by Sue Townsend
While we waited for her I made a cup of tea and fed Sabre and made Bert a beetroot sandwich.
My mother and father came and took over. My mother phoned for an ambulance. It was a good job they did because while it was coming Queenie went a bit strange and started talking about ration books and stuff.
Bert held her hand and called her a ‘daft old bat’.
The ambulance men were just shutting the doors when Queenie shouted out, ‘Fetch me pot of rouge. I’m not going until I’ve got me rouge.’ I ran into the bedroom and looked on the dressing table. The top was covered in pots and hairnets and hairpins and china dishes and lace mats and photos of babies and weddings. I found the rouge in a little drawer and took it to Queenie. My mother went off in the ambulance and me and my father stayed behind to comfort Bert. Two hours later my mother rang from the hospital to say that Queenie had had a stroke and would be in hospital for ages.
Bert said, ‘What am I going to do without my girl to help me?’
Girl! Queenie is seventy-eight. Bert wouldn’t come home with us. He is scared that the council will take his bungalow away from him.
MONDAY JULY 5TH
Independence Day Holiday (USA)
Queenie can’t speak. She is sort of awake but she can’t move her mouth muscles. My mother has been round at Bert’s all day cleaning and cooking. My father is going to call in every day on his way home from the canal. I have promised to take horrible Sabre for his morning and evening walks.
TUESDAY JULY 6TH
Full Moon
Bert’s social worker, Katie Bell, has been to see Bert. She wants Bert to go back into the Alderman Cooper Sunshine Home temporarily. Bert said he ‘would prefer death to that morgue’.
Katie Bell is coming round to see us tomorrow. She is checking Bert’s lie that my mother and father and me are providing twenty-four-hour care for him. Queenie is still very poorly.
WEDNESDAY JULY 7TH
Katie Bell is a strange woman. She talks (and looks) a bit like Rick Lemon. She was wearing a donkey jacket and denim jeans and she had long greasy hair parted down the middle. Her nose is long and pointed (from poking into other people’s business my father said). She sat in our lounge rolling a cigarette in one hand and taking notes with the other.
She said Bert was stubborn and suffering from slight senile dementia and that what he needed was to see a consultant psychogeriatrician. My mother got dead mad and shouted, ‘What he needs is a day- and a night-nurse.’ Katie Bell went red and said, ‘Day and night care is prohibitively expensive.’
My father asked how much it would cost to put an old person in an old people’s home. Katie Bell said, ‘It costs about two hundred pounds a week.’
My father shouted, ‘Give me two hundred pounds a week and I’ll move in and look after the old bugger.’
Katie Bell said, ‘I can’t relocate funds, Mr Mole.’ As she was going she said, ‘Look, I don’t like the system any more than you do. I know it stinks, but what can I do?’
My mother said, ‘You could wash your hair, dear, you’d feel much better without it straggling around your face.’
THURSDAY JULY 8TH
I left a note on Pandora’s peg today. It said:
Pandora,
Queenie Baxter is in hospital after a stroke. Bert is on his own in the bungalow. I am going round and doing what I can, but it would be nice if you could visit him for a bit. He is dead sad. Have you got any photos of Blossom?
Yours, as ever,
Adrian
FRIDAY JULY 9TH
A brilliant day today. School broke up for eight fabbo weeks. Then something even better happened tonight.
I was in the middle of ironing Bert’s giant underpants when Pandora walked into the living room. She was carrying a jar of home-pickled beetroot. I was transfixed. She gets more beautiful every day. Bert cheered up no end. He sent me off to make some tea. I could hardly keep my hands still. I felt as if I’d had an electric shock. I looked yearningly at Pandora as I handed her her tea. And she looked yearningly back at me!!!!!!!!
We sat around looking at photos of Blossom, Pandora’s ex-pony. Bert droned on about ponies and horses he had known when he was an ostler.
At 9.30 I washed Bert, sat him on the commode and then put him to bed. We sat by the electric coal fire until he started snoring, then we fell into each other’s arms with little sighs and moans. We stayed like that until Bert’s clock struck 10 p.m. Sex didn’t cross my mind once. I just felt dead calm and comfortable.
