[A reading from 'Bad Blood' and discussion by Lorna Sage]

[A reading from 'Bad Blood' and discussion by Lorna Sage]

Reading (1 min). Discussion (7 min). Lorna describes how the book came about; her upbringing in old-fashioned rural Wales; her relationship with her grandfather who behaved “fantastically badly”; the valuable role of his compromising diaries which enabled Lorna to “remember what he sounded like”; the three marriages which the book is about “that tripartite structure was for me what enabled the book to work”; and the response from readers “they’ve been sparked into memory by it and I’m very pleased with that.”
[Bridget Gillies, Archive Assistant]

Lorna Sage

Lorna Sage Archive, University of East Anglia

University of East Anglia Archives

2000?

Sharon Tolaini-Sage. All rights reserved.

mp4 multimedia file

Moving Image

LS/PER/3

Hanmer, Wrexham

00:08:08

Unknown

I suspect I’d been thinking of writing a memoir for a long time, at the back of my mind. Partly because I’d been telling the stories I use in it, for a very long time, when I think about them. But what quite turned it into an act of writing I’m not so sure. What turned it into ‘Bad Blood’ I’m not so sure. I think really a very archetypal memoirist’s impulse, which is, that you feel that a whole area of experience, a whole place, a whole time is not going to be done unless you do it, and that’s certainly something I felt. And wonderfully enough, an awful lot of people, since the book came out, have actually written to me saying “Gosh, yes, that’s a lost time, a lost place, a lost whatever.” Part of it was because also where I grew up was very old fashioned, very rural, it was about to change totally but it hadn’t for a very long time. So in a curious sense I felt as if I lived in a longer ago past than I actually really had and a lot of other people from round there have written to me saying exactly that. It’s now completely changed but then it was like growing up, I realise in retrospect, in the 19th century and in fact quite a lot of readers have actually said they’ve been reminded of 19th century memoirs by it in a way. So I think really the process of change, that you realise that it gets lost unless you do something with it.
My grandfather was the subject of my best stories. He was always I realise my great figure, he was my mentor, he was the one I grew up with. That’s why I started, I was so pleased with my first sentence cause he’s wearing his clerical skirts so he’s like my Mam, Dad and everything and I really enjoyed having found that sentence but in fact he seemed to be looking over my shoulder once I started the book, in the sense that his diaries turned up, which I didn’t have when I started.
The compromising diaries that he was going to be blackmailed by my Grandma by, um, I knew they existed but I didn’t know they still existed. And in fact they turned up and that was one of the great sort of moments when I realised that actually I could recapture, him in a different way because although he was totally influential over my childhood I couldn’t remember what he sounded like, at least I had some of his words and he was um, and she was right, he behaved fantastically badly but you know I was only 9 when he died so he didn’t have time to betray me unlike all the other women in his life. My grandfather was a priest of the Church of England in Wales. He was a vicar in the grand old fashioned slightly high church sense which is of course why he wore his cassock a lot. He was, as it turned out, certainly a boozer, a womaniser, this I’d always known about him though in fact when I found his diaries and read between the lines I realised that it was more elaborate than we had known. He was also interestingly enough very much a sort of disappointed writer and so on, so I felt he was prodding me a bit once I’d started the book that actually I was still, though he’d died when I was 9, doing his thing a bit. He was very much that sort of push for the book. But it enabled me too to write about him in the thirties which I adored doing, I mean I didn’t want this book to be personal in a sense of confessional or me as a small child impersonating myself back then. I really was very interested in the place, the time, a world, and the fact that I could get into his world in the thirties before I existed, was for me very important and actually gave me a different view of what the whole book could be, so it turned into a book about three marriages in fact, my grandparents’ marriage, my parents’ marriage, my own first marriage, the one that of course gave birth to the title in a sense because my mother, when I got pregnant at 16, thought it was all down to Grandpa and ‘the books’. The two things went totally together in my family’s view, he was the bookish one, he’s the one who taught me to read when I was very young, he was the one who influenced me.
By the time I went to live with my real family I was already ‘his thing’, his person, his creature and that tripartite structure was for me what enabled the book to work as something not just personal because it was very important to me to try and get a world. I didn’t want to write a personal memoir in the internalised, fictionalised going back sense. I wanted to write something more with places, characters, a kind of reality that was not just internalised. I’m very pleased that it has sparked off a lot of memories in other people, in readers. It started other people remembering, not because they think they are at all identical, their experiences are identical or whatever but they’ve been sparked into memory by it and I’m very pleased with that.
I think hindsight has got too bad a reputation I think it’s very useful, because your life is not just what it seemed to you then, your life is what you’ve made of it and what you can make of it now too, in terms of the stories you can find in it, the ways you can describe it. That matters to me a great deal.