Bad Blood was published in 2000. Lorna died in January 2001, in time to know the book was a great success and to receive many letters of congratulation. Quite a few of her female correspondents, she told me, thought that the childhood described in the book was their own childhood. Time and again reviewers picked out the ability of the book’s narrative to fill a gap in social documentary that examined that unknown thing: the life of a young girl in the provinces during the postwar recovery of the 1940s and the emergent 1950s.

Margaret Forster, whose own books represent explorations of all kinds in this territory, puts the paradox of Lorna’s text in a very succinct way, so succinctly indeed, that, from my point of view, it almost successfully avoids it: ‘Bad Blood is a personal history written with such insight it makes of it a social document of true worth…’ This is certainly true and needed saying: it seems to account for the importance of the book in purely social terms. But ‘insight’, true as this is, is inevitably left to do the invisible job of pinning the inner meaning of the text to the outer world of communication. And as a reader, and a witness to some of the material that went into the book, I’m not quite satisfied with this account: what about the role of language? Or does ‘insight’ just get across on its own from word to world?

Another reviewer, Rachel Cusk, takes a different tack altogether: she questions the idea that the book is a ‘memoir’ at all, and not an imagined world: ‘It is full of the strange atmosphere of an intersection between the real and the unreal…’ I must say, I have some sympathy with this point of view as well. Shelley – a much-read poet for Lorna and me in the early years of our marriage – says in the Defence of Poetry, that the point of poetry is to make you ‘imagine what you know’; and there is a good deal of poetry present (in invisible quotation marks) in the writing of Bad Blood, part of an all-round transgression of genre boundaries, as we can see from the playful echo of the world of folktale in the opening chapter’s title: ‘The Old Devil and His Wife.’ To do justice to the book’s richness, we need both these perspectives, however incompatible, on the face of it, they may seem to be.

The text of Bad Blood is obviously a layered text: the opening chapter is written with a wry articulacy which filters the picture of a ‘Gothic’ child-hood through a series of mature reflections. This is a rule of expression, whose wit is often intimately connected with a kind of creative anachronism.

For me, the book is profoundly personal  – I can say this because I witnessed the remnants of the world described in its opening scenes when I walked through the door of ‘Sunnyside’, that partial reincarnation of the Vicarage, at the end of Chapter XVI and became, as the text puts it, apparently without a shadow of Margaret Thatcher, ‘one of us’. I breathed the mysterious oxygen of the Stockton family myths. But also because I knew the author – I felt, at that time, as intimately as I knew myself – and while I can exactly corroborate the accuracy of much of the narrative, yet the language of the book also rings with a host of other encounters that I had with its author in the life we led long after the story (i.e. the plot) has come to an end. The language of the book is layered with those encounters. Her brother Clive, on seeing me approach, did indeed cry ‘It walks! It talks!’ cackling gleefully while clawing his way up the staircase as I entered the hall of Sunnyside for the first time. But Lorna hadn’t read Frankenstein at the point when those words were spoken, and neither had I, nor Clive – he was thinking of comics, and knowing him, the engineer to be, robots. Frankenstein came later, for all of us, yet its mention at that point in the text is perfect and integral to the scene — I was indeed standing on the threshold, innocent of their world — and it was a myth that we all three shared an awareness of, even before we had discovered its source.

The point here is that Language is an instrument of mediation for both writer and reader; and the act of mediation might be defined, simply, as ‘witnessing plus translation.’ Translation, that is, from one language – one level of language – to another, in an effort to clarify a memory-image, what something felt like, but also, importantly I think, what its logic was, how someone could come to think like that. For me the book is full of this disciplined fidelity to the riddles of the author’s life, while those riddles are meditated, translated, and sometimes solved, in retrospect.

Lorna held the early world of this book like an undisturbed crystal in her memory; partly because she never went back to Whitchurch or Hanmer after we had left. I, on the other hand, despite vowing never to go back, returned many times, to visit my mother in her illness and my brother, and to get to know my brother’s children, a process that began with my father’s death in 1967. Thus

I entered several different time-phases that were, geographically speaking, ‘over there’; my own version of that other world, keeping pace with my own life. I was an exile too, but one who negotiated with the past. But Lorna never did go back, after we had settled in Norwich. Instead her parents, anxious to see our daughter Sharon, with whom they were very close (she had after all been living with them while we were at Durham University), always visited us; the result for Lorna was that relatively little ‘leak’ of present time had been allowed to make its way into the crystal cabinet of those memory-pictures.

This meant that she was left with demandingly clear sets of feelings, some of which she didn’t yet, as it were, discursively understand for herself, and for her future readers. She pictured it all; but she had not yet quite imagined what she knew. The book is the result of that process: it took years of reading and writing and self-examination, and finally, the powers of a sleuth, poring over Grandpa’s long-lost diary with a magnifying glass, for it to assume the form it finally did. And of course, as she records, it becomes clear it was her father, Eric, who gave her the means to carry out that sleuthing, and finally to dish the dirt on her grandfather’s sexual activities.

