by Sue Townsend
Passion Sunday. British Summer Time begins
My father forgot to change the clocks last night so I was late for the Pink Brigade’s meeting in Pandora’s lounge. We voted to exclude Pandora’s father from the meeting on the grounds of his extreme left-wing views. We have decided to back Roy Hattersley in the expected fight for the leadership.
Pandora has gone off Tony Benn since she found out that he is a lapsed aristocrat.
Claire Neilson introduced a new member, her name is Barbara Boyer. She is dead good-looking and also dead intelligent. She disagreed with Pandora over NATO’s nuclear arms policy. Pandora had to concede that China was an unknown factor. Pandora asked Claire Neilson not to bring Barbara again.
MONDAY MARCH 29TH
I ate my school dinner sitting next to Barbara Boyer. She is a truly wonderful girl. She pointed out that Pandora has got a lot of faults. I was forced to agree with her.
TUESDAY MARCH 30TH
I am committing non-sexual adultery with Barbara. I am at the centre of an eternal triangle. Nigel is the only one to know: he has been sworn to secrecy.
WEDNESDAY MARCH 31ST
Nigel has blabbed it all over the school. Pandora spent the afternoon in matron’s office.
THURSDAY APRIL 1ST
All Fools’ Day. Moon’s First Quarter
Barbara Boyer has ended our brief affaire. I rang her up at the pet shop where she works part time cleaning the cages out. She said she couldn’t bear to see the pain in Pandora’s eyes. I asked her if it was an April Fools’ joke, she said no and pointed out that it was after 12 a.m.
I have learnt an important lesson, because of lust I am without love.
I am fifteen tomorrow.
Had a shave to cheer myself up.
FRIDAY APRIL 2ND
I am fifteen, but legally I am still a child. There is nothing I can do today that I couldn’t do yesterday. Worse luck!
Had seven cards from relations and three from friends. My presents were the usual load of Japanese rubbish, though I did get a model aeroplane from Bert that was made in West Germany.
Pandora has ignored my birthday. I don’t blame her. I betrayed her trust.
Boz, Baz, Daz, Maz, Kev and Melv came back from the canal and gave me the bumps. Boz gave me a tube of glue for my model aeroplane.
SATURDAY APRIL 3RD
8 a.m. Britain is at war with Argentina!!! Radio Four has just announced it. I am overcome with excitement. Half of me thinks it is tragic and the other half of me thinks it is dead exciting.
10 a.m. Woke my father up to tell him Argentina has invaded the Falklands. He shot out of bed because he thought the Falklands lay off the coast of Scotland. When I pointed out that they were eight thousand miles away he got back into bed and pulled the covers over his head. 4 p.m. I have just had the most humiliating experience of my life. It started when I began to assemble my model aeroplane. I had nearly finished it when I thought I would try an experimental sniff of glue. I put my nose to the undercarriage and sniffed for five seconds, nothing spiritual happened but my nose stuck to the plane! My father took me to Casualty to have it removed, how I endured the laughing and sniggering I don’t know.
The Casualty doctor wrote ‘Glue Sniffer’ on my outpatient’s card.
I rang Pandora; she is coming round after her viola lesson. Love is the only thing that keeps me sane …
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First published in Great Britain by Methuen 1982
Published in Mandarin Paperbacks 1983
Reprinted in Arrow Books 1998
Published in Penguin Books 2002
Reissued with a new Foreword in this edition 2012
Text copyright © Sue Townsend, 1982
Foreword copyright © David Walliams, 2012
The moral right of the author and of the introducer has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-7181-9613-4
Celebrating 30 Years of Adrian Mole
‘One of literature’s most endearing figures’ OBSERVER
In eight books, two TV series, a stage play and on radio, Adrian Mole has delighted millions of people young and old across the world over the last thirty years.
Whether you have grown up with Mole or have only recently become acquainted with his diaries, you will find on the following pages the full story about Adrian’s literary birth as well as plenty of information about his creator Sue Townsend and her other works.
To find out even more about Sue and Adrian don’t forget to visit
www.suetownsend.co.uk
Turn the Page and read on …
Sue Townsend
An extract from
The WOMAN WHO WENT TO BED FOR A YEAR
Out in March 2011
Chapter 1
After they’d gone, Eva slid the bolt across the door and disconnected the telephone. She liked having the house to herself. She went from room to room tidying, straightening and collecting the cups and plates that her husband and children had left on various surfaces. Somebody had left a soup spoon on the arm of her special chair – the one she had upholstered at night school. She immediately went to the kitchen and examined the contents of her Kleeneze cleaning products box.
‘What would remove a Heinz tomato soup stain from embroidered silk damask?’
As she searched, she remonstrated with herself. ‘It’s your own fault. You should have kept the chair in your bedroom. It was pure vanity on your part to have it on display in the sitting room. You wanted visitors to notice the chair and to tell you how beautiful it was, so that you could tell them that it had taken two years to complete the embroidery, and that you had been inspired by Claude Monet’s Water Lily Pond and Weeping Willow.’
