There are two extraordinary characters in Lorna Sage's memoir: her grandfather, the badly behaved vicar of a large but empty church in a remote village on the Welsh borders, and Lorna herself, who became pregnant at 16. "Getting into trouble", as it was called in 1960, was taken as a sign that she had inherited her grandfather's bad blood. But Lorna Sage married the seventeen-year-old father of her child, and sat her A levels shortly after giving birth. Defying the prejudices and conventions of the time, she and her husband went on to study at Durham University, both gaining Firsts in English. Lorna Sage is now Professor of English at the University of East Anglia, and a distinguished author and reviewer.
Sage was a war baby, and because her father was away in the army, she and her mother lived at her grandparent's vicarage. In a spirited opening chapter entitled "The Old Devil and His Wife", she describes their marriage as "a lifetime of mutual loathing", a state of affairs arrived at due to her grandfather's drinking and womanising, and her grandmother's innate resentment. Each felt cheated by life.
The bookish vicar yearned for the company of his intellectual peers, preferably in a snug bar, while his wife missed her large family in South Wales, and yearned for simple metropolitan pleasures that were unobtainable in Hanmer. She took consolation in a collection of perfumed soaps wrapped in tissue paper. She described the village as a hole, a dead-alive dump and a muck-heap, and shook her fist at the people who passed the vicarage on their way to church. Her refusal to play the part of vicar's wife was one reason why her husband had such a poor living. Fondness for drink, including altar wine, and his widely publicised affair with the bicycling district nurse were presumably the reasons he was left there.
The comic elements in Sage's account of her origins evaporate, when grandfather takes things too far by making passes at a friend of his teenage daughter, Valma. Sage dates her mother's loss of confidence to this betrayal.
Grandfather dies when Lorna Sage is nine. Her father has returned from the war, and the family move, with grandmother and a newly-born son, from the large, dilapidated vicarage into a spanking new, open-plan council house. Her father, a shadowy, work-addicted figure, runs a cattle haulage business, and eventually the family moves to a bigger house in the nearby town. Sage, to her own surprise, matures at a young age into a real beauty, described by her uncle as `the poor man's Brigitte Bardot". The black and white photographs scattered among the text show that he was not exaggerating.
Her account of those bleak, post-war years vividly recreates the limited horizons of the time. Sage becomes pregnant without realising she has had sex. She was expected to give the baby up for adoption, and retire into obscurity. The story of her fight to continue with her education is an inspiring one, and a reminder of how radically the attitude to working mothers, sex and marriage has changed since 1960. It was the end of an era, and good riddance.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic