I seem to be spending a fair amount of reading time lately in Wales (figuratively that is). First with Edith Pargeter's The Brothers Gwynedd and its Medieval setting and now with Lorna Sage's memoir, Bad Blood. Whatever the Pargeter might be lacking in prose style, Sage more than makes up for with her artful recollections of growing up with several generations worth of a dysfunctional family in Austerity Britain. In a way it's as bleak as it sounds but Sage never falls into a trap of self-pity. Her storytelling is all quite matter of fact and at times verges on the humorous--even if the recollections had to be painful (at least at times they were for me). I wish I could write a post about it as brilliantly as she writes her memoir, but maybe this will at least pique your curiosity enough to go find this book, which I highly recommend. (Note--possible spoilers in the last few paragraphs).
Bad blood is what she inherited from her rather colorful grandfather, a vicar, who had a tendency towards roaming hands and a small problem with alcohol. This is not the sort of vicar I've come to know in cozy mysteries or entertaining television dramas. Exiled to the outer nowhere of rural Northern Wales he quickly found solace in the arms of a nurse and later the company of his daughter's schoolfriend, which would forever drive a wedge between them. Sage's grandmother resented the fact that she had to leave her comfortable home above a family shop in South Wales, and never let him forget it. She went so far as to blackmail him for money, threatening to share his personal diaries with his superiors. Always considering herself above the parishioners of the village they were just as dirty (her cleaning abilities left much to be desired), but she believed the vicarage dirt was of a different class.
To young Lorna, however, who must have been unaware of the family drama unfolding at the time, she followed closely on her grandfather's 'skirts' wherever he went, and from him discovered a shared love of books. Her grandfather had the habit of blacking out the titles on the spines so that no one would want to borrow them.
"He died when I was only nine, but that strengthened his hold on my imagination. He did not let me down as he had all the others, starting with my grandmother and my mother, their daughter. Instead he vanished into the dark with his mystique intact." (Guardian)
I had the feeling while reading that his work in the vicarage was a little suspect, though perhaps I wasn't given the whole story, as he would spend the occasional day quietly ensconced in his rooms reading while anyone who came visiting would be told he was away on business. After his death the family had to vacate the vicarage and his successor saw the dirt and dilapidation as not only a hygienic but moral shortcoming.
Valma, Sage's mother, had married shortly before the war and lived with her family while her husband was off fighting. It was left to her to try and take care of the household as best she could, a job she was singularly unsuited for. When the war came to an end and her husband returned, the family (with grandmother in tow) moved into one of the new council house estates. It was easy enough to get away with bad housekeeping skills in the mess that was the vicarage, but the new open-plan houses were something else entirely.
"My mother's acquired ineptitude fitted this post-war pattern. And she did, the propaganda said, try to turn herself into a housewife, although she was very bad at it. Quite how bad only became clear once we'd moved to the council, house, for vicarage ways were ingrained; she couldn't be expected to make much impression on that Gothic grime and disorder. But in 'her' brand-new house full of light and hard, washable surfaces (even the window-sills were tiled) she was horribly exposed. According to the advertisers and social psychologists, housework was her calling and she simply couldn't do it; she had a kind of genius for travesty when it came to domestic science."
Because of her 'bad blood' acquired from her grandfather--"vanity, ambition and discontent along with literacy" her parents were in public proud of her but in private thought this bookishness only added to her delinquency. Her parents seemed to fold into one another, her father fiercely protective of her mother despite her shortcomings, leaving no room for Lorna. At one point she writes, "there are too many children in our house", no one wanted to be the parent.
As a child in the 1950s the world was changing, and she was part of this new more worldly generation, but she was unprepared for what her actions would bring. At sixteen she became pregnant, not realizing that what she had done could even result in pregnancy. Keeping with the times it was expected that she would go away to have her baby and then give it up for adoption. Now more than ever her mother reminded her of her bad blood as she followed in her grandfather's footsteps, yet she decided to not only marry the baby's father but do her A Levels and go to University. As an aside, did any woman in the 1950s have a decent, happy childbirth? The attitudes and actions of the time were really deplorable.
Sage went on to not only receive her her English degree (as did her husband), but became a noted literary critic, a Professor of English Literature and wrote several books. She won the Whitbread Prize for Bad Blood: A Memoir in 2000, but sadly several weeks later she died of emphysema. It was her grandfather that inspired her to write her memoir.
"I still thought of him - still think of him - as my great familiar and mentor, the making of me, though I now see that that carries all sorts of baggage with it that I had not expected. Writing about his sins, his sermons, his last illness (he had a stroke in mid-flow in the pulpit, I was there in the front row of the choir), I gave myself the impetus to go on to explore my parent's lives and my own first marriage, at 16.
Indeed, marriage, and its changing nature over the years, became one of the book's themes, and so did secrets and lies. He represents for me now the glamour of the past, and its sinister pull, like the force of gravity inside your life." (Guardian)