The trees alone had taken a year.
There was a small pool of tomato soup on the kitchen floor that she hadn’t noticed until she stepped in it and left orange footprints. The little non-stick saucepan containing half a can of tomato soup was still simmering on the hob. Too lazy to take a pan off the stove, she thought. Then she remembered that the twins were Leeds University’s problem now.
She caught her reflection in the smoky glass of the wall-mounted oven. She looked away quickly. If she had taken a while to look she would have seen a woman of fifty with a lovely, fine-boned face, dark inquisitive eyes and a Clara Bow mouth that always looked as though she were about to speak. Her face was currently fashionable; ‘vintage’, according to the girl on the Chanel counter where she bought her lipstick, always remembering to throw the receipt away. Her husband would not understand the outrageous expense.
&n
bsp; She picked up the saucepan, walked from the kitchen into the sitting room and threw the soup all over her precious chair. She then went upstairs, into her bedroom and without removing her clothes or her shoes got into bed and stayed there for a year.
She didn’t know it would be a year. She climbed into bed thinking she would leave it again after half an hour, but the comfort of the bed was exquisite, the white sheets were fresh and smelled of new snow. She turned on her side towards the open window and watched the sycamore in the garden shed its blazing leaves. She had always loved September.
She woke when it was dark and she heard her husband shouting outside. Her mobile rang. The display showed that it was her daughter Brianne. She ignored it. She pulled the duvet over her head and sang the words of Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk the Line’.
When she next poked her head out from under the duvet she heard her next-door neighbour Julie’s excited voice saying, ‘It’s not right, Brian.’ They were in the little front garden.
Her husband said, ‘I mean, I’ve been to Leeds and back, I need a shower.’
‘Of course you do.’
Eva thought about this exchange. Why would driving to Leeds and back necessitate having a shower? Was the northern air full of grit? Or had he been sweating on the M1? Cursing the lorries? Screaming at tailgaters?
Angrily denouncing whatever the weather was doing?
She switched on the bedside lamp. This provoked another episode of shouting outside and demands that she ‘Stop playing silly buggers and unbolt the door.’
She realized that, although she wanted to go downstairs and let him in, she couldn’t actually leave the bed.
There was the sound of breaking glass. Soon after, she heard Brian on the stairs. He shouted her name. She didn’t answer. He opened the bedroom door, ‘There you are,’ he said.
‘Yes, here I am.’
‘Are you ill?’
‘No.’
‘Why are you in bed in your clothes? And shoes? What are you playing at?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s empty-nest syndrome. I heard it on Woman’s Hour.’
When she didn’t speak he said, ‘Well, are you going to get up?’
She said, ‘No, I’m not.’
He said, ‘What about dinner?’
‘No thanks, I’m not hungry.’
‘I meant what about my dinner? Is there anything?’
She said, ‘I don’t know, look in the fridge.’
He stomped downstairs. She heard his footsteps on the laminate floor he’d laid so ineptly the year before. She knew by the squeak of the floorboards that he’d gone into the living room. Soon he was stamping back up the stairs.
‘What the bloody hell has happened to your chair?’ he said.
‘Somebody left a soup spoon on the arm.’
‘There’s soup all over the bloody thing.’
‘I did it myself.’
‘You’re having a nervous breakdown, Eva. I’m ringing your mum.’
‘No!’
He flinched at the ferocity in her voice.
She saw from the stricken look in his eyes that after twenty-five years of marriage the world as he knew it had come to an end. He went downstairs. She heard him cursing at the disconnected phone then after a moment, stabbing at the keys. As she picked up the bedroom extension her mother was laboriously giving her phone number down the line, ‘…162 444 333 Mrs Ruby Brown-Bird speakin’.’
Brian said, ‘Ruby, its Brian. I need you to come over straight away.’
‘No can do, Brian. I’m in the middle of having a perm, what’s up?’
‘It’s Eva,’ he lowered his voice, ‘I think she must be ill.’
‘Send for an ambulance, then’, said Ruby irritably.
‘There’s nothing wrong with her physically.’
‘Well, that’s all right, then.’
‘I’ll come and pick you up and bring you back so you can see for yourself.’
‘Brian, I can’t. I’m hostessing a perm party and I’ve got to have the solution rinsed off in half an hour. If I don’t I shall look like Harpo Marx. ’Ere, talk to Michelle.’
After a few muffled noises a young woman came on the line.
‘Hello, Brian, is it? I’m Michelle. Can I talk you through what would happen if Mrs Bird abandoned the perm at this stage? I am insured but it would be extremely inconvenient for me if I had to appear in court. I’m booked up until New Year’s Eve.’
The phone was handed back to Ruby. ‘Brian, are you still there?’
