Читать книгу Bad Blood - Lorna Sage - Страница 7

Lorna Sage, who died of emphysema on 11 January 2001, lived just long enough to see a finished copy of her memoir and to know that it had won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Since then, Bad Blood has been included in the Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, making it that rare thing: an instant classic. It is still, twenty years after publication, the most powerful coming-of-age story I have read, and the most memorable portrayal of the theatre that is family life. ‘There is something cloying and close about living in a proper family,’ Sage writes, ‘that has always brought out the worst in me’. That same claustrophobia, however, brought out the best in her as a writer.

A Professor of English at the University of East Anglia, Lorna Sage straddled the borders of Grub Street and academe and Bad Blood is about borders and border crossings. She crossed from childhood to adolescence in a Welsh border town called Hanmer, which is so small, her schoolteacher gleefully revealed, that it wasn’t even on the map (in 2001, the population was 726). Hanmer was ‘a time warp’ and Lorna, born in 1943, grew up in what she calls ‘an enclave of the nineteenth century’, where the gravedigger’s name was Mr Downward and the blacksmith who lived by the mere was called Mr Bywater. She would straddle the borders of the pre- and the post-war worlds when she joined the first generation of women to go to university, and there added her voice to second-wave feminism.

Lorna was raised by her mother and her grandparents in the local vicarage, and her first nine years are recorded in the language of a gothic novel. The hero is Lorna’s bookish grandfather, the Vicar of St Chad’s, clad in black skirts with a scar running down his hollow cheek, and the villain is her grandmother Hilda, four foot ten and lethal with the carving knife when her husband comes home pissed. The book’s opening image, with Lorna ‘hanging on’ to her grandfather’s skirts as they flap in the wind on the churchyard path, propels us instantly into the comedy of her storytelling; I imagine her suspended in the air like one of those weightless figures by Quentin Blake who are always on the move, buoyed along on a raft of their own innocence. If Lorna turned her grandfather into a hero, he ensured her role as a heroine by naming her after Lorna Doone in R. D. Blackmore’s romance. By the time she was four, she had been taught by him to read; Lorna was, from the start, her grandfather’s creature and her lifetime in books informs the subtlety and irony of her prose. Lorna’s childhood world, filtered through her adult sensibility, is a literary echo chamber.

The vicarage is itself a place of border controls, with her grandparents occupying different territories. Hilda, in one wing, pines for her home town of Tonypandy where her family have status and a shop, while her husband in his study, Lorna later learns, pines for other women, first a local nurse referred to as MB, and then a seventeen-year-old friend of his daughter, called Marj. Discovering his affairs, Hilda blackmails him for a portion of his stipend every quarter. Lorna’s father is absent for her early years and her mother, Valma (also named by the vicar), is pictured as ‘a shy, slender wraith’ sweeping the hearth like Cinderella while plates and pans fly over her head.

The vicar, depending on whose side you are on, is either a faithless, cheating wastrel or a Romantic melancholic. He reminds me of Patrick Brontë, the half-mad father of the Brontë sisters who let off steam by sawing the legs off chairs, shredding his daughters’ dresses and firing loaded guns from the kitchen door. Lorna describes the vicar’s ‘defiant’ and ‘outrageous’ glamour as shamanistic, vampiric, Byronic; his past followed him, she says, ‘like a long, glamorous, sinister shadow’ and this same shadow hangs over these pages because the Vicar of St Chad’s is the spirit of Bad Blood. At the book’s centre are the diaries he kept in 1933 and 1934, in which he records his indiscretions and reveals, as Lorna wonderfully puts it, his ‘distinguishing trait’ to be ‘pride in his own awfulness’. He wrote a diary, she concludes, because he saw himself as a writer, but also to redeem his life from ‘the squalor of insignificance’. The squalor of insignificance: the phrase is painfully good, but then every line of Bad Blood is quotable. Lorna’s grandparents, for example, buried in same plot, are ‘rotting together for eternity, one flesh at last after a lifetime’s mutual loathing.’ The best term to describe Sage’s tone in these passages might be horrid laughter.

The Vicar was not, of course, a glamorous figure to anyone other than his granddaughter. A lonely and bitter man exiled in an illiterate parish, it is striking that it is his story and not her grandmother’s that moved her because, in her life as an academic, Lorna reclaimed the stories of women and not men, writing seminal studies of Angela Carter and Doris Lessing, and editing the vast Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English.

When her grandfather dies in 1952, the genre of Bad Blood shifts from the gothic to what Lorna calls ‘socialist realism’. The family move from the spell-binding squalor of the vicarage to the wipeable surfaces of a 1950s council house, Lorna’s father returns to civilian life and a baby brother is born. There is also a subtle shift of class, one of several that Lorna will experience as she is propelled forwards. The newly formed nuclear unit is organised around a profoundly domestic mother who lacks, to a spectacular degree, any domestic skills and whose dominating feature is her fear of food. Could Valma have been anorexic? Sage doesn’t say, but the question hangs in the air: she had a horror of swallowing and so picked all day, occasionally bingeing on onions.

Socialist realism is replaced, in the book’s final section, by a parody of romance when the family move upwards again, this time to a large house with a gravel drive bought with the proceeds of Hilda’s blackmail campaign. The author’s sense of her life as a narrative is now so strongly ingrained that when her schoolteacher gives her some hairgrips for her unruly locks, Lorna concedes that ‘I was letting my hair down too early in the plot’. The plot twist, when it comes, is as much as surprise to her as it is to us.

There are several more borders to cross before the story draws to its close with Lorna entering adulthood against the grain. In the age of the Beatles and the Chatterley Trial she reads English at Durham University, a place whose buildings, ‘angular, hard-edged, ill-lit and draughty’, remind her of the vicarage. Here she meets the brilliant Nicholas Brooke (author of Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy) who will go on to become her colleague at the University of East Anglia. With his ‘theatricality’, ‘bitterness’, ‘cradled cigarette’ and ‘flapping black gown’, Professor Brooke is the image of Lorna’s first mentor, the man whose skirts she would hang onto as they flapped in the wind on the churchyard path. Still moving forward, she is now ‘part of the shape of things to come.’