fabulous! She is an extraordinarily accomplished writer with a wonderful turn of the phrase. Just take this "caressing shapeless moments until they wriggle into life" phrase from the epigraph. Reading this I instantaneously recalled people who had this gift. How many of us, though, would have the talent to describe them in this apparently frivolous yet extremely precise way? A metaphor like that carries more meaning than a faithful and detailed account of real-life behavior.

But wait, there is more: Ms. Sage has written one of three best accounts of childhood and adolescence that I have ever read, along with J. Joyce's and J.M. Coetzee's (which are perhaps more universal and realistic as they are at least in part fictional). Playing doctor in the bushes, the horror of braces, schooling torture and malevolent teachers, like the one in the following, unforgettable passage:

"One day he lined up his class and went down the line saying with gloomy satisfaction 'You'll be a muck-shoveller, you'll be a muck-shoveller...' and so on and on [...]"

Still more: the magnificent account of the first school dance, a momentous event in a schoolchild's life. For me, also the mention of Paul Anka's song Diana! The event must have taken place about 1962. Well, I had my first school dance around that time too, and I also remember the horrors of worrying who, if anyone, I would dance with; and I also counted one, two, three, under my breath while "dancing." And, yes, Paul Anka's Diana was there too! A sort of disclaimer is needed: maybe I like the memoir so much because the author belongs to my generation?

The author's grandparents on her mother's side are the main focus of the memoir. Their hatred towards each other is the dominating motif:

"So married were Grandpa and Grandma that they offended each other by existing and he must have hated the prospect of gratifying her by going first. On the other hand she truly feared death, thus he could score points by hailing it as a deliverance and embracing his fate."

The entire thread of the grandfather's diary is stunningly well constructed and presented. The diary itself and the author's commentary seamlessly move from one to the other.

I could keep enumerating the literary values of the memoir, but the review is already too long. Let me only mention that we get an evocative account of life in deeply provincial Great Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Oh, and my three favorite sentences:

"[...] it's a good idea to settle for a few loose ends [in a story], because even if everything in your life is connected to everything else, that way madness lies."

And what about

"He too was only fifteen, but he smoked and drank, and was fed up with being so young."

And let's end with the best quote about the ending:

"It's the sense of an ending that's timeless.

Four-and-a-half stars, and I am rounding up. Yay! First maximum rating since February.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

For some reason before reading this book I didn't check when it was published; if I had I would've found it a safe conclusion that the author is dead. And I have no idea why that fact cast a pall over the book; often our authors are never really dead anyway. Poe and Bronte and Wilde and Mailer are as alive to me today as they ever were. But Sage writes with such piss and vinegar, with all of the arrogance and angst and condemnation of the teenager she was that her death was strangely effecting. And somehow her book was transformed and I had the image of her own grandmother gathering the family around for one last rant about men's evils.

The virtue of the book is its fire, and the images of class and virtue, of the old vicar peddling his bike from spinster to spinster. It lost me a little with the descriptions of literature and the role of schools as reproduces of class rather than enablers of class mobility but still, four stars.

[Claire Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this when it was first published, 20 years ago, and although I remember loving it, I couldn't recall anything about it. In post-war Wales and England Lorna Sage recounts her girl-hood and her family, especially her womanising vicar grandfather (using two of diaries to relate what he got up to with the community nurse). But it is her grandfather who moulds her, making her bookish and independent, and Lorna's mother blames him for what happens to Lorna towards the end of this memoir - which I didn't remember at all. All of it fascinating. I was inspired to reread it because Lorna's ex-husband Vic and her daughter Sharon are being interviewed by Louise Doughty as part of UEA's literary events this November. https://store.uea.ac.uk/product-catal...

[Juliette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bitter, overwrought, screechy, self-absorbed and self-important: can NOT understand why all her reviewers were so complimentary, although could guess it might be something to do with fear! Sorry, thumbs down.

[Lucy Kaufman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book for 50p from a plastic tub of second books in my GP surgery. Its cover denoted quality and the spine seemed vaguely familiar (I realise now, my mother has a copy on her shelf). One of the best 50p pieces ever spent, Lorna Sage’s memoir turns out to be just what the doctor ordered.

Well-remembered and exquisitely observed, Bad Blood is a poetic blend of personal psychology, social history and an academic love of literature, which never succumbs to schmalzy sentimentality or nostalgia. The past is palpably present in Sage’s prose, as vivid as a painting, yet even painful personal experience is dissected with the precision of the academic Sage became.

