Old Devil in a Dog-collar

I first read Lorna Sage’s deeply absorbing and funny memoir Bad Blood in 2001, just before it won the Whitbread Award for Biography. A week later she died of emphysema, aged only 57, and, although I’d never met her, I felt as if I had. Her printed voice still flowed in my head, witty and full of insights into the rocky worlds of children and the adults who are supposed to care for them; a precise voice, rich with details that reminded me of my own semi-rural childhood: ‘hedges overgrown with hawthorn, honeysuckle and dog roses’.

Lorna Sage was a professor of English Literature, a distinguished literary critic and a regular reviewer for the Observer, the New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. She was born during the Second World War, in 1943, and lived with her ‘rather put-upon’ mother at her grandparents’ vicarage, while her father, an army captain, was away on active service. In the vicarage another war was being waged. Lorna’s grandparents barely spoke to one another and slept at opposite ends of the house. The ‘old devil’, a High Church vicar who went in for frequent communions, not only wore a dog-collar but also sported a scar on his cheek, the result of a carving knife wound made by his wife on one of the many occasions when he’d come home drunk. It was the drinking that had brought about his relocation from South Wales to the village of Hanmer, in an obscure corner of Flintshire. There ‘the communicants got watered-down Sanatogen from Boots’, grandfather’s wine supply having been stopped by the Bishop. According to Lorna’s grandmother, Hanmer was a hole: ‘A dead-alive dump. A muck heap.’ A place of traditional farmers and Women’s Institute wives, smallholders and labourers, with only one policeman, one butcher and one baker. On its publication in 2000, Bad Blood provoked a great deal of criticism from Hanmer’s residents, who objected to Sage’s portrayal of them as parochial and narrow-minded. They felt her views were unduly influenced by her grandmother, a recluse who hardly ever set foot in the village. Their loyalties were with the vicar – a lovely man, who used to tell them ghost stories at Scout meetings. A photograph, near the beginning of the book, shows the vicarage exactly as I’d imagined it, with high hedges and tall chimneys; ‘a modest eighteenth-century building of mellowed brick’. Reading on, I found myself in a familiar and distinctly shabby world, with rationing, clothes that were either outgrown or waiting to be grown into, and archaic rituals that did little to cover up the troubling indignities lurking beneath. However, if young Lorna needed to escape, there were quiet lanes and fields to roam and there was always the church. Among its echoing spaces and stained glass, she would potter about with her grandfather for hours, or they’d go outside and watch the sexton, Mr Downward (his real name), maintaining or digging the graves. When a skull was accidentally uncovered, Grandpa couldn’t resist picking it up and launching into ‘Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well . . .’ which Lorna took literally, being too young to know that Yorick was somebody else’s invention. He taught her to read before she was 4 and she would take down the books from the shelves in his study and puzzle over the big words while he worked on his sermons. Her name, which he chose for her, came from one of those books – Lorna Doone. Of her early reading she writes: ‘I didn’t want to meet lifelike characters. I preferred characters who carried off their unreality with conviction.’ Lorna’s grandmother, who never answered the door and ignored the housework, mostly stayed in bed, pining for the pleasures of South Wales and the sugar lumps and sponge cakes stocked in her parents’ shop. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she suffered from diabetes and had no teeth – that is no real teeth, just a ghoulish set of dentures. Her way of expressing affection to her granddaughter, or any other small child, was to smack her lips and say, ‘You’re so sweet, I’m going to eat you all up.’ Occasionally she would take Lorna into the garden and attack the nettles with a pair of sharp scissors. Clearly they were standing in for her husband. ‘Ugh! Nasty old thing!’ she’d say. ‘Wicked old devil!’ The ‘wicked old devil’ used to take Lorna out in his Singer saloon, across the English border into Shropshire, to the pub in Whitchurch, where he could drink anonymously. Six miles there and six miles back. She was a perfect alibi; no one at home could imagine the existence of pubs that allowed young children through their doors. After her father’s return from the battlefields of Normandy and the Ardennes, the reunited family moved into that post-war symbol of hope and aspiration, a brand-new council house. Her father worked long hours at his inherited haulage business, Stockton & Sons, ‘where muddle, compromise and inefficiency were the new enemy’, while her mother, a typical 1950s housewife, remained ‘rather put-upon’. Initially, Lorna attended Hanmer Church of England School, and her descriptions of her early education take me straight back: the dreaded multiplication tables; the horrible playground games. Lorna survived by saying that if you were nice to her she would let you play in the graveyard. Mr Downward would turn a blind eye to all but the most boisterous grave-hopping games, believing the graveyard to be some sort of extension of the vicarage garden. Lorna was particularly popular after a wedding when she and her school friends could collect the confetti with its ‘little pink bells and silver horseshoes’, or after a funeral when they could gather up the expensive flowers from the new grave and redistribute them to the others: ‘There’s nothing small children enjoy more than parcelling things out according to some system of just deserts and it was obvious that many of the dead were being short-changed.’ Lorna’s next school, Whitchurch Grammar School for Girls, meant travelling on the bus every day. I also travelled to school by bus and well remember the terror she describes of sitting in the wrong seat. The nearer you were to the front, the lower your status and, if you dared to sit next to a boy, you became entirely invisible. Which, like me, she never understood, especially as the talk was all about boys. Shy and bookish, she fell in love with Latin and was good at memorizing poems, but she suffered from sinus infections and often couldn’t sleep. Nevertheless, she got very good marks and soon set her sights on university. She was pretty and blonde, and reached puberty early. There was Pond’s make-up and ‘turning your school cardigan back to front to look like a turtle-neck sweater (and hide your tie)’. There was New Musical Express and the Top Twenty – Pat Boone, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis. ‘We wanted to eat them all up, what big eyes we had, if we swallowed them whole we’d take on their powers, they’d be ours, they’d be us.’ There was also Vic Sage, a whole year older than her, yet surprisingly easy to talk to. Soon they were holding hands, going on long walks and ‘trying to get inside each other’s skins’ in the nearby fields or the back row of the local cinema until, after ‘a bruising kind of bliss mostly made of aches’, she was shocked to discover that she had ‘gone all the way’. Even more shocked when she found herself pregnant at 16. Had she, perhaps, inherited her grandfather’s bad blood? Her parents certainly thought so. Sometime later, Lorna and her mother made another shocking discovery. Clearing up after her grandmother’s death and wading through a lifetime’s residue of squirrelled-away letter, and sugar lumps ‘put by against the return of rationing’, they came across a surprising amount of paper money. It turned out that Grandma had blackmailed Grandpa for years by threatening to show his private diaries to the Bishop unless he handed over part of his stipend every quarter. Apparently, it wasn’t just the booze that he preferred to keep secret; there had also been affairs with local women. At 16, however, Lorna was still unaware of this. After the initial shock of the pregnancy, her parents allowed Lorna to marry Vic as long as she finished school first – it was either that or have her run off to Gretna Green. They also looked after their little granddaughter for several years while the young couple went away to Durham University to study English Literature. In 1964, Lorna and Vic found themselves on the front page of the Mail: ‘the first married couple of ordinary student age to graduate in the same subject, at the same time, both with Firsts’. The accompanying photograph, reproduced in the memoir, shows them standing with their daughter Sharon, all together on graduation day. And here Bad Blood ends, at a triumphant beginning. Although Lorna and Vic separated in 1974, they remained good friends and colleagues, both taking up teaching posts at the University of East Anglia. Vic and I met when he was an external examiner for the MA in Creative Writing that I helped teach at Middlesex University. He was a charming and erudite man, unmistakably an older version of the smiling young father I’d already encountered in the Mail photograph. In addition to her journalism, Lorna Sage was known primarily for her interest in women writers, including Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Edith Wharton. She wrote a biography of Doris Lessing in 1983 and a critical study of post-war women novelists, Women in the House of Fiction (1992), and she was editor-in-chief of The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (1995). But, for me, Bad Blood is her greatest achievement, with characters overflowing with ‘unreality’ that leap off the page with total conviction, full of extravagant behaviour and resilience.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 49 © Linda Leatherbarrow 2016