by Sue Townsend
Sunday May 15th
Father was awfully stern in the pulpit today. He railed against professional churchmen who insist on meddling in politics. (A guarded reference to Monsignor Kent who is petitioning the council for a street lamp in Church Lane.) After Sunday dinner I gave father the money I have been saving up for the elocution lessons. I said, ‘Father, this is to pay for the purloined Brylcreem.’ He said, ‘I appreciate the gesture, daughter, but keep the money, you must acquire a slight lisp if you want to get on in the world.’
Mother said, ‘I think it’s more important to learn to roll your Rs.’ Then she ran giggling into the back room with her apron over her head. Father and I looked at each other baffled.
Monday May 16th
Everybody is being perfectly horrid to me at school. I’ve been to the headmistress to complain but even she was unsympathetic. She said, ‘You’re overworking, Roberts, I want you to take a few days off.’ I protested that the school couldn’t function without me. The head snapped, ‘Go home Roberts, and give this note to your parents.’
Dear Mr and Mrs Roberts,
Margaret’s behaviour has been giving me great cause for concern. At all times she is neat, clean and controlled. She works prodigiously hard. She is top of every subject barring Art (which, as you know, she sees no point in doing). She is highly competitive on the sports field, is an excellent needlewoman and always wears highly polished shoes. Indeed she is the type of girl one ought to be proud of; but Margaret is wearing out my staff with her constant requests for more work. She is already ink, milk and register monitor. Class, sports and house captain. She works in the greenhouse during her playtimes and has offended the school’s groundsman by marking out the school hockey pitch during her dinner break. This morning I came into school early and found her mopping out the lavatories. All very laudable, you may think, but her mania for work is making her very unpopular with the other girls. Are there problems at home? Is she compensating for some lack of affection or attention on your part? I’m sorry to worry you with all this but I sometimes fear for Margaret’s future. She is an ambitious and clever girl but she must learn to tolerate those of us who are rather more fallible.
Headmistress, Kesteven and Grantham Girls School
PS. By the way, have you any of those walnut fancies in stock? If you have please bag two separate quarter pounds. I will call in to the shop on Wednesday at 4.59pm to collect them. (Please arrange for Margaret to be in the back room, out of sight.) Thanking you in advance.
Father’s hand trembled as he bagged the walnut fancies. He said, ‘Geniuses are never recognized in their own land.’
Mother suggested an outing to the fairground tomorrow night. I don’t want to go but Father insisted that Mother be chaperoned so I consented.
Tuesday May 17th
The fairground was full of smelly, working-class oiks enjoying themselves. Mrs Arkwright’s lodgers, Ginger Skinnock and Roy Batterfree, were trying their strength against Big Benn the strongman. Big Benn watched their efforts with a supercilious smile. Skinnock and Batterfree were advised by Big Benn that there was only one way to ring the bell and that was to gather all of your strength and then let the hammer fall on the target. Gormless Howe, the village idiot, was driving around the dodgem track in a random and dangerous manner, bumping into other cars. A fairground worker leapt on the back of his car and steered him safely to the side. Poor halfwit, his mother shouldn’t let him out on his own. I left Mother shrieking her head off on the Big Wheel and crept into Madame Du Cann’s tent to have my fortune told.
Wednesday May 18th
I’m still reeling from Madame Du Cann’s predictions. She said, ‘Youse going to be the mightiest in the land one day.’ I gasped, ‘The Queen?’ ‘No, better than Queen,’ she rasped. I wiped my palms and she continued her scrutiny, but then a look of horror crossed her face. ‘What is it?’ I cried. ‘No! No! ’Tis too ’orrible!’ she croaked. ‘Get you home, you poor, doomed creature.’
What else did she see? I must know.
Thursday May 19th
I crept from the shop and pounded (difficult to do on canvas) on Madame Du Cann’s tent flap. Her swarthy features grimaced as she saw me. Eventually, after silver had crossed hands, she consented to tell me all.