The book spans the 40s, 50s and 60s, the years from her unconventional upbringing in a filthy vicarage, through her council house teens to her graduation from Durham university. One of the most compelling sections is her analysis of the failings of her vicar grandfather, responsible for the ‘bad blood’ she is later believed to inherit. Without reverting to bitterness or emotionality, but instead approaching her grandfather as text — it is his diary she plunders for evidence of his depravity — Sage painstakingly pieces together the clues as to what drives his hypocritical and unethical behaviour, not only as vicar but as husband, father and man.

This may be Lorna Sage’s unique story, a rural upbringing in a North Wales she paints with the same intellectual eye, and a cast of locals specific to that time and location, who are given the same searing treatment as her family, but all the time Bad Blood invites us to look again at our own pasts and families with fresh perspectives. Seeing laid bare the damage family members do to each other and themselves, we cannot help but examine more deeply the characters around us we take for granted, whose own stories we were born into, at how we too have been shaped by their actions, personalities and dysfunctions. By the final closing of its cover, perhaps we too discover what we have inherited.

The quotes on the back cover refer to the book’s importance as social history, as a document of the rapidly changing post-war era, and on one hand it is. For me though,
The book takes an astonishing, but welcome, personal turn. Without spoilers (don’t google her if you don’t like surprises) Sage’s experience resembles my own. By the end of the book, for my own reasons, my face was awash with tears. Lorna Sage had spoken to me, personally, from the grave. When I spotted this book in my GP surgery, I had no way of knowing Bad Blood’s dispassionate style, coupled with her prevailing humanity, was just the tonic I needed.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not being familiar with Lorna Sage, I read this strictly from an interest in autobiography. I found myself waiting for something, anything to happen, but the story was told in such a gray, weary manner, even the "big" events in her life seemed mundane.

[Lnaimark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ms Sage is a wonderful writer. The structure and style are somewhat unusual for a memoir, and I definitely appreciate that.

Spending time in a post-war Welsh vicarage with Lorna's lusty vicar grandfather, perpetually sour and angry grandmother, and her ditsy mother----none of whom could manage to lift a broom or to teach Lorna to bathe, apparently---was definitely one of those "Gee, I didn't know people lived like that" experiences. Again....a plus for me Moving out of the vicarage and into "council housing" once her father returned from the war provided yet another look into that period of time.
Lorna was not afraid to make herself look bad...in fact, she worked at it. She seemed so angry (like grandma) and unlovable, I must admit I was quite surprised late in the book when suddenly she's acknowledged as a genius.
One reviewer said that parts of the book stretched belief. That part for me was when she said she couldn't remember having sex and was incredulous to find herself pregnant. Oh well...we all have our coping mechanisms.
I somewhat wish she'd spent more time on the successful part of her life, but--in truth--it's the vicarage and council house years that are more interesting and unusual, so no real issues for me there.
I very much liked that she provided a "what happened to them afterwards" epilogue. Since that epilogue is about a dozen years old, I googled her....and was quite saddened to see that she died not long after the book was published and won an award. But was happy to learn that the daughter is a happy, well-adjusted person.

[Yak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written but not terribly enjoyable memoir of a woman growing up with the world's worst grandparents and mother in post-war England and Wales. These people are so mundanely awful that it's jot even entertaining or heartbreaking to read about them, such as with "The Glass Castle" or "Running With Scissors."

[Kitty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the page turner it should have been. Had a hard time caring one way or the other about the author. At one point, I almost returned to the library half read. Don't know why I perservered. Now that I am done, I just feel ambivalent.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took a little while to get going for me but when it did, I think when Lorna became a rebellious...ish teenager I loved it.

It is also uplifting, funny in a grim way and has some great pictures showing what a stylish lady she was. I was saddened to learn that Lorna Sage died in 2001.

Fine book.

[Sarah Tittle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having absolutely no idea who Lorna Sage is/was, I ventured into the memoir because I was hungry for a woman's story—but not looking for trigger-warning events. I apologize for that; I just can't stomach horrible news on top of what's already out there.

