BAD BLOOD
Lorna Sage
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2000
Copyright © Lorna Sage 2000
Introduction copyright © Frances Wilson, 2020
Cover photograph: Lorna Sage aged 14
‘All Shook Up’ Words and Music by Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley © 1957 by Shalimar Music, Inc. – assigned to Elvis Presley Music, Inc., all rights administered by R & H Music and Williamson Music – All Rights Reserved. Lyric reproduced by kind permission of Carlin Music Corp., London NW1 8BD. ‘(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear’ Words and Music by Kal Mann and Bernie Lowe © 1957 Gladys Music – all rights administered by R & H Music and Williamson Music – All right Reserved. Lyric reproduced by kind permission of Carlin Music Corp., London NW1 8BD. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ Words and Music by Mae Boren Axion, Tomy Durden and Elvis Presley © 1956, Tree Publishing Co. Inc., US. Reproduced by kind permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H 0EA.
Lorna Sage asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781841150437
Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780007374281
Version: 2020-08-14
‘In a class of its own … It is a measure of her achievement that she can turn the peculiarities of her own past – and they are peculiar – into a narrative that speaks for the whole of post-war Britain … This is not just an exquisite personal memoir, it is a vital piece of our collective past’
Daily Telegraph
‘A wonderful book. Women need this kind of book but perhaps men need it more, to give the sort of understanding which we still lack of how girls actually grow up’
Margaret Forster
‘This could have been the saddest book you have ever read, but because of Lorna Sage’s relish in the details, her exuberant celebration of the vitality of this clever, surviving girl, it is as enjoyable a book as I remember reading’
Doris Lessing
‘[A] rich, justly acclaimed autobiography … this almost perfect memoir is a tribute to imperfection’
Independent
‘Lorna Sage has always been among the most acute literary critics of her generation, and this book shows why: because she writes so well herself, with an honesty equal to a story as painful as this. She has transmuted a bad dream into a book of classic poise. This is not a book for children, but neither was her childhood’
Clive James
‘Speak, Memory! Lorna Sage’s memoir is magnificent and quite impossible to lay aside. What a book for this country now. She makes Hanmer, Whitchurch, the shop, the ailing haulage business, the lightless houses, the mad relations, into the real ancestral England, from which the English have ever since been on the run’
Jonathan Raban
For Sharon and Olivia
Contents
Introduction by Frances Wilson