Lorna Sage, who died in 2001 at the age of 57, was professor of English at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. In another life she would now be remembered in the academic community, as an authority on contemporary women writers in English, the author of several books on the works of Angela Carter, and editor of the Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English. A slightly wider public would have read her book reviews and other journalism: she died before Doris Lessing, but it was her obituary of the novelist that was published by The Guardian.

However, she tells us that it was her mother’s death in 1989 which set her thinking about writing a memoir of her early life, first in Hanmer (now part of Wrexham county borough in North Wales) and then over the border in the Shropshire town of Whitchurch. Published in 2000, Bad Blood came, almost literally, out of nowhere. Sage lived just long enough to see it win the Whitbread prize for biography. It continues to attract attention and appear on lists of essential books. For good reason: while the book is an important social document about post war provincial life, especially the lives of girls and women, that is only the half of it. It is also the compelling story of the traps that ensnared her parents and grandparents, and of her own escape.

Lorna Stockton was born in 1943. Her grandfather, the Rev Thomas Meredith-Morris, was vicar of Hanmer, and her first years were spent in the vicarage with her mother and grandparents, while her father was in the army. This is the area called English Maelor, Maelor Saesneg in Welsh, a curious bit of Wales projecting out into England, which had been passed between England and Wales during the medieval period but which from Tudor times until the 1970s was administered as part of Flintshire, the main body of which was some distance away: Flintshire (Detached)  was how it was expressed on the maps of my own childhood. It contains no towns, and is still deeply rural. Sage quotes Hardy’s In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’:

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk…

Then she tells us:

Hanmer wasn’t on his patch, of course, but you could picture the Maelor district as a mini-Wessex, less English, less fertile, lacking a writer to describe it. The local dialect did make a lot of the syllable ‘Ur’ that he singles out in Tess to stand for the ancient burr you can hear in country voices. In Hanmer grammar ‘Ur’ or ‘Er’ was the all-purpose pronoun used for men, women, children, cattle, tractors. It implied a kind of levelling, as though all were objects, and you could use it for a tree or a stone, too. In my memory it’s always associated with negatives – ‘dunna’, ‘conna’, ‘wunna’. You kick a gate that’s warped half off its hinge: “Er wunna open,” you say without surprise. Everything had its own sullen, passive power of resistance.

My personal perspective on her account of Hanmer childhood and schooling is that I grew up ten years later in a village about twenty miles away, went to the village school, later moved to the small town nearby, and somehow got to grammar school and university, rather as she did although, of course, I was a boy. Modernity must have arrived in those intervening ten years, or perhaps Sage is right to wonder whether she grew up in an exclave not only of Flintshire but of the nineteenth century. She describes a world of oil lamps, rural squalor and perfunctory education. As the vicarage child she was not supposed to play with the common, dirty children, and began by observing it all from on high.

…Next door to us, also fronting onto the square, was a sixteenth-century tumbledown timber and brick cottage crammed with children I wasn’t supposed to mix with – the Duckets, one of Hanmer’s most shameless tribes. The wall that divided us from them provided me with a perch from which I could look down into their back garden. Our side had a lawn with borders and apple trees, and was neglected and overgrown and peaceful. Theirs was like a bomb-site, a muddy, cratered expanse with twisted pieces of old prams and bike frames, and shards of crockery embedded among straggly weeds and currant bushes. The Duckets epitomised what my grandmother meant by ‘dirty’: they were openly poor (the father was a farm labourer), they bred like rabbits and they spilled out of their house wearing their ragged hand-me-downs for all to see.

The first part of Bad Blood is dominated by her grandparents and their conflict, her mother figuring in the main as an overworked domestic skivvy. At an early age the young Lorna formed an alliance with her grandfather, a highly literate, rather gothic and perennially frustrated man who encouraged her in reading and writing: he is credited with choosing her name, taken from Blackmore’s Lorna Doone. Nonetheless she spent much time with her grandmother, who was pleasure-seeking, overweight and constantly wishing to be back where she came from, in the Rhondda in south Wales. The couple hated each other. In her mother’s girlhood plates had been thrown and grandfather’s face had been slashed with a knife, but in Lorna’s childhood things had settled down into cold, venomous distance.

What it was all about became clear after their deaths, when Sage’s father gave her grandfather’s diary, seized by grandmother for the purpose of blackmail: she had threatened to show it to the bishop. In it, grandfather describes moving to Hanmer in advance of his family. Almost straight away he began a sexual relationship with ‘MB’, the local district nurse. When grandmother arrived there was an enormous row, and the affair eventually ended: much later, after grandfather’s death, MB administers grandmother’s regular insulin injection, reserving (in grandmother’s telling) a blunt needle for the purpose.

