Later this month The Slaves of Golconda will be reading Lorna Sage's Bad Blood: A Memoir. I'm starting a little early and thought I'd share a teaser here in order to tempt a few of you to perhaps read along with us. Anyone, of course, is welcome to join in the discussion (which starts May 31), and if you'd like to post on the Slaves blog, just send me your email and I can make sure an invite goes out to you. The actual discussion takes place at our forum.
Lorna Sage won the 2000 Whitbread Prize for Bad Blood. The blurb reads in part "a tragicomic memoir of one woman's escape from a claustrophobic childhood in post-World War II Britain and the story of three generations of the author's family and its marriages." It's a portrait of a time not so long ago, but disappeared all the same.
It sounds as though she had quite a colorful family life.
"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 the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn't get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. He'd have liked to get further away, but petrol was rationed. The church was at least safe. My grandmother never went near it--except feet first in her coffin, but that was years later, when she was buried in the same grave with him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime's mutual loathing. In life, though, she never invaded his patch; once inside the churchyard gate he was on his own ground, in his element. 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 a carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable."
Since I am also reading a historical novel set in Medieval Wales, this should prove an interesting counterpoint--growing up along the Welsh border in the postwar era. I can't wait to read more!