Bad Blood: A Memoir

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A daughter, Sharon, is born; Victor and Lorna both gain firsts in English from Durham University, and both join the English department at the new University of East Anglia. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. After the initial shock of the pregnancy, her parents allowed Lorna to marry Vic as long as she finished school first – it was either that or have her run off to Gretna Green.

Cursing a marriage that has neither love, understanding nor imagination, he turns to a life of unabashed wickedness. It's very tempting now she's not here to idolise her to my heart's content, but I do think she was extraordinary.Contemporary young women, who might not be aware of how recent and precarious their rights are, would be really interested to know that married women had only just been allowed entrance into university. The main thing I end up looking back and thinking was, I always knew that if I needed anything or was in trouble, she would be there. Their careers ran in parallel; both graduated with first-class degrees in 1964, both moved on to Birmingham University, where Sage studied at the Shakespeare Institute. Going to school was a shock – she was used to being around adults, and a certain type of adult at that, who would talk about interesting, complicated things.

Well before the invention of "new historicism" they taught what was, at the time, a unique course on the urban landscapes of the 1830s and 40s. I'm in my 30s and I'm still defining myself a lot by the music I love and the memories I have associated with it. St Aidan's College altered its rules to allow access to women students who were also wives and mothers. A photograph, near the beginning of the book, shows the vicarage exactly as I’d imagined it, with high hedges and tall chimneys; ‘a modest eighteenth-century building of mellowed brick’.

He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came back pissed and incapable. This mixture of regret and bouyant spontaneity is what gives Lorna Sage such a tragi-romantic character, and her story such poignant loveliness. Lorna Sage won a scholarship to read English at Durham University, after the university's St Aidan's College changed its admission rules to admit married students.

This is one of those memoirs of a difficult, sometimes violent girlhood, that makes riveting reading--not as harrowing as Andrea Ashworth's brilliant Once in a House on Fire, but every bit as good. Lorna Sages outstanding memoir of childhood and adolescence brings to life her eccentric family and bizarre upbringing in rural Wales.In a boiling summer, punning headlines (‘It’s all a matter of degrees’ and ‘The Couple Who Are One Degree Over’) in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail emphasise how far they were outside the norm. The envelope in which she was sent her A level certificates, for example, is addressed to an impossible, hybrid ‘character’ – Miss Lorna Sage. This is a version I can really celebrate because the first version came out when Lorna died and I couldn't celebrate it, no matter how much I loved it," says Sharon, sitting in the dining room of her house in Norwich, which is spick and span with no echo of the filth Sage described that permeated the vicarage, and later the council house her parents moved to.