A truly well-written autobiography can be sheer pleasure to read. I believe that Lorna Sage’s ‘Bad Blood’ is a classic of the genre. Her name briefly hit the headlines when I was at school. She was of my generation and did the ‘unforgivable’  in the tiny village of Hanmer, in Flintshire, North Wales in the sixties. She became pregnant at the age of sixteen, while still at school.

The autobiography recounts her vicarage childhood, living with her eccentric grandparents until her father returned from the army. She tells of the trials of bullying at school as well as her bleak family life. Although Lorna was convinced that marriage was not for her, her pregnancy made her a teenage bride.

In what was liberal and forward-looking thinking in the sixties, Lorna and her husband, Vic Sage, were both admitted to Durham University where both earned firsts. Lorna became a distinguished literary critic before her death from emphysema, just days after her autobiography won the Whitbread Prize for Biography.

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