This much, says Sage, had been local folklore, and the surprise was mainly in seeing it all written down, with her grandmother’s sarcastic marginalia: Love begins (fool). But there is more, something that had been kept secret. As Sage reads the diary she finds references to her mother as a girl which are at odds with the woman she knew: a girl with a gift for the stage, who shared grandfather’s intellectual interests just as she herself had, and to whom, as with herself, he had given an unusual, artistic name, Valma. Their fates were different, however. Grandfather betrayed Valma. The diary begins to mention Valma’s best friend, Marjorie, who was a year or two older and about to start training to be a nurse. There are various trips with the two girls together. But then arrives Percy, a new curate with a motorbike, who takes a shine to Valma. Grandfather suddenly found himself alone with Marjorie.

On 6 August: ‘Val and curate go off for a ride. Marj on my lap in the study. So ends this day. What of it?’

Her father’s affair with Marjorie destroyed his relationship with Valma.

He seemed to have forgotten that she was a clever girl, and lost all interest in her mind and character, in his hectic obsession with the mere fact of youth. He may or may not have damaged Marj’s young life (she seems to have gone off to her hospital training on time and to have revisited Hanmer later at odd intervals when the fancy took her) but he certainly scarred his daughter’s sensibility horribly. She lost all the confidence and hopefulness you can glimpse in the dashingly virginal girl of 1934. She became fiercely censorious about bodies and their wants, so much so that it always seemed a bit of a miracle that she’d managed to make an exception for my father, and marry and reproduce at all. And she was shy, fearful, mislaid most of what she’d learned from Grandpa or at school and saw herself apologetically as inept, unable to cope with life.

Sage begins to notice how, in the diary, the upper class women of the area are constantly inviting the vicar to tea: rumours about his relationship with MB do not discourage them, perhaps the reverse. Reading of the women clustering around him, she wonders: was MB the first? Or had there been others, earlier on, back in the valleys of South Wales? This is the bad blood of Sage’s title:

Later on, much later, after his death, my mother’s worst insult was to say, ‘You’re just like your grandfather.’ This was in my adolescence and what she mainly meant (but couldn’t bear to spell out) was that I was promiscuous, sex-obsessed. I took it as a great compliment.

Once her periods arrived they came heavily, every three weeks, and her nose bled too.

Sage’s father continued in the army for an extended period after the end of the Second World War, but all changed when he returned. Her brother was born, and her father soon arranged that he, Valma, and the children would move into the Arowry, a road of new council houses on the edge of the village. Grandfather died while this move was slowly being effected, and suddenly Lorna’s grandmother had to vacate the vicarage and come with them to the cramped new house where, she complained, the neighbours could see in. Grandfather’s Gothic nature was confirmed by his death.

On the day of his funeral, which I wasn’t allowed to attend, the whole class was supposed to be sitting in respectful silence. Actually, we were whispering and smothering giggles. The church bell was tolling, almost directly over our heads it seemed (the school was next door to the church), and we had worked ourselves up into a state of creepy euphoria. Maybe he wasn’t quite dead after all. Nerys Jones, the pale girl I sat next to, sent a shudder round by suggesting that the noise of the bell would be bound to wake him up. He’d sit bolt upright in his coffin, his jaw bound up as though he’d got toothache – so we pictured him – and give the grand congregation a real fright. We convulsed with laughter at this tasteless vision and roused the headmaster from his reverie. He’d been about to slip into church at the last minute. Now he took extra time out to give Nerys a tremendous telling-off that reduced her to tears.

Sage might have left off her memoir at that point and produced a very satisfactory book; in fact I have seen Bad Blood reviewed as if it were just the history of her grandparents. But perhaps the most remarkable part of the story is not about young Lorna Stockton’s family, but about Lorna herself.

She found herself in a different world, in which her father took the lead. Eric Stockton was the son of the local coal haulier, and had carried sacks of coal from the age of fourteen, but he transformed himself in the Army, became a captain, went to Sandhurst, was wounded in action. Taking over the family business, he set himself to the creation of a modern haulage concern. Sage sees both his capable and comic aspects. In ‘Bad Blood’ his words are always capitalised, as he plans to Knock the Business into Shape, tells people to Look Sharp, or complains about Pen-pushers and Yes-men with No Incentive to work or Stand on their own Two Feet and Pull their Weight. His wife moved around him in a cloud of domestic incompetence and ill-cooked Sunday dinners, although Sage is quite clear that her parents were devoted to each other, and it is perhaps not a surprise to read in her note at the very end of the book that her father ‘was and remains bereft’ after Valma’s death.

Lorna now also had her young brother, Clive, and there was a period of great concern when he contracted polio. At length he made a full recovery, but this was yet another force pushing her out of the house to make her own world; often, from her description, in a kind of furious sulk. First of all she went about the lanes near Hanmer, where she insinuated herself as helper to a local farmer. But then she passed the scholarship and became one of three children from the village school to go to the Girls’ High School or Boys’ Grammar School in the nearby town of Whitchurch. (Perhaps things had not after all changed that much when I came along: at my own school this happened to two of us.) Nisi Dominus Frustra it said on her blazer badge, and she became entranced by Latin. Little by little it became clear that Lorna Stockton was extremely bright, if neither especially popular nor good at games.

She contracted a friendship with Gail, a onetime enemy from Hanmer school, and for a period they were inseparable, talking about Elvis Presley or hanging around in Whitchurch in the hope of seeing – rather than meeting, at this stage – boys. There are wonderful descriptions of the intensity of this relationship. She recalls a photo of Elvis Presley, looking like one of his crew, not the star, greasy and drinking from a bottle of Coke.

This was the Elvis we loved, the muck-shoveller manque, and we scorned his clean-cut wholesome rivals – particularly Pat Boone, who was tanned and scrubbed, with a parting in his fair hair and what my mother called a nice light voice. One memorable day when Ivy [Gail’s mother] and the stepfather took us for a trip to Southport, Gail and I spent all our time and pocket money dashing from one jukebox to another to make sure that Pat Boone’s chaste hit ‘Love Letters in the Sand’ would be drowned out all over the windswept town by ‘All Shook Up’… All the Elvises groaned and whimpered at once, and the waves rushed in and obliterated Pat Boone. And we clung to each other in a shelter smelling of orange peel and piss on the promenade, and shrieked with glee, like the Bacchae who dismembered Orpheus.

She remarks that, other than holding hands and a bit of grooming, she and Gail never touched. But the handholding was enough.

Were Gail and I tense with excitement or bored stiff? Or both at once? We crackled with emotional static. As we waited for the bus, or dawdled Whitchurch streets, we held hands to earth ourselves – not gently or sentimentally, but squeezing hard as though we’d fall or float any minute and only our interlaced fingers kept us grounded.

This section of the book gives a fine picture of 1950s adolescent girlhood, far beyond any sociological description or nostalgic reminiscence. Once again there is the sense that there would be enough here for a whole book.

Sage is most critical of her teenage self when young Lorna sees her life as entirely defined by boys. In the end, this perspective is turned inside out, as she redefined what might be possible in such a life.

Real teenage boys appeared at a school dance, where Lorna Stockton found herself receiving the unwanted attentions of a boy from the grammar school, Victor Sage. She told him where to go. Quite some time later, many of the young people were invited over as a sort of work party to dig the garden of her English teacher, Mr Davies, who had just bought an old farmhouse, and here she met Vic again. Imagining themselves secure in the knowledge that they were not attracted, they told each other all about their lives and soon were meeting regularly, with a little secrecy: Lorna’s parents were usually told that they were meeting up with a group of friends. They both passed their ‘O’ levels easily, while Lorna’s life changed again. Her father’s business had become profitable with the end of meat rationing, as much of the work involved livestock haulage, and now they bought Sunnyside, a house on the edge of Whitchurch which had some of the rambling character of the vicarage, close to the council estate where Vic lived.

At sixteen Lorna spent the summer holidays sometimes with Vic, ‘trying to get inside each other’s skins, but without taking our clothes off’, and sometimes reading Wordsworth or keeping up her Latin: ‘Every morning I sat in the kitchen… and I translated two or three hundred lines of Virgil’s Aeneid, without using a dictionary, guessing at words I didn’t know’. The couple were moving towards A-levels with the possibility of university when they found out the answer to that classic question of the era: can a girl get pregnant just by ‘heavy petting’?

We can easily imagine the scene after the family doctor had revealed the truth, with Lorna’s mother shouting “What have you done to me?” over and over again. And this was a time when ‘County Education Committees would stop a girl’s university grant if she cohabited, married or became pregnant, because it was a waste of public money…’

My parents’ plan was that I should go to a Church Home for Unmarried Mothers, where you repented on your knees (scrubbed floors, said prayers), had your baby (which was promptly adopted by proper married people) and returned home humble and hollow-eyed… From now on you could count yourself lucky if they let you learn shorthand and typing. Look where so-called cleverness got you…

Lorna herself was outraged: they had not really ‘done it’ and here she was paying the price. Outrage stood her in good stead. She and Vic realised that if they married they would cease to be legally under parental control. The parents could refuse consent, but then it would be all over the Whitchurch Herald. They hatched a plan that she would leave school at Christmas, study at home, and that if the baby came on time in May she would be ready for A-Level examinations in June. After that, despite the dire predictions of her head teacher, she would try to get into university. This became Vic’s aim too: when he took the Civil Service examination and did outstandingly in some papers while failing others, the examiners told him to forget it and go for a degree. The couple married on Boxing Day 1959. By this time Lorna’s parents and Vic’s mother had come round to the idea, and their support was plainly essential in what followed.