On the way home I asked Pandora when she realized that she still loved me. She said, ‘When I saw you ironing those horrible underpants. Only a superior type of youth could have done it.’
It has just been on the news that a man has been found in the Queen’s bedroom. Radio Four said that the man was an intruder and was previously unknown to the Queen. My father said: ‘That’s her story.’
SATURDAY JULY 10TH
My father took Bert to visit Queenie, so I went to Sainsbury’s on the bus. My mother gave me thirty pounds and asked me to buy enough food for five days. I remembered our last Domestic Science lesson, in which Mrs Appleyard taught us how to make cheap meals with maximum nourishment, so I bought:
2 lb Lentils
1 lb Dried peas
3 lb Wholemeal flour 1 pkt Yeast
1 lb Castor sugar
2 pints Plain yogurt
20 lb King Edward’s
2 lb Brown rice
1 lb Dried apricots
1 Tub cream cheese
1/2 lb Krona margarine
A large cabbage
2 lb Breast of lamb
A huge Swede
4 lb Parsnips
2 lb Carrots
2 lb Onions
How I dragged it all to the bus stop I’ll never know. The bus conductor was no help. He didn’t assist me to pick a single potato from off the floor of the bus.
I am going to write and complain to Sainsbury’s about their lousy brown carrier bags. They ought to stand up to being dragged half a mile without splitting. My mother didn’t thank me when I handed her fifteen pounds change! She whined on and on about forgetting the frozen black forest gateaux and tinned peas etc.
She went mad when she saw that I had not bought a white thick-sliced loaf. I pointed out that she had all the ingredients with which to make her own bread. She said, ‘Correction. You have the ingredients!’
Spent all evening bashing dough about, then chucking it into tins. I don’t know what went wrong. I opened the oven door and checked it every five minutes but it just wouldn’t rise.
SUNDAY JUNE 11TH
Fifth after trinity
Pandora says I should have kept the oven door shut.
My father refused to eat his breast of lamb stew. He went to the pub and had a microwave mince and onion pie and crinkle-cut chips.
He is asking for a coronary.
MONDAY JULY 12TH
Holiday (Northern Ireland)
Brainbox Henderson has started a youth club poetry magazine. I have submitted some of my Juvenilia plus a more recent mature poem called:
Ode to Engels
or
Hymn to the Modern Poor
Engels, you catalogued the misfortunes of the poor in
days of yore, Little thinking that the poor would still be with us in nearly
1984.
Yet stay! What is this I see in 1983?
Tis a queue of hungry persons outside the Job Centre.
Though rats and TB be but sad memories
The pushchairs of the modern poor contain pasty babies
with hacking coughs
Young mothers draw on number six
Young fathers queue to pay fines
Old people watch life pass by the plate-glass windows of
council homes
Oh Engels that you were still amongst us pen in hand
Your indignation a-quiver
Your fine nose tuned to the bad smells of 1983.
I have sent a copy to Bert Baxter. He is always going on about Engels.
TUESDAY JULY 13TH
Brainbox Henderson showed me Barry Kent’s pathetic entry for the poetry competition. Kent is convinced he is going to win the first prize of £5. It is called Tulips’.
Nice,red, tall, stiff,
In a vase,
On a table,
In a room,
In our house.
According to Henderson, Kent’s poem shows Japanese cultural influences! How stupid can you get?
The nearest Barry Kent has been to Japanese culture is sitting on the pillion of a stolen Honda.
WEDNESDAY JULY 14TH
Moon’s Last Quarter
Every night this week I have been round to Bert’s and taken vile Sabre for one of his four-mile walks, but I couldn’t face it tonight. I hate the way people cross the road to avoid us. Sabre hasn’t bitten anybody for ages, but he always looks as if he’s about to. Even other Alsatians flatten themselves against walls when they see Sabre approaching. I wish that Queenie would hurry up and get better; she is proud to be seen out with Sabre. She says, ‘An Alsatian a day keeps the muggers at bay.’
