Lorna Sage: Bad Blood

By DONNA McINTYRE*

Jeepers. Bad Blood comes with so many reviewer endorsements, you feel something is wrong if you don't savour every word of this memoir.

It's a plucky tale. Not that Lorna Sage was a child victim of abuse - her family life just doesn't seem to have offered much fun. But Sage drew strength from her experiences.

She lived in a vicarage in a dreary village on the English-Welsh border with her mother and her mother's parents. The grandmother felt that marriage had cheated her out of her safe, maiden existence. The clergyman took to the booze and womanising to escape his wife's condemnation. Lorna's docile mother tried to keep the peace between her warring parents while her own husband was absent, serving in the Army.

After the grandfather died, the dysfunctional family moved into a council house, with bitter grandmother in tow. Suffering insomnia, Sage found solace in reading and later Radio Luxembourg, and kept out of the way of parents and baby brother. She would "bury herself in a book, and slip away into an antisocial, delinquent ennui".

Teenage pregnancy complicated her life, but she managed to pursue an academic career. She died in January this year.

Bad Blood sums up life warts'n'all in postwar provincial Britain. That Sage could find humour in her turbulent girlhood is proof of her resilience and dry wit.

HarperCollins

$21.95

* Donna McIntyre is a Herald subeditor.