Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

Lorna Sage, Professor of English at the university of East Anglia, was just a few years older than me but this is a young woman’s story, the story of her childhood through to her graduation from university. I was telling someone the other day that this book is about the telling of the story rather than the story itself. Her writing is exquisite, not in a poetic languagey way but more in its depth of thought, its word choice, its nuances. The period she’s describing falls into three sectors: the first as a child living with her damaged, flawed grandparents, the second when her father returns from the war and the family is reconstituted in a council house and the third the period of her adolescence and education. She’s an early feminist, an intelligent misfit both in the working class environment and within the family in which she finds herself, like a cuckoo in the wrong nest. A lot of her observations ring so true for women of my generation, who grew up in the fifties against a background of war memories, austerity and a need to shelter within rigorous moral boundaries as a means of survival. It’s an inspiring and moving story of this brilliant young woman’s determination to create a different future for herself. This book won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. It’s utterly wonderful.