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Lorna Sage's Bad Blood: Of Books and Sex - Page 2

© Pamela St. Clair

Lorna’s father returns from the war, her grandfather dies, and the family moves to a new neighborhood of "council homes," forcing Lorna to leave behind her favorite play yard, the church cemetery, and the dark gothic vicarage filled with nooks and crannies inviting escape and solitude. As her grandfather had a habit of fleeing daily from the house, Lorna likewise disappears, preferring to stomp through the countryside for long periods of time. Sage evokes the landscape as lyrically as she delineates people: "Hanmer was a most picturesque place from a certain distance, but close up its substance was a heavy and strange. In the spring the ground sucked at your feet; with every step you could savour the pull of the mud. This was what I liked so much about tramping around the fields, this stubborn resistance in every sticky clod: you could hypnotise yourself with it, just putting one foot in front of anther was so absorbing. This way you could lose yourself until you slowed to a dazed standstill and seemed a very passable village idiot, content to sit for hours in a thicket, unseen, waiting for nothing in particular to happen." Elsewhere, Sage’s literary acumen is manifest in the atmospheres she evokes, Hanmer is a Hardy-esque closed community, and the dark, mysterious vicarage echoes with Brontëan overtones.

When Lorna discovers her grandfather’s diaries, with their cryptic details of his affairs, along with his more quotidian observances, she finds yet another connection between them, their desire to write. Through writing, reading, and promiscuity, grandfather has left his mark. After appearing in the very first paragraph, he continues to mark the pages, for it is with him that she most clearly identifies and with whom she is identified by others: "My mother’s worst insult was to say, 'You’re just like your grandfather.' This was in my adolescence and what she mainly meant…was that I was promiscuous, sex-obsessed. I took it as a great compliment." Moreover, Lorna’s identity becomes more tightly embroiled with her grandfather’s when we learn that he named her, Lorna—from Lorna Doone.

Lorna’s inherited "bad blood" boils throughout the 1950’s, roiling against the decade’s emphasis on conformity, against the provincial school district that disdained rather than encouraged a smart girl’s achievements, and against the circumscribed values of circumscribed communities. Through it all, literature fuels her forward. She not only takes refuge in words but also uses them to build a life, regardless of obstacles. She becomes pregnant at sixteen, marries her boyfriend, and continues to find solace in literature, taking the A-level exams the day after leaving the hospital with her newborn daughter. She and her husband proceed to college together, both graduating with firsts in English. Lorna continues her education and makes literature her career. One can almost hear grandfather’s rebel skirts flapping in the distance…

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