‘You will marry a small bald man with weak eyes who will sire you with two babies from one egg. One will be a she child and will give you no trouble but the other, t’other will be a he child and will grow to be a monster. He will bear the name of a European currency (Frank?) and after embarrassing you with family planning sponsorship and wandering a desert he will destroy your career. For, and this is the curse, you will love this monster blindly and will see no wrong in him.’
She fell, shuddering, onto the card table and I went home to the shop and slept soundly. As if I would ever do THAT with a man, even once!
Friday May 20th
Woke up at 4am, refreshed after an hour and a half’s sleep. Just for fun read Intermediate Chemistry and committed to memory the more difficult formulae. However, life cannot, and should not, be one endless round of pleasure, so at 5am rose and went downstairs to the shop and helped father to water down the dandelion and burdock. Out of two dozen original bottles we managed to eke out one dozen more. Father, who is a good Methodist, explained that our actions were perfectly moral, and that Jesus’s trick with the loaves and fishes was an honourable precedent.
Saturday May 21st
A dreadful thing happened today. A country bus collided with Angela Pork-Cracklin’s horse, ‘Snooty’. The bus overturned and ended up in a turnip field. Poor Snooty bruised a fetlock, also several working-class people were killed and injured. Father and I have sent a card to Angela commiserating with her on the injury suffered by her beloved, pure-bred beast.
The Parish Council elections take place soon, so father thought it would be polite if I visited the injured in the cottage hospital. I telephoned the Matron to inform her of my impending visit but, to my astonishment, she advised me not to come. I snapped, ‘But, my good woman, I have arranged for the local press to be there.’
She said, ‘I don’t care if the editor of the Bible is there. My patients are still shocked and are in no condition to receive visitors’.
Father got on the telephone to a member of the hospital board who happens to owe us 5 pounds 10 shillings for sweet sherry, and hey presto the hospital doors opened for me. I was photographed with an Arnold Grimbold (double amputation), a Mabel Spiggs (fractured skull) and a Hed Noddy (multiple fractures) and, by accident, a Nigel Lawless (obesity and inflation). The patients did not seem at all grateful to see me or appreciative of my little jokes about the ‘horse power’ of the bus. I promised to return on Wednesday.
Sunday May 22nd
Arnold Grimbold committed suicide tonight. He left a note: ‘I can’t face Wednesday.’ This is thought to be a reference to the day his stumps were due to be dressed. What a weakling; Grantham is better off without him. I have asked for the grapes I gave him on Saturday to be returned to the shop.
Monday May 23rd
Got up at 5am and helped father to water down the vinegar. Screwed the caps back on bottles then had a lovely cold bath.
Walking to school I was almost knocked down by a horrid working-class man on a bicycle. I castigated him severely. He feebly explained that he had momentarily lost concentration due to tiredness after cycling 60 miles looking for work. I pointed out that he had absolutely no excuse for not keeping to the straight and narrow path and took his name. He claimed it was Tebbit, but I have my doubts. He looked awfully shifty, quite peculiar eyes. His sort ought to be forbidden to breed.
After a most enjoyable maths lesson I felt it was my duty as a monitoress to lecture the first years on the importance of having spotless finger nails. One or two started to snivel, so I kept them behind and gave them a jolly good talking to about keeping one’s emotion in check.
School dinner (sorry, lunch. Will I never get it right?) was unnecessa
rily extravagant. I counted two sultanas per square inch in the spotted dick. I complained to the school cook but she rudely told me to ‘move along’ claiming that I was holding up the second helpings queue.
Had to endure a double period of English Literature in the afternoon. I will be pleased when we have finished Hard Times by that obvious communist Charles Dickens. I offered to balance the lesson by reading aloud from Queen Victoria’s letters but Miss Marmaduke refused and asked me to sit down. (A word in the head’s ear would not come amiss: Miss M. is recently back from a cycling tour of Russia.)
