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Not unlike the World Wars, the fifties are wildly romanticized by those who can’t remember them. For those who can recall them, we’d rather not. It was a time of confusion and ignorance and immense social changes, Our grandparents and our parents endured hardships, warfare, depressions personal and financial - we, the babies born just before and early in World War II, simply misunderstood almost everything, many retreating into reading. I remember desperately reading huge quantities of fiction for clues to how people lived, for information about sex, for information about how to make friends. D. H. Lawrence really wasn’t that much help, and neither was Frances Hodges Burnett. We didn’t have soap operas, remember, only novels; from this distance, I am not sure that the novels we read were essentially better than “As the World Turns”. Lorna Sage has written a sharp, distressing, very touching chronicle of her personal experience of the fifties in a memoir titled Bad Blood. Lorna Sage was named after a novel, Lorna Doone. I remember reading it in high school, though all but a damp peat-smoke, plaid wool impression remains after all this time. It was a very popular book at one time - a romantic story of inter-class romance - rough boys marrying the daughter of the manor. Lorna Sage tries in Bad Blood to understand her parents and grandparents - a task which was impossible for her when she was young and struggling to understand herself. Lorna Sage was a bad girl, sulky about school; I was a good girl, eagerly trying to get good grades and approval. She grew up on the Welsh/English border, in a rural, rather backward community and I grew up in a brand new American Midwestern suburb, though for a while in the American version of council housing. She attended a low-rent school which was openly suspicious of girls’ education and encouraged all their students to stay in their assigned social niches. I attended ‘experimental’ schools on the open plan and a rather snooty high school Her family was catastrophically dysfunctional; mine was quite functional, thank you very much, and we actually climbed the economic ladder rather quickly. And yet,while I read this memoir I had a startling experience of sisterhood and wicked accuracy. Lorna and I had a lot in common in spite of the transAtlantic differences. Our fathers made a huge leap out of poverty via the army. Our grandfathers had had unfulfilled ambitions. Our mothers stayed home, without question. Most of all, Lorna and I battled the conventions of the fifties, trying to obey or escape, or both at once, hopelessly sure it would always be impossible to fit comfortably anywhere in the world, ever. The fifties were about feeling ugly, confused, and hopeless, no matter who you were, as long as you were a girl. The assumptions in the fifties about what women could do were identical in both sides of the Atlantic: get married, keep house, be a secretary, be a nurse, be a teacher. The assumptions were so strong they bypassed whatever our parents or even our schools believed and cast a net of stainless steel destiny around the girls of the fifties. Those conventions weren’t too kind to the boys, either. The abyssmal ignorance recounted in this book, the suffocating social rules, even the catch phrases (give this kitchen a lick and a promise) were startlingly familiar and, more than any fragrance or taste ever could, threw me back to a time dark with struggles that need not have been so fierce. Those years continue to mark my attitude toward life in general with a certain suspicion and sardonic defensiveness that those even a little bit younger do not understand. The boomers growing to puberty in the sixties were extremely vocal about it. Our fifties crowd, older than the boomers, in fact a generation without a nickname, were in general too ashamed of our failures and fears to reveal them in public. We wrote novels, not memoirs, and not too many of those, compared to the previous and following cohorts. Lorna Sage’s award-winning memoir, Bad Blood, is not only a delight to read, but it fulfills a need to document those strange years that built toward the sixties. Unlike celebrity memoirs, indeed unlike most memoirs, it has a reason for being. Read Bad Blood and you will begin to understand something new about the suffering of parents and grandparents, and something essential about the source of the nineteen sixties’ insistence on breaking away from the old conventions and expectations. |
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