Lorna Sage Bad Blood Quotes

Commentary: Lorna Sage, Bad Blood (2000) In the passage ‘Bad Blood’, Lorna Sage writes about her painful childhood memories and school life. It consists of three paragraphs. First paragraph touches upon the narrator’s past experience with school. The second paragraph explores the relationship between narrator and Gail. The last paragraph focuses mainly on Gail.
Lorna starts off the passage with an effective opening, as the first sentence “So the playground was hell”. The conjunction used to start off the sentence is a technique used by Lorna to grab the reader’s attention instantly and leads one directly to the situation. Lorna has also used a metaphor to refer to the playground as “hell”, putting emphasis on it being a very unfriendly and fearful place. This is rather ironic and contradictory as playground is commonly seen as something innocent and playful. We can therefore already from the beginning
“I was convinced at the start that…”, the words “at the start” foreshadow and warn us that Gail’s current superior position is going to change. This is exactly what happened when Gail no longer is described in superior way but rather in a pitiful manner. “But she was not allowed out to play… and everybody knew that she had to sit for hours ever night while her grandmother twisted her hair in rags”. This is significant as it shows a different side to Gail. Here she is portrayed as a softer character, whereas before she was portrayed as a more powerful one. In the last paragraph, we read that the narrator and Gail are both “set apart”, the narrator living in a vicarage and Gail having a divorced mother. This also shows how Gail is very different as she is portrayed as an outcast. Instead of comparing them, Lorna is stating their similarities. Another example of relating Gail to the narrator is that Gail “even had a funny name, like me”. These elements of similarities suggest the reasons for their eventual