As I walked home (alone as usual) I saw the man claiming to be Tebbit messing about on a grass verge and pretending to mend a puncture. He was in the vicinity of Snooty’s sumptuous stable, so I felt it was my duty to report the matter to our Bobby on the beat. It is a well-known fact that the unemployed are horse stealers. Police Constable Perkins thanked me in his broad Lincolnshire dialect and I continued home.
After a scrumptious home-baked tea I settled down to four hours of even more delicious chemistry homework.
After the shop closed I helped father with the accounts. I was horrified to discover that Mrs Arkwright of Railway Buildings owes sixpence for groceries. I made father promise that he would never extend credit again. He said, ‘Margaret, the woman is a widow with five children to feed.’ I said that by granting her credit he would not be helping Mrs Arkwright to mend her reckless ways. I offered to call on Mrs Arkwright and ask her for the sixpence, but father reminded me that it was nearly midnight and that we still had not chopped and bundled the firewood for the shop. (We are taking advantage of a late BBC weather forecast predicting a cold snap.)
Finally got to bed at 2am, recited ‘How now brown cow’ one hundred times and will now lay my pencil down and go to sleep.
Tuesday May 24th
Had a lie in until 6am. Then got out of bed and had a brisk rub down with the pumice stone.
I opened the curtains and saw that the sun was shining brightly. (A suspicion is growing in my mind that the BBC is not to be trusted.)
Father and I hastily split the firewood into toffee apple sticks and Mother was sent into the kitchen to make three hundred toffee apples. Dear diary, I’m rather worried about Mother. She looks more timid and nervous every day. I simply can’t think why: she has her baking, her duties in the shop and a full social life with the church, so I don’t understand why, whenever I address a remark to her, she twitches and stutters and backs away from me. She has also taken to wearing a large crucifix.
Wednesday May 25th
Went to see Mrs Arkwright and managed to get three-pence farthing out of her. I spent some time on her ill-scrubbed doorstep explaining how she should cut down on household expenses. I told her that one could make excellent substitute tea by boiling dried nettle leaves, for example. Mrs Arkwright said it was a bad day for England when a person couldn’t afford a cup of tea, but I retorted that it was the duty of all of us to make sacrifices in order to finance the munitions industry. Mrs Arkwright sarcastically asked what I, as a grocer’s daughter, went without. I answered that I had given up applying Vaseline to the sores on my legs caused by my wellington tops rubbing.
Mother simply stank of garlic tonight. Is she turning Catholic?
Thursday May 26th
Police Constable Perkins called round to the shop to report that the cyclist Tebbit had been held at the Police Station for three days of questioning but had now been released without charge. I was rather put out by this apparent evidence of police laxity, but Perkins said, ‘His spokes were in a proper state by the time we’d done a strip search of his bike. So don’t worry, Miss Roberts, he won’t be riding around no more Lincolnshire lanes a’ bothering young ladies. No, he’ll be pushing that bike all the way back to London town!’
We all had a jolly good laugh and Father invited Perkins to join us in a cup of tea at the side of the bacon slicer. He didn’t stay long, because, as he explained, it was the scrumping season, and he was kept busy catching young boys and fracturing their eardrums.
When he had gone, Father and I did the daily stocktaking and were shocked to find there was a tin of salmon and a small Hovis missing.
My mother claimed that Constable Perkins had slipped them into his truncheon pocket as he left the shop!
Father sent her to bed for daring to cast a slur on a fine body of men. All the same the loss of the salmon and Hovis was a severe blow. Strict economies would have to be made, so Father and I sat up all night grinding chalk and adding it to the flour bin.
Friday May 27th
Got up at dawn to write an essay on magnetic particles. It was so enjoyable that I got carried away and was almost late for school.
After school dinner (lunch, Margaret, lunch) I was summoned to the head. She astonished me by saying, ‘Margaret, I can’t fault your school work, but please do try to take life less seriously, perhaps strike up a friendship with one of the girls in your class.’ I pointed out to her that there were no girls of my class at the school, but she murmured, ‘That isn’t quite what I meant, dear,’ and dismissed me.