THURSDAY JULY 15TH
St Swithin’s Day
Pandora’s parents took Bert to the hospital to visit Queenie this evening, so Pandora and I spent two brillo hours lying on her parents’ bed watching the video of Rocky I. I kept my hands strictly away from Pandora’s erotic zones. When the film finished we talked about our futures. Pandora said that after University she would like to dig water holes in the Third World countries. She demonstrated how an artesian well is sunk by using her lit cigarette. Unfortunately the cigarette fell out of her hand and burnt a hole in the duvet. Pandora is dead worried; her parents are fanatical non-smokers.
I am reading Lucky Jim by a bloke called Kingsley Amis. My father says that Kingsley Amis used to be the editor of the New Statesman. It is surprising how much my father knows about literary matters. He never reads books but he is forced to listen to Radio Four on his car radio because the dial has jammed and he can’t get Terry Wogan.
FRIDAY JULY 16TH
5.30p.m. Stick Insect has just rung to ask if my father is back from work yet. I told her that he calls in on Bert Baxter on his way home every night. She said, ‘Thank you, I’ll ring back later,’ in a sad sort of voice. I expect she is regretting her promiscuous behaviour now that her baby is imminent.
I told my mother it was a wrong number; pregnant women should not be upset.
SATURDAY JULY 17TH
I have just seen my father and Stick Insect walking along the canal towpath arm in arm. I know the path is a bit cobbly but surely Stick Insect could have walked without assistance. It’s kind of my father to support Stick Insect in her hour of need but he should be more careful of public opinion. If people see an old-looking man arm in arm with a pregnant woman they are bound to assume that he is the father of the foetus. I hid behind the old bridge until they’d passed out of sight, then went to call for Pandora.
SUNDAY JULY 18TH
Sixth after trinity
My father announced at breakfast that he is going to have a vasectomy. I pushed my sausages away untouched.
MONDAY JULY 19TH
Went to see Grandma after Bert’s. She was making her Christmas cake. She let me drop the twenty pence pieces in the mixture and stir it around a bit while I made a wish. I was dead selfish really; I could have wished for world peace or Queenie’s quick recovery or for a safe confine-ment for my mother, but instead I wished that the spots on my shoulders would clear up before my summer holiday. I am dreading baring my back to gawping holiday-makers on Skegness beach.
The Queen’s personal detective, Commander Tres-trail, has had to resign because the papers have found out that he is a homosexual. I think this is dead unfair. It’s not against the law and I bet the Queen doesn’t mind. Barry Kent calls ME a poofter because I like reading and hate sport. So I understand what it is like to be victimized.
TUESDAY JULY 20TH
New Moon
Got a foreign letter, it is addressed to me but it must be a mistake. I don’t know any foreigners.
Norsk rikskringkasting, bercen, Norway Kjaere Adrian Mole,
John Tydeman viste meg ditt dikt ‘Norge’ og jeg var dypt rart av de f⊘lelser de uttrykte. Jeg hiper du en dag vil besoke vart land. Det er vakkert og du vil kunne oppleve fjordene og se hvor Ibsen og Grieg levde. Som en intellektuell person burde det interessere deg. Nar du besoker oss og snakker med oss vil du oppdage at vare vokaler ikke er sa eiendommelige. Husk at vi bare har lange netter og korte dager om vinteren. I juni er det helt motsatt. Sa kom om sommeren - vi skal ta imot deg pa beste mate.
Til lykke med dine studier av norsk laerindustri.
Hjertelig hilsen
Din,
Knut Johansen
WEDNESDAY JULY 21ST
Only eight days to go before my holiday in Skegness begins. I have asked my father if Pandora can come with us. I can’t bear the thought of being alone with my parents for a fortnight. My father said, ‘She’s welcome to come along providing she stumps up a hundred and twenty quid.’
THURSDAY JULY 22ND
When we were round at Bert’s doing his cleaning I asked Pandora if she would like to come to Skegness. She said, ‘Darling, I would follow you into Hell, but I draw the line at Skegness.’
Bert said, ‘Pandora, you’re nought but a stuck-up little Madam. It’ll do you good to mingle with the proletariat. Life ain’t all dry ski slopes and viola lessons you know.’ He gave a big sigh and said, ‘Personally I’d give me right ball for a week in Skeggy.’