This memoir, which spans the 2oth century, opens with the lives of her grandparents on her mother's side, with whom she lived for the first decade of her life. Sage then tells the story of her mother, before she finally gets to her own life. This was a little confusing to me because none of these lives were remarkable in any way historically speaking, except these people were both products of their times and bold (and often perversely) out of place. This seems to be the theme of the memoir, a sort of nature v nurture exploration of smalltown prejudices, nosiness, and parochiality where a woman of intellect and drive had much to overcome in order to pursue her dreams (if those dreams did not include becoming a housewife). It's a somewhat dreary story overall, but punctuated by scenes of colorfully if not comically unconventional: characters her alcoholic, possibly pedophilic, philandering preacher grandfather; her angry, husband- and man-hating grandmother; her domestically disinterested, talented actress of a mother. And I enjoyed Sage's writing, especially passages such as: "Their tweeds smelled of damp and camphor, their jowls trembled under a coating of powder, their lipstick ran up into the cracks under their moustaches and their blue eyes watered from the fumes of the coke stove."

But it wasn't until Sage's teenage years

SPOILER AHEAD

and her plunge into total disgrace when she becomes pregnant at age 16 having not even realized that she'd actually had intercourse. The chapters that cover her pregnancy and childbirth are fascinating, as is Sage's revelation that she didn't have to give into the stigmatization of unwed, or at least teenaged, motherhood. After hiding her condition and attending school so that she can enroll in university, waiting until the last minute to get to the hospital even though she knows her baby is breach, and insisting on leaving said hospital before she's discharged, Sage brings home a beautiful, complacent baby whom she promptly deposits with her parents so that she can go to college. I am not judging here AT ALL. She is merely repeating her own story, in which she was raised by her own grandparents. She concludes, "Certainly it was a lot easier to have a baby than to be delivered of the mythological baggage that went with it."

Lorna Sage emerges as a smart, obstinate, and sly chronicler of her own life and the era in which she lived. I only wish she'd devoted more time to her teenage years and less to her young childhood.

[Charlotte Potter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this. Up there with some of my favourite memoirs by female writers (on a par with H is for Hawk, On Chapel Sands, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal).

Lorna Sage has such a singular voice and draws the characters of her family members so vividly. They all feel bizarrely real and yet like they’re from a novel. I thought often of Cold Comfort Farm (although it should be said that Lorna is almost the antithesis of Flora Poste!). I love how literature permeates the whole book (the way she plays with genre is so clever) and that it was literature which gave her and Vic a way out into the world. Highly recommended.

[Belinda Vlasbaard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 sterren - Nederlandse paperback

Recensie volgt later. Uitgeleend.

[Abi Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bad blood is a memoir and world of words and mud and history and theology. I found the first half difficult, painful in intensely human ways.the whole book was almost too tactile and sticky and yet ethereal and off and lost to a different time. It’s not an easy read or comfortable, it is broody and violent and emotional and affective. One to read in spring with its hope and hardness rather than the bleakness of winter or heat and optimism of summer. I don’t think I’ve read a book which in its description or tone feels the same. 10/10 recommend.

[Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

I came close to giving it three stars, but the narrative style, some ambiguous phraseology, and paragraphs that sometimes trailed off into other realms, made this book somewhat of a slog for me, until about halfway through, when it more securely snagged my interest. The book won the 2000 Whitbread Biography Award, so there is appeal and value. Lorna Sage's life story is unusual and not the sort of background you'd expect of a noted English professor and literary critic.

From the beginning she had a library of books to read, but otherwise her childhood was dysfunctional, living in a Gothic vicarage in rural Wales, soon after WWII, being raised by grandparents who hated each other. As a schoolgirl she was bookish, shy, and outcast of sorts due to her unkempt appearance and lack of hygiene (she courted head lice until she was about 16). At seventeen, she became a mother (by mysterious means--she had little knowledge of biology but had a boyfriend). That would appear to be about the end of the line, except that she and her husband had such high educational goals and "ran off" to university, leaving their baby girl to be raised by grandparents (history repeating itself!)

All narrative, but descriptively so, the first part of the book probed family background--the characters and relationships of parents and grandparents, revealing the causes of family dysfunction and "dilapidations" in the vicarage. It seemed that none of the adults wanted to accept the roles of parenting. They were self-involved and lived out fantasy roles. The education system in isolated Hanmer, Flintshire, was a myth. None of the children in that district were expected to be any more than "muck shovellers" as adults. Lorna was left to her own devices, to read and wander. Despite the lack of parenting, Lorna idolized the family's worst example: her promiscuous,duplicitous, and self-indulgent grandfather, who taught her to love books.