‘Ruby, she’s in bed wearing her clothes and shoes.’
Ruby said, ‘Phone your own mam.’
The phone was disconnected.
Eva heard him stabbing at the keys again.
Brian was always slightly apprehensive when he called his mother. His tongue couldn’t form words properly. She had a way of making him feel guilty, whatever the subject of the conversation. His mother answered promptly with a snappy, ‘Yes?’ Brian said, ‘Is that you, Mummy?’
Eva carefully muffled the mouthpiece with her hand.
‘Who else would it be? Nobody else comes to this house. I’m on my own seven days a week.’
Brian said, ‘But, er … you … er … don’t like visitors.’
‘No, I don’t like visitors, but it would be nice to have to turn them away. Anyway, what is it? I’m half-way through Emmerdale.’
Brian said, ‘Sorry, Mummy, do you want to ring me back when the adverts come on?’
‘No’, she said. ‘Let’s get it over with, whatever it is.’
‘It’s Eva.’
‘Ha! Why am I not surprised? Has she left you? The first time I clapped eyes on that girl I knew she’d break your heart.’
Brian wondered if his heart had ever been broken. He had always had difficulty in recognizing an emotion. When he had brought his First Class Bachelor of Science degree home to show his mother, her current boyfriend had said, ‘You must be very happy, Brian.’
Brian had nodded his head and forced a smile, but the truth was that he did not feel any happier than he had felt the day before when nothing remarkable had happened.
His mother had taken the embossed certificate, examined it carefully and said, ‘You’ll struggle to find an astronomy job. There are men with more superior qualifications than you’ve got who can’t find work.’
Brian said mournfully, ‘Eva’s gone to bed in her clothes and shoes.’
His mother said, ‘I can’t say I’m astonished, Brian. She’s always brought attention to herself. Do you remember when we all went to the caravan that Easter in 1986? She took a suitcase full of her ridiculous beatnik clothes. You don’t wear beatnik clothes at Wells-next-the-Sea. Everybody was staring at her.’
Eva screamed from upstairs, ‘You shouldn’t have thrown my lovely black clothes into the sea!’
Brian hadn’t heard his wife scream before.
Yvonne Beaver said, ‘What’s that screaming?’
Brian lied, ‘It’s the television. Somebody’s just won a lot of money on Eggheads.’
His mother said, ‘She looked very presentable in the holiday-wear I bought her.’
As Eva listened, she remembered taking the hideous clothes out of the carrier bag. They had smelled as if they had been in a damp warehouse in the Far East for years, and the colours were lurid mauves, pinks and yellows. There had been a pair of what Eva thought looked like men’s sandals and a beige, pensioner-style anorak. When she tried them on she looked twenty years older.
Brian said to his mother, ‘I don’t know what to do, Mummy.’
Yvonne said, ‘She’s probably drunk. Leave her to sleep it off.’
Eva threw her pillow across the room and screamed, ‘They were men’s sandals she bought me in Wells-next-the-Sea! I saw men wearing them with white socks! You should have protected me from her, Brian! You should have said “My wife would not be seen dead in these hideous sandals!”’
She had screamed so loudly t
hat her throat hurt. She shouted downstairs and asked Brian to bring her a glass of water.
Brian said, ‘Hang on Mummy, Eva wants a glass of water.’
His mother hissed down the phone, ‘Don’t you dare fetch her that water Brian! You’ll be making a rod for your own back if you do. Tell her to get her own water!’
Brian didn’t know what to do. While he dithered in the hallway his mother said, ‘I could do without this trouble. My knee has been playing me up. I was on the verge of ringing my consultant and asking him to chop my leg off.’
He took the phone into the kitchen with him and ran the cold tap.
His mother said, ‘Is that water I can hear running?’
Brian lied, ‘Just topping up a vase of flowers.’
‘Flowers! You’re lucky you can afford flowers.’
‘They’re out of the garden, Mummy. Eva grew them from seed.’
His mother said, ‘You’re lucky to have the space for a garden.’
The phone went dead. His mother never said goodbye.
He went upstairs with the glass of cold water. When he handed it to Eva she took a small sip, then put it on the crowded bedside table. Brian hovered at the end of the bed. There was nobody to tell him what to do. She almost felt sorry for him but not enough to get out of bed.
Instead she said, ‘Why don’t you go downstairs and watch your programmes?’
Brian was a devotee of property programmes. His heroes were Kirsty and Phil. Unbeknown to Eva he had written to Kirsty saying that she always looked nice, was she married to Phil or was their partnership purely a business arrangement? He had received a reply three months later saving, ‘Thank you for your interest’ signed, ‘Yours, Kirsty’. Enclosed was a photograph of Kirsty. She was wearing a red dress and showing an alarming amount of bosom. Brian kept the photograph inside an old Bible. He knew it would be safe there. Nobody ever opened it.