Pandora blushed a lovely pink colour and said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, Bert. One tends to forget that one’s privileged.’
Bert lit a Woodbine, sighed again and said: ‘I shan’t ‘ave another holiday now, not at my age. No: death’s the only rest I’ve got to look forward to.’
To create a diversion Pandora phoned the hospital and asked how Queenie was. The nurse said, ‘Mrs Baxter asked for her pot of rouge today.’ Bert cheered up when he heard this news; he said: That means the old gel’s on the mend.” We put Bert to bed, then I walked Pandora home.
We had a dead good half-French, half-English kiss, then Pandora whispered, ‘Adrian, take me to Skegness.’ It was the most romantic sentence I have ever heard.
FRIDAY JULY 23RD
77 a.m. A dirty white cat turned up on our doorstep this morning. It had a tag round its neck which said, ‘My name is Roy’ but there was no address. It ignored me when I got the milk in so I ignored it back.
6 p.m. My mother and father have had a big row about Roy. My father accused my mother of encouraging Roy to stay by giving him (the cat) a saucer of milk. My mother accused my father of being an animal hater.
The dog looks a bit worried; I expect it feels insecure. Roy spent the day asleep on the toolshed roof, unaware of the trouble it was causing.
SATURDAY JULY 24TH
Went shopping for holiday clothes today. My mother came with me. I wanted to buy a grey zip-up cardigan from Marks and Spencer (there is a cold wind at Skegness). I tried it on but my mother said it made me look like Frank Bough and refused to pay for it. We had a bit of an argument about my taste in clothes versus her taste in clothes. In fact, looking around, I could see quite a few teenagers were having arguments with their parents.
We walked around the rest of the shops without speaking for a bit until my mother dragged me into a punk shop and tried to interest me in a lime-green leopard-skin-print T-shirt. I refused to try the tasteless thing on, so she bought it for herself!
The sadistic-looking shop assistant said, ‘That’s a cool mother you got.’ I pretended not to hear him. It wasn’t difficult: Sid Vicious was singing a filthy version of ‘My Way’ on the shop’s stereo system. It was so loud that the chain jackets and studded belts were reverberating.
Our next stop was at Mothercare, where my mother went mad buying miniature clothes and stretch-mark cream. I was hoping that she would buy a nice respectable maternity dress for the dreaded day when her lump starts to show, but she informed me that she was intending to carry on wearing her dungarees. I will be a laughing-stock at school.
SUNDAY JULY 25TH
Seventh after Trinity
Did a bit of O level revising. I’ve got the lousy stinking mocks to do when I get back to school. I am doing English, Geography and History at 0 level and Woodwork and Domestic Science and Biology at CSE.
It’s all a big waste of time, though, because intellectuals like me don’t need qualifications to get jobs or worldly success: it just comes automatically to us. It is because of our rarity value. The only problem is getting influential people to recognize that you are an intellectual. So far nobody has recognized it in me, yet I have been using long words like ‘multi-structured’ in my daily intercourse for ages.
MONDAY JULY 26TH
Courtney Elliot brought bad news this morning. It was a letter from the Manpower Services Commission telling my father that his canal bank clearance project was ‘seriously behind schedule’. My father stormed on and on about, ‘What do they expect if they pay slave wages?’
My mother said (quite mildly for her), ‘Well, you’ve hardly worked like a slave, George. You’re always home by four-thirty.’
My father went out and slammed the kitchen door. I ran after him and offered to help him on the canal bank, but he said, ‘No, stay at home and help your mother with the holiday packing.’
My mother and Courtney Elliot were doing the Guardian crossword together, and the holiday clothes were still in the Ali Baba basket waiting to be washed so I took the dog round to Bert’s and watched the Falklands Memorial Service on television.
St Paul’s Cathedral was full of widows and bereaved people. I went home and chucked my Falklands campaign map in the bin.
TUESDAY JULY 27TH
Moon’s First Quarter
My mother had a pompous note from Pandora’s father today. He is refusing to give Pandora £120 for Skegness!