The memoir became livelier as the author wrote about her teen years where she and her best friend idolized rock stars and other unavailable males rather than the local boys in their fiefdom. For awhile, Lorna had a more pleasurable relationship with this girl as they fantasized about boys and distant lives of glamour; they also were a dynamic doubles tennis team, which garnered Lorna some favor and respect. Inevitably, she met a soul mate in Vic Sage and became pregnant (almost by a miracle of immaculate conception by her description). Their daughter's birth did not hold the couple back from pursuing their educational dreams, thanks to Lorna's parents who stepped into the parenting role.

[Rachael Eyre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Possibly the oddest memoir I've ever read. Sage's girlhood reads like a real life Cold Comfort Farm, with a coterie of barmy relatives - the promiscuous Rev, her stirring grandma, the pervy socialist uncle. It's a powerful evocation of a time where transgressions such as teenage pregnancy and divorce were beyond the pale, and turned ordinary people into pariahs. It also demonstrates the harm that unhappy families can do, because her relations seem to have deliberately kept her in the dark about sexual matters; when she falls pregnant aged sixteen, she refuses to believe she's gone "all the way."

The book veered between being utterly compelling (the early part about her grandpa, "the old devil", is the best) and something of a slog; my interest flagged until she met her future husband, Vic. It doesn't really help that she's relentlessly unsympathetic (but how could she help it, growing up in such a volatile household?)

While not exactly the classic everybody claims, I can understand why it had such an impact. It's shocking to think how limited women's lives were, and so determined by biology, within living memory.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of a family that gives the word "disfunctional" new meaning. The author had the misfortune to be born in a time when her father had to go off to war, and her grandparents were the logical ones to take her in--unless you actually knew them. At war with each other for all the time she knew them, Grandfather's sexual exploits and Grandmother's resentment poison the atmosphere of their home. Appointed to an out of the way village, where presumably he could do the least damage (or at least, attract the least attention), Grandpa feels cheated by life. In her turn, Grandma's anger at being uprooted from her Welsh roots leads to her doing nothing -- literally. Once the world war is over and Lorna's father returns, they get their own place, but the rest of her life seems anti-climactic.

[Jennifer Summers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up purely because I like memoirs and saw it had good reviews. I wasn't familiar with Lorna Sage's non fiction writing. I can imagine if this isn't the case, and you are a fan of Lorna's work already, it would be really interesting to read about her life and upbringing. However as a stand alone memoir I felt it was lacking somewhat in terms of plot.

It is undoubtably well written with some really interesting parts, but overall wasn't that impactful for me. It also ended just as I was starting to get more invested in the plot, which was a little disappointing.

A pretty quick, enjoyable read but I doubt it will stick with me for very long.

[Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the print reviews call this memoir tenderly written, an exuberant celebration, generous. I'm going to say no to all of that. For the most part the author is a sullen observer of miserable people. One reviewer said it described a time in English villages that England continues to run from - that comes closest to my perception. However there are some pertinent observations on women and their lives and the fact that intelligence, education, self determination and books can pull them out of drudgery and self destruction.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memorable and convincing memoir that begins in a vicarage on the Welsh border, moves to a council house in the village and ends at university. Lorna Sage's autobiography is about family history and shame, good intentions and mistakes; the escape offered by books, education and good friends, the sad results of keeping silent about sex and bodies, the everyday trials of fitting in, finding work, being short of money and maintaining appearances.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok read, but nothing special, I didn't think she really had anything particularly new or different to say about the period, and she didn't really have all that exceptional a life, although I was impressed at her determination to sit her exams and go to university despite having just given birth, and would rather have read that story, rather than it just being the last chapter!!

[Cheryl Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderful, compelling beginning, the grandfather and grandmother, locked in a dysfunctional marriage, descriptions of the vicarage and the relationship between the author and her family. Though Lorna Sage is an excellent writer, descriptions of place and people are detailed and vivid, the story bogs down as the chapters progress and seems all too familiar.

[Jennifer Rolfe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book a good analysis of social life in the post ww2 period in rural Wales but she told the story and I don't feel very connected to the people. Where was the resolution? Felt the author was rather detached from the whole process.