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Lorna Sage's Bad Blood: Of Books and Sex

© Pamela St. Clair

"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.