2001 Few important books have been published in a closer race with the undertaker than Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood. Her best-selling personal memoir (the procreator of what, in more debased form, would become a genre of so-called ‘misery memoirs’) was published in October 2000.
Bad Blood went on to win the Whitbread Prize in the first week of January 2001. Sage died a few days later. She described what writing Bad Blood meant to her (and illustrated the remarkable vividness of her literary style) in an article in the Guardian, shortly before her death:
Starting a memoir, you open a door on to the past. The moment Bad Blood became real to me was when, in my mind’s eye, I saw just which door, and who was leading the way:
‘Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on.’
I am still pleased with the book’s first words, though I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. My bitter, theatrical vicar-grandfather, stagnating in the remote rural parish of Hanmer in North Wales for his sins (women and drink, mostly), was my reference point, my black flag on the map of the past, my arrow pointing – ‘You were here’, this is where you begin.1
A chronic sufferer from terminal emphysema, Sage knew, while writing the memoir, that this was also where she would end.
The life recorded in Bad Blood is remarkable, but in its way typical of the meritocratic opportunities opened in the second half of the 20th century by the Butler Education Act, and the Robbins expansion of the universities in the 1960s.
She was born Lorna Stockton in rural Shropshire on 13 January 1943. Her father, a peacetime haulage contractor, was serving in the army. Her mother was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. Neither Lorna’s mother nor her grandmother had been happy with their marriage partner. The Stockton family lived in a council house after her vicar grandfather retired from his living.
While still at her girls’ high (i.e. grammar) school, Lorna met, married and had a child by Victor Sage. She was a mother at sixteen. Despite the obvious handicaps, she made it to Durham University, graduating in 1966 with a first-class degree in English (as did her husband, Vic). She never – as would soon become necessary for an academic career – did a PhD, but got an assistant lectureship at a ‘new university’, the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, where she would spend the remainder of her working life (her husband also landed a job in the department).
Sage became an authority on modern women’s literature, and a prominent reviewer in national newspapers, magazines and on cultural TV programmes. Her marriage to Sage was dissolved in 1974, and she remarried five years later.
Bad Blood is a voyage of introspection. Sage locates the fluid of the title – and her extraordinary drive to succeed in life – in her grandfather (who died when she was nine): ‘I … acquired from grandpa vanity, ambition and discontent along with literacy. I didn’t know my place.’
1 Guardian, 12 January 2001.