For those readers who don’t yet know this book, I should say here that it is the story of a young girl’s childhood and adolescence, from her birth in 1943 until her own pregnancy, and our marriage on 26th December 1959, when we were both still in the sixth form at school. Our daughter, Sharon, was born on 29th May 1960. We had committed the sin of the decade, in a gossip-ridden censorious provincial society that would shun us for the rest of our lives. But Lorna’s story, of course, does not end there – it tells of her escape, by means of that lost world inside her head, into the future. And that future is present, from the very beginning, by a loop of rhetoric, a marvellous simultaneity created by archaeological layers of language, in her text.

Bad Blood begins by describing that lost world, a time-warp, into which she felt herself to have been born; the world of her grandfather, drawn in language that ironically contains the seeds of her own independence, her literacy, her freedom, and her vision of the future, which accompanies Lorna throughout her story. It shows how, in the period after the Second World War, remote, provincial parts of Britain retained the strict religious mores and rigid social structures of the Victorian period almost untouched. It describes too how much poverty and dirt and darkness of all kinds was the order of the day, particularly for people who lived in remote country districts; and it narrates the impact on that lost, mythic, yet historical world, of both the new Labour government’s building of public, council-housing estates, and the materialist (American-derived), optimistic values of the post-war recovery; all of which is associated in the latter parts of the text with a new fascination with aesthetic, economic, and philosophical realism. The struggle between those values and the lost world of significances she had inherited as a child, which includes her own literacy, reaches far down into the language of the book: she calls this struggle ‘the reality wars’ (Bad Blood, p.172).

Lorna felt she belonged to that lost world, because she had a very special relationship to her grandfather, the Reverend Thomas James Meredith-Morris, who came from South Wales to Hanmer, when he was appointed Vicar in the 1930s. By the time she was born, in 1943, his marriage had declined into open warfare, and the Vicarage was a battleground for the opening exchanges in the bitter struggle between her grandparents. The opening paragraph of the book evokes Lorna’s earliest memories of her relationship with her grandfather:

Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. He’d have liked to get further away, but petrol was rationed. The church was at least safe. My grandmother never went near it – except feet first in her coffin, but that was years later, when she was buried in the same grave as him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime’s mutual loathing. In life, though, she never invaded his patch; once inside the churchyard gate he was on his own ground, in his element. He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek, too, which grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times he had come home pissed and incapable. (p.3)

The rawness of the child’s perceptions – the primary act of witnessing – are almost immediately overlaid by the full maturity of the writing style. Lorna told me that it had taken her ages to get the curve of that first sentence right, but once she had, the whole book began to flow. There is a knowing gender-subversion in the substitution of a grandfather-in-skirts (the skirts of his black cassock) for a mother-figure. He is the one who taught her, in a later double-entendre, ‘to read in self-defence’ (p.15) – that is, ‘self-defence’ because this little creature will leave him alone if she can read, but also to read as an act of self-defence, which is the foundation of her ability to weather the storms of the future. A little later, she confirms the way he stood in the position of a female in a playful, but deadly serious analogy:

I was the baby goose imprinted by the first motherfigure it sees – he was my black-marker. (p.4)

When I read this sentence, I remember Lorna’s delighted response to the black and white nature-documentaries by Peter Scott about wild geese in the 1960s, and the proposition she derived from them, that Motherhood is quite often an arbitrary, not a natural role, for wild geese; the notion that the baby goose is programmed to recognise the first large goose it sees as its mother, instinctively demanding food by pecking at a black spot at the top of its bill, which will cause regurgitation of food, made her smirk. The likelihood that this action also enables the chosen ‘mother’ to recognise its infant in a flock, clinched neatly the whole question.

But ‘black-marker’ is also a play on words. Grandpa marks her, imprints her with his own promiscuity by teaching her to read.  First, to have a ‘black mark’ against you is a sign of disgrace – I had told Lorna soon after we had met about the incident which opens Treasure Island, in which Blind Pew delivers ‘the Black Spot’ to Billy Bones; and, secondly, as she tells us later, Grandpa blacks out the authors and titles on the spines of his books in his library, so that no visitor will casually borrow them (p.10). So the books which are to be, throughout her life, the great solace of this child, her gateway to reality, are also profoundly associated with Grandpa’s ‘black mark’. As she tells us (proudly) later on (p.15), ‘I knew my name came from one of the blacked-out books – Lorna from Lorna Doone – and that he’d chosen it.’ And later, after his death, while just about to leave the vicarage, she tells us: ‘I knew how to hide in books. If need be I could build a kind of nest out old scraps of print I found around. The taste for words Grandpa had given me was thoroughly promiscuous…’ (p.90). The metaphoric structure of being ‘imprinted’ still retains the biological aspect of unconscious behaviour (nest-making), but ‘promiscuity’ looks knowingly forward to the sexual pieties of the 1950s, and Valma, Lorna’s mother’s idea, that Grandpa’s ‘bad blood’ – the mayhem of his smoking, drinking, lechery, theatrical adventures and bad-tempered anarchism – had skipped a generation in herself to reappear in her daughter, a belief that gives the book its title. No one thought of genes in those days.