The baby arrived on time in May. Health professionals do not come out well in Bad Blood. At the long-gone maternity hospital at Crosshouses the teenage Mrs Sage was not singled out for barbaric treatment on account of youth or immorality: it was meted out to all, without distinction. Nonetheless she emerged with a healthy daughter, Sharon, just in time to complete her A-Level examinations. She and Vic both did well enough to gain a university place, and she now had a year in which to secure one. But there was a problem: Shropshire County Council would give Vic a grant but not her, as she was a married woman with a child and it would plainly be a waste of money to do so. So she applied for scholarships, which had no such restrictions. Lorna applied to various Oxbridge colleges and was told that they would only accept a mature married woman. So she tried the University of Durham. She travelled to Durham for the examination, which was followed by an interview.

Professor Clifford Leach sat behind his desk, welcomed me expansively and handed me over to Nicholas Brook, a sliver of a man on the edge of the pool of Anglepoised light. He was as thin as a rail, tense, his tone rasping, impatient, ironic. When we talked about Shakespeare… and I struggled to resay what I’d written, he raised a quizzical eyebrow and returned my ideas to their real authors – L.C. Knight’s How Many Children had Lady Macbeth? Yes. And that rhapsodic stuff about the late plays and levitating into immortality, wasn’t that Wilson Knight? I nodded, hot in the face. Answering in person for what I’d written was agonizing. On paper I’d been confident, I’d been someone else – a lot of someone elses as it turned out. A fraud…

I called my mother from a freezing phone box, reversing the charges… I told her there was no chance.

But that, of course, was wrong. ‘The inquisition in that stone study was an ordeal designed to establish that I was scholarship material’. And, we might think, it showed this rather unusual and plainly determined young woman that these learned men were no soft touches, while they reassured themselves on the same point too.

‘The Sages take up literature’ it said in the local paper when she and Vic both went to Durham to study English. Thee years later, when they became the first married couple both to graduate with first class degrees, their graduation photograph was on the front of the Daily Mail, showing them holding Sharon who was then aged four.

That Sage pulled this off owed much to her parents, who looked after Sharon during term-time until she and Vic had finished their undergraduate degrees. My Mother’s House, by Sharon Tolaini-Sage is Sharon’s account, with a very affectionate portrait of her grandparents. Vic’s mother, who had her own very difficult domestic situation, stuck by the young family too. The solidity of her relationship with Vic was very important. ‘There had been no recriminations between us. I hadn’t said why wasn’t he more careful, he hadn’t said I led him on…’ Vic Sage has his own story, the council estate boy ‘well known for clowning, drinking and fighting after hours behind the Back Street Vaults’, with a father in and out of the local mental hospital, who got his girlfriend pregnant, married her and had a child at eighteen, became a literature professor, and is an authority on the Gothic novel. In the end, their marriage did not last, but they remained friends and colleagues until Lorna’s death. Writing, Reading and Witnessing, by Victor Sage, is his appreciation of Bad Blood, scholarly, personal and full of warm memories.

Finally we should remember a group of female teachers ‘about the same age as the [twentieth] century’ who, much to her surprise, encouraged Sage when their younger peers did not. Her headmistress told her that no university would accept a married female undergraduate, especially one so fallen. But: Miss Macdonald, the music teacher, ‘…stopped my mother and me one day in the middle of the Bull Ring to tell us at the top of her voice that seventeen was the ideal age to have a healthy baby and get on with your life. The geography mistress, Miss Heslop, sent encouraging messages along the same lines. And Miss Roberts timetabled weekly Latin tutorials at her house, and advised me to put in for scholarship level as well, to impress the selectors’.

This continued at Durham University.

When I met Miss Scott at St Aidan’s she turned out to belong to the same generation as Miss Roberts and shared her no-nonsense view of my offence. In future St Aidan’s wouldn’t be sending women students down for anything other than intellectual shortcomings. She had set a dangerous precedent, but she took it in her stride, only warning me against the mind-rotting side effects of the washing-up that she’d heard living with a man involved.

But it is Miss Roberts, her Latin teacher at Whitchurch High School, who sticks in her mind.

I never got to know Miss Roberts well, although I wish I’d tried harder. She gave me her academic gown when she retired from the high school in the 1960s and was pleased when I started reviewing for the New Statesman in the 1970s, not long before she died.

Bad Blood remains in print. Sage’s Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English is widely available, a type of cornucopia which fulfils her intention that by ‘read[ing] on past the person whose name you already knew and looked up… you’ll find yourself in undiscovered country quite fast’. There is also a collection of her journalism available, edited by Sharon Sage and Vic Sage, entitled Good As Her Word.

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BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly series edited by Alan Horne. It is focused on the area bounded by the rivers Alun, Dee and Gowy, on the border between England and Wales in Flintshire, Denbighshire and Cheshire. You can read about the background to Between Rivers in the Introduction