‘If I never saw you again, and lived all my days in Arabia, I should be reminded of you continually; you have gone all over the house of my mind and left everywhere sweet traces of your passage.’  – Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, by Frank McLyn, 1993

Every long school holiday I would return to ‘Sunnyside’ with my grandparents. I usually had a new, obsessive project – I can remember attempting a detailed taxonomy of the shoulder high grasses growing on the ‘back lawn’, bringing them in to the kitchen to stick them in a notebook, attempting to impress my grandparents with my studiousness. My grandfather, known to me as Pop, might be sitting there briefly, on newspapers, dressed in overalls, smelling of oil from a sump, whatever that was, and Swarfega, in equal measure. I gave confident presentations about whatever I was exploring next, during the grandfather-part of my audience’s ‘forty winks’ and my grandmother’s ceaseless movement between kitchen, scullery, sink. These episodes of extremely serious ‘work’, would be punctuated by dragging my reluctant and breathless grandmother out onto the front lawn to ‘play badminton’. Sunnyside was a world to me, with discrete regions to be explored and catalogued: ‘Down the Back’, where the wagons were worked on, ‘The Orchard’, beyond which ran the brook (forbidden territory, backing onto the council estate). ‘The Back Lawn’, an expanse of neglected weeds, the ‘Front Lawn’, mown sporadically, protected from the road by an impenetrable jungle of rhododendrons peppered with ancient abandoned shuttlecocks and presided over by a huge copper beech. It was deeply familiar to me – the house I had been ‘born into’, brought back from a scrape with a different destiny at Crosshouses hospital. It was where I lived for the first three and a half years of my life, while my parents worked on the escape route.

Beyond the rhododendron boundary were fields, cut through by Wrexham Road, along which my grandmother and I would traipse wearily into town and back on market days. The town was a foreign land, far away in every sense from Sunnyside. On the way back my grandmother would breathily say, her slight Welsh lilt swishing, ‘oooh, my feet are banging’.

The last time I returned to Sunnyside, some years ago, was on a visit to Hanmer, to contribute to the recording of a radio programme about my mother, Lorna, and Bad Blood. There was no public transport to take me from the station at Whitchurch, to Hanmer, so I took a taxi. On the way down Wrexham Road, I asked the driver to stop at the house, which in that other life had been called Sunnyside. Ah yes, the driver said, that belongs to the owner of Lorna’s house. I was too addled to ask what he meant at that moment, too astonished at the transformation. I had remembered the house with a small tree growing from the front eaves on the roof. Now it was brand-spanking new, a ‘villa’ with white painted timbers and a sweeping drive, occupying the same physical space, barely recognisable, uncanny. On the way back from Hanmer, having visited the church, the graveyard, the mere, and the pub in constant drizzle, I asked the taxi driver about ‘Lorna’s house’. He told me that the current owner of Sunnyside had set up a chain of shops, with the image of the house as their logo, selling gifts and home-ware. One of the shops was in the High Street, the other down Green End, the origin of my grandmother’s banging feet. ‘Lorna’s House’ had been re-framed, re-presented, re-branded.

This use of my mother’s name, of the identity of the house, gave me pause. The irony of having gutted the house and all its waywardness to then name a chain of shops selling ‘lifestyle’ and ‘home-wares’ wasn’t lost on me. It couldn’t be further from my mother’s life, and her attitude to houses and domesticity. She was the least domestic person I have known, and would cheerfully have lived in a hotel. But then, of course, Sunnyside wasn’t Lorna’s house; it had belonged to my grandparents.

When I got over the astonishment of the existence of this ‘Lorna’s House’, I began to think about the house as the locus of so much that is important to Bad Blood, before and after it ends. Sunnyside was part of a chain of sites in Lorna’s life, and in her memoir – they illustrate how the memoir and the life are connected, but are not the same. The houses that came before – the vicarage, the Arowry in Hanmer, the sites of her childhood – brought their Gothic chaos with them into Sunnyside. They were places to look out from, to the world out there, from the secretive site of the hidden domestic dramas revealed in Bad Blood.

Sunnyside is the address to which an initial rejection letter from Durham University was sent, and to which Lorna’s exam results came in a stiff brown envelope addressed to a ghostly, impossible ‘character’ ‘Miss Lorna Sage’.

Impossible because Lorna had become independent when she married my father Victor and was, when taking her ‘A’ levels, no longer ‘Miss Lorna Stockton’ but was ‘Mrs Lorna Sage’. These were exam results, but also her passport to the life she went on to lead.

Sunnyside was the address to which when she was in Durham, studying, reading, knitting baby clothes for me, Lorna wrote countless letters to my grandmother – working while working. I owe all of this knowledge and documentary ‘evidence’, to my grandmother, who preserved it all, and from whom my mother, and then I, inherited it:

The appropriation of the house and its re-integration into the foreign land of Whitchurch in which it sits, has, in this way, linked itself in my mind to the project of curating the forthcoming exhibition at UEA’s archive to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Bad Blood.

In his 2014 book Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist goes back to the origins of ‘curating’: ‘curare’, the Latin for ‘to take care of’, which provides the essence of my purpose in gathering together for exhibition the artefacts and images connected with my mother’s memoir. Obrist goes on to point out the origins of a contradictory contemporary tsunami of curation: ‘The current vogue for the idea of curating stems from a feature of modern life that is impossible to ignore: the proliferation and reproduction of ideas, raw data, processed information, images, disciplinary knowledge and material products…’

It is to this kind of curation, perhaps, that the commercial application of ‘Lorna’s House’ belongs, whereby choices are made on the basis of illustrating ‘a curatorial proposal or premise to which they are subordinated’. My ideas about how to curate artefacts and images connected with Lorna’s memoir thanks, almost, to the bizarre twist of the chain of shops, now seem much more clearly defined, led by the associations of not just the sites, but the evocative grip of the entangled relationships that Lorna had with the people and places of Bad Blood – the house as a house of the mind and the memory.

Lorna looked out at the world from the houses in which she grew up, ‘closeted’ and separate from it, and Bad Blood provides a clear way in to not just her life at the time, but to the way she summons it for the reader. It is as though in retrospect she can use her photographic memory as a text, simply and authoritatively asserting her reading of it just as she had done throughout her lives as literary critic and academic:

…next door to us, also fronting onto the square, was a sixteenth century tumbledown timber and brick cottage crammed with children I wasn’t supposed to mix with – The Duckets, one of Hanmer’s most shameless tribes. The wall that divided us from them provided me with a perch from which I could look down on their back garden. Our side had a lawn with borders and apple trees, and was neglected and overgrown and peaceful. Theirs was like a bomb-site, a muddy, cratered expanse with twisted pieces of old prams and bike frames, and shards of crockery embedded among straggly weeds and currant bushes… The vicarage was a secret slum, but the Ducket’s doors were always open, so you could see Mrs Ducket with her hair in curlers running about bare-legged in slippers, or – even more scandalously – sitting down with a cup of tea and a fag. They had no secrets… While I was forbidden the square, they were positively driven out of their house, back and front, in all weathers, clutching wedges of bread and damson jam… – Bad Blood, p.13

Curating images and objects connected with Bad Blood might be a nasty mess. It should be, really. Its viscous, darkly funny nature should be impossible to control; unruly. ‘Where were we?’ Lorna asks, in a chapter entitled ‘Sticks’. The exhibition to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Bad Blood will aim to shed tangential, provisional light on locations and memories around the book – taking care of my mother’s house.