One more point about the reciprocal imprinting aspect of the ‘black mark’, which is important for the language of the whole book, and which stems from my own account as a personal witness. Long before she wrote the book, when Lorna first began to teach at UEA, she picked Blake’s famous lyric ‘London’ to analyse with first-year students, to illustrate to them the Romantic notion of vision – i.e. the power of imagination as ‘visionary perception’. I can remember her vividly, during one of the many discussions that went on, most of them at our kitchen table, clamouring over minute de-tails in this poem, suddenly calling attention to the repetitive nature of the writing in the lines:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the chartered Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

I can hear her now: ‘Look at that’, she said, ‘mark Marks’. And she went on to expound in the following fashion: ‘The repetition: it’s not just clumsiness; it’s the poet’s vision. The first ‘mark’ means ‘remark’ which means ‘observe’. It is therefore apparently subjective. The second ‘marks’ means the ‘signs’, which are apparently objective. But unless you have the vision, the understanding, the imagination, you’ll never see them, despite their objective flagrancy. What Blake is doing is ‘imprinting’ on the everyday world of London the signs which his imagination tells him are there. And this was her way of explaining the power of lines like:

How the Chimney sweeper’s cry Every black’ning Church appalls…

The cry is the street-cry ‘Sweep! Sweep!’ which Blake made into the cry of the child who was to be sent up into the black world of the chimneys: “weep! weep!” and so he, Blake, can hear the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of the political system literally – in the very syllables of their language – clanking out their unconscious satire of the helpless and oppressed. A pall is a cloth you place on a coffin in the nineteenth century and so the word ‘appalls’ (quite apart from its irony about the hypocrisy of Lambeth Palace) drapes the Church in this funeral cloth for all to see. All, that is, who can see. The ultimate form of ‘imprinting.’

The other completely positive meaning, for Lorna, of Grandpa’s ‘black mark’ was that, for him, through writing his transgressions in his diary, as she puts it in one of the book’s finest phrases, ‘life is redeemed from the squalor of insignificance.’ (p.77). There are many other examples I could give of the presence of the romantic imagination in Lorna’s construction of the ‘reality wars’, from Wordsworth to Yeats. When I met her she was immersed in Wordsworth and had turned herself into a kind of pantheist. We began to correspond. I remember receiving a letter, in which she said she had spent the morning in a tree reading T.S. Eliot: her phrase ‘coming to consciousness in Hanmer’ (p.6) is a reference to Eliot’s ‘the morning comes to consciousness…’, from his Preludes – which she might well have first read in that tree (we were doing it for O Level). But by the time she wrote it in Bad Blood, it was infected by a hilarious LP record we had as undergraduates in which Yeats read out in a voice burring with Irish romantic outrage, the following lines from the second Prelude:

The morning comes to consciousness With faint, stale sm…hells of …beorrr…

There are many poets in the slyly parenthetic phrasings of Bad Blood, whose work organises the central conflict in her text i.e. the war between realism and anarchic fantasy. My main point here is to show how I cannot read this book without a whole theatre of remembered quotations rising up in my head like the Japanese flowers in Proust’s teacup. That first paragraph, if I may return to it for a moment, also illustrates some obvious points about the language and narrative method of this text. Characteristically, there are several points of view embedded in it. Instead of mimicking the action of memory in narrative form – literally ‘going back’ – it represents the repeated nature of this experience in the tense ‘would’, a shorthand, institutionalising tense. The wary consenting voices of the parents are present in the reported speech of ‘So long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much’ – you have to ask who thinks or says this, ‘So long as he takes her he can’t get up to much, can he?’ And then we switch back to the mature Lorna: ‘I was a sort of hobble: he was my minder and I was his.’ The reciprocity of role is witty here: the arrangement is a kind of system; and the tiny clinging figure raises the idea that all children are minders of their parents or the adults in their lives. A ‘hobble’ is the process of tying a horse’s legs together, so that it can’t stray. It is also, comically, a kind of skirt that prevents a stride. We then switch to a paraphrase of Grandfather’s own way of thinking: ‘He’d have liked to get further away, but petrol was rationed. The church was at least safe.’ Safe, that is, from her. The voice that goes on to explain, however, is Lorna’s own, speaking directly to us, and suddenly declining into her abrasive gallows humour and mimicry: ‘My grandmother never went near it – except feet first in her coffin, but that was years later, when she was buried in the same grave with him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime’s mutual loathing.’ The idea of ‘one flesh’ is an echo of the Anglican marriage service – here subverted to an eternal Gothic marriage bed in the tomb – and a union which the mutually-hating couple had never enjoyed in life. The book’s style is polyphonic, sometimes a whole babel of voices contained within a single paragraph. And some of those voices are Thomas Hardy’s or Shakespeare’s or Blake’s. For me, the personal nature of this narrative is inseparable from these voices because – long after the period written about, but before the book was written – they became part of my heritage too.