You might think that a memoir of a childhood in a rural village on the border of Wales would be very like Cider With Rosie and there are similarities in the picture of rural deprivation, although the period of this book is twenty years after Rosie. But the real difference is that this is no rural idyll. It starts by describing her grandfather, the Vicar, and her grandmother, his wife, who hated him, who lived apart from him (in the vicarage) who never went to church and who blackmailed him over his affairs. The tempestuous relationships and the Vicar's philandering cast a long shadow over Lorna's growing up.
It is beautifully written.
She writes beautifully:
- "She was buried in the same grave as him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime's mutual loathing." (C 1)
- "I thought that that was what a vicar was, simply: someone bony and eloquent and smelly (tobacco, candle grease, sour claret), who talked into space." (C 1)
- "They didn't just 'know their place'. it was as though the place occupied them, so that they all knew what they were going to be from the beginning." (C 1)
- "They were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen it out self-righteously." (C 1)
- "My overcoat was at first too big (I would grow into it), then all at once too small, without ever for a moment being the right size." (C 1)
- "Mr Palmer seemed omniscient. He rules over a little world where conformity, bafflement, fear and furtive defiance were the orders of the day." (C 2)
- "All housework is futile in the sense that it always has to be done again." (C 3)
- "When they're not breaking the commandments, anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless." (C 4)
- "Jolly miserable: that middle-class oxymoron." (C 4)
- "I was still only an apprentice misfit and self-conscious in the part." (C 7)
- "In the land of the 1950s you were meant to be socially mobile, but personally conformist; self-made, but in one of the moulds made ready. You mustn't miss the boat, but you mustn't rock it either." (C 9)
- "Being an air hostess hadn't yet been revealed as waitressing-in-the-sky." (C 10)
- "The particular awfulness of amateur acting is that you can always see through the disghuise to the person underneath." (C 12)
- "'Poetry for the Young' ... was absolutely silent on animal appetites and contrived to confuse love with waving goodbye to one's native land. Its real subject was death: death in infancy, death in the far corners of the empire, death at sea on the way there - and just plain old death." (C 12)
- "More than one of those tweedy spinsters had had an affair with Grandpa." (C 12)
- "He kept a pair of bicycle clips in his pocket in case someone might want to lend him a bike." (C 12)
- "Only when you look ore closely can you see that this housewife is pathologically scared of food, hates home, is really a child dreaming of pretty things and treats." (C 12)
- "A few intellectual tearaways at the boys' grammar school talked about jazz and existentialism, but they were practising for university." (C 13)
A great read: idyll with attitude. November 2020; 281 pages
Bad Blood won the 2000 Whitbread (now the Costa) Prize for Biography. Other winners reviewed on this blog include:
- 2007 Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
- 2009 The Strangest Man (Paul Dirac) by Graham Farmelo
- 2015 The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
Other fictional Costa winners can be found here.
Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed on this blog can be found here.
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