Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

Author:Lorna Sage
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, General, Women
ISBN: 9780061738609
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

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Nisi Dominus Frustra

Without the Lord, all is in vain said the Whitchurch Girls’ High School crest on our blazer pockets. And how right they were, although it was not the Lord but His language, Latin, that was my salvation. Latin, the great dead language that only existed in writing, would compensate for my speechlessness, vindicate my sleepless nights and in general redeem my utter lack of social graces. Latin stood for higher education, still, in the early 1950s, a kind of litmus test for academic aptitude – you couldn’t get into university without an O-level in Latin, it was the sign of being able to detach yourself from here and now, abstract your understanding of words, train your memory and live solitary in your head with only books for company. So it was meant to be hard, but I found it wonderfully easy, for just these reasons. I fell in love with Latin. It was the tongue the dead spoke, ergo Grandpa’s language, of course. I could hear his show-off exasperated tones and his preacher’s style in every tame declension and conjugation.

Nisi Dominus Frustra was mumbo-jumbo for the mind’s ear. The motto my new school truly believed in, however, was mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body, and team games, religious knowledge and ‘domestic science’ figured large on the curriculum. The high school cultivated the air of being somehow still fee-paying, it was designed to produce solid, disciplined, well-groomed girls who’d marry local traders and solicitors like their fathers. The eleven-plus had let in a leavening of out-of-towners and outsiders, but that had only made it more vital to insist on sub-public-school mores – uniforms, ‘houses’, and an elaborate hierarchy of prefects and deputy prefects whose job it was to remind their juniors to stand up straight, and send them out to run up and down the playing field at break in wet weather instead of huddling in the cloakrooms. So, in falling in love with Latin, I was obeying the letter of the school’s law rather than its spirit.

The high school liked girls with rounded characters, loyal, outgoing, serviceable girls who made the best of themselves. Even the communal fantasies were well groomed. Quite a lot of girls back then dreamed of becoming air hostesses. Being an air hostess hadn’t yet been revealed as waitressing-in-the-sky, but was somehow connected with team spirit, patriotism and the WAAF officers who mourned the pilot-heroes as they pushed mimic planes about in headquarters bunkers in war films. In peacetime there was more chance of marrying a pilot; or a first-class passenger might at any moment intuit from the way you poured his coffee that you had the sterling spirit and the poise to play his helpmeet on solid ground somewhere in Surrey.

Meanwhile, Whitchurch was a self-satisfied little Shropshire market town that took its character from retailing and auctioneering and accounting. The cattle market was on Fridays and half-day closing (religiously observed) was on Wednesdays. Whitchurch had missed out

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