After school I counted and bagged the currants and raisins for the shop, then spent two relaxing hours doing mathematical equations.
There was a church social at the Methodist Hall so I took a pound of broken bourbons that father had donated and spent the evening chatting to a visiting Russian Orthodox priest. He was awfully handsome and intellectual and I was delighted when he offered to walk me home. We were approaching the shop chatting about samovars when he crushed me to his chest in a bear hug and whispered lewd and revolutionary suggestions of a personal nature. I screamed and ran into the shop. I didn’t tell father, but I will never trust another Russian as long as I live.
Took a cold water bottle to bed with me to punish myself for stealing a raisin.
Saturday May 28th
Spent a frustrating morning poring over my school atlas doing Geography homework: locate and then draw the Falkland Islands. After searching the entire coast of Scotland and its environs I happened to glance down at the bottom left-hand corner of the map and found them off the coast of Argentina!
Sunday May 29th
At 7pm I broke my promise to myself and with a trembling hand I closed and locked my bedroom door, took my secret box out of my wardrobe and had a session of dressing up and posing in front of the mirror.
The crown kept slipping down over my head and I had to stop twice and stitch the cotton wool back onto the ermine robe, but I think I have almost perfected the regal wave.
I am now certain that I am of royal birth. I’m grateful that I have been adopted by simple, kindly grocer-folk, but the life of a commoner is not for me. I need to know my true lineage.
Dear King,
I will get straight to the point, did you or any of your close relations visit Grantham fifteen and a half years ago? And if so, did you or they happen to ‘bump’ into a plump, pleasant faced, rather simple woman?
I ask, sire, because I am the offspring of that good woman. There is a certain Hanoverian cast to my features which does not correspond to any other branch of the ‘family’ physiognomy.
To be blunt: I am convinced I am of Royal birth. At present I am living with good, decent grocer-folk but ‘tis with your family I belong, sire. I know you are a busy man but I would appreciate an early reply; my future depends on it. By the way, you can count on my complete discretion. There is no danger of me blabbing our secret to friends – I have no friends.
I sign myself,
Margaret Hilda Roberts
(until you inform me otherwise)
PS. Should you need to order ceremonial robes etc., I am a size 14 with my Liberty bodice, size 12 without. PPS. Should I start having riding lessons? If so, should I ride side-saddle or should I straddle the horse?
Monday May 30th
Dearest Diary,
Poor father has been inundated with complaints about his food. Mrs Arkwright came into the shop this morni
ng and claimed that ‘Your eggs is all rotten, Roberts.’
Her coarse working-class accent grated on my ears and she went on, ‘An’ I ain’t surprised, seeing as how youse chickens is all scabby and mangy an’ is fed on fish ’eads.’
She was joined by Mrs Pork-Cracklin who accused father of selling diseased cheese. In more refined tones she complained, ‘My dinner guests have telephoned me this morning – from their respective lavatories – to inform me. that they suspect your cheese to be the cause of their lavatorial incarceration.’
Father got rid of Mrs Arkwright by threatening to inform the authorities that she keeps lodgers. However, he was extremely unctuous to Mrs Pork-Cracklin – he gave her a box of iced fancies and a tin of Earl Grey. Then, he dropped to his knees and begged her forgiveness. She generously gave him absolution before sweeping out of the shop and climbing into her limousine.
Tuesday May 31st
I received the following note from Cecil this morning:
The Little Hut
The Woods
The Wilderness
Mags old girl,
I say, do you think you can deliver another jar of Brylcreem to me tonight? This ‘living in the open’ business is playing havoc with my hair. Also, Mags sweetie, could you put in a good word for me with the Grantham worthies – I’m most awfully fed up with living in the actual and metaphoric wilderness. Surely I have paid the price for my little slip up last year. It proves I have red blood in my veins (and lead in my pencil) doesn’t it? I steered the Methodist Youth Club to victory in our last election didn’t I? Without me you could be languishing on the sidelines – making the tea, instead of enjoying high office as Chairwoman (Youth Wing).