by Sue Townsend
The vet rang up to demand that we come and fetch the dog back from his surgery. It has been there nine days. My father says it will have to stay there until he gets paid tomorrow. The vet only takes cash and my father hasn’t got any.
Pandora! Why?
THURSDAY JANUARY 29TH
The stupid dog is back. I am not taking it for a walk until its hair grows back on its shaved paws. My father looked pale when he came home from the vet’s, he kept saying ‘It’s money down the drain’, and he said that from now on the dog can only be fed on leftovers from his plate.
This means the dog will soon starve.
FRIDAY JANUARY 30TH
That filthy commie Bert Baxter has phoned the school to complain that I left the hedge-clippers out in the rain! He claims that they have gone all rusty. He wants compensation. I told Mr Scruton, the headmaster, that they were already rusty but I could tell he didn’t believe me. He gave me a lecture on how hard it was for old people to make ends meet. He has ordered me to go to Bert Baxter’s and clean and sharpen the hedge-clippers. I wanted to tell the headmaster all about horrible Bert Baxter but there is something about Mr Scruton that makes my mind go blank. I think it’s the way his eyes pop out when he is in a temper.
On the way to Bert Baxter’s I saw my mother and Mr Lucas coming out of a betting shop together. I waved and shouted but I don’t think they could have seen me. I’m glad Mr Lucas is feeling better. Bert Baxter didn’t answer the door. Perhaps he is dead.
Pandora! You are still on my mind, baby.
SATURDAY JANUARY 31ST
It is nearly February and I have got nobody to send a Valentine’s Day card to.
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 1ST
Fourth after Epiphany
There was a lot of shouting downstairs late last night. The kitchen waste-bin was knocked over and the back door kept being slammed. I wish my parents would be a bit more thoughtful. I have been through an emotional time and I need my sleep. Still I don’t expect them to understand what it is like being in love. They have been married for fourteen-and-a-half years.
Went to Bert Baxter’s this afternoon but thank God he has gone to Skegness with the Evergreens. Sabre looked out of the living-room window. I gave him the ‘V’ sign. I hope he doesn’t remember.
MONDAY FEBRUARY 2ND
Presentation
Mrs Lucas is back! I saw her pulling trees and bushes out of the earth and putting them in the back of a van, then she put all the gardening tools in and drove off. The van had ‘Women’s Refuge’ painted on the side. Mr Lucas came over to our house to talk to my mother, I went down to say ‘hello’ to him, but he was too upset to notice me. I asked my mother if she would get home early from work tonight, I’m fed up with waiting for my tea. She didn’t.
Nigel got thrown out of school dinners today for swearing at the toad-in-the-hole, he said it was ‘all bleeding hole and no toad’. I think Mrs Leech was quite right to throw him out, after all the first-years were present! We third-years must set an example. Pandora has got up a petition to protest about the toad-in-the-hole. I will not sign it.
It was Good Samaritans today. So I was forced to go round to Bert Baxter’s. I have missed the Algebra test! Ha! Ha! Ha! Bert gave me a stick of broken Skegness rock and said he was sorry he rang the school to complain about the hedge-clippers. He said he was lonely and wanted to hear a human voice. If I was the loneliest person in the world I wouldn’t phone up our school. I would ring the speaking clock; that talks to you every ten seconds.
TUESDAY FEBRUARY 3RD
My mother has not done any proper housework for days now. All she does is go to work, comfort Mr Lucas and read and smoke. The big-end has gone on my father’s car. I had to show him where to catch a bus into town. A man of forty not knowing where the bus stop is! My father looked such a scruff-bag that I was ashamed to be seen with him. I was glad when the bus came. I shouted through the window that he couldn’t sit downstairs and smoke but he just waved and lit up a cigarette. There is a fifty pounds’ fine for doing that! If I was in charge of the buses I would fine smokers a thousand pounds and make them eat twenty Woodbines.
My mother is reading The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer. My mother says it is the sort of book that changes your life. It hasn’t changed mine, but I only glanced through it. It is full of dirty words.
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 4TH
New Moon
I had my first wet dream! So my mother was right about The Female Eunuch. It has changed my life.
The spot has got smaller.
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 5TH
My mother has bought some of those overalls that painters and decorators wear. You can see her knickers through them. I hope she doesn’t wear them in the street.
She is having her ears pierced tomorrow. I think she is turning into a spendthrift. Nigel’s mother is a spendthrift. They are always getting letters about having their electricity cut off and all because Nigel’s mother buys a pair of high heels every week.
I would like to know where the Family Allowance goes, by rights it should be mine. I will ask my mother tomorrow.
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 6TH
The Queen’s Accession, 1952
It is lousy having a working mother. She rushes in with big bags of shopping, cooks the tea then rushes around tarting herself up. But she is still not doing any tidying up before comforting Mr Lucas. There has been a slice of bacon between the cooker and the fridge for three days to my knowledge!
I asked her about my Family Allowance today, she laughed and said she used it for buying gin and cigarettes. If the Social Services hear about it she will get done!
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 7TH
My mother and father have been shouting at each other non-stop for hours. It started because of the bacon down the side of the fridge and carried on into how much my father’s car is costing to repair. I went up to my room and put my Abba records on. My father had the nerve to crash my door open and ask me to turn the volume down. I did. When he got downstairs I turned it up again.
Nobody cooked any dinner so I went to the Chinese chip shop and bought a carton of chips and a sachet of soy sauce. I sat in the bus shelter and ate them, then walked about feeling sad. Came home. Fed dog. Read a bit of Female Eunuch. Felt a bit funny. Went to sleep.
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 8TH
Fifth after Epiphany
My father came into my bedroom this morning, he said he wanted a chat. He looked at my Kevin Keegan scrapbook, screwed the knob of my wardrobe door back on with his Swiss army knife, and asked me about school. Then he said he was sorry about yesterday and the shouting, he said my mother and him are ‘going through a bad patch’. He asked me if I had anything to say. I said he owed me thirty-two pence for the Chinese chips and soy sauce. He gave me a pound. So I made a profit of sixty-eight pence.
MONDAY FEBRUARY 9TH
There was a removal lorry outside Mr Lucas’s house this morning. Mrs Lucas and some other women were carrying furniture from the house and stacking it on the pavement. Mr Lucas was looking out from his bedroom window. He looked a bit frightened. Mrs Lucas was laughing and pointing up to Mr Lucas and all the other women started laughing and singing ‘Why was he born so beautiful?’
My mother phoned Mr Lucas up and asked him if he was all right. Mr Lucas said he wasn’t going to work today because he had to guard the stereo and records from his wife. My father helped Mrs Lucas put the gas stove in the removal van, then he and my mother walked to the bus stop together. I walked behind them because my mother was wearing long dangly earrings and my father’s trouser turn-ups had come down. They started to quarrel about something so I crossed over the road and went to school the long way round.
Bert Baxter was OK today. He told me about the First World War. He said his life was saved by a Bible he always carried in his breast pocket. He showed me the Bible, it was printed in 1956. I think Bert is going a bit senile.
Pandora! The memory of you is a constant torment!
TUESDAY FEB
RUARY 10TH
Mr Lucas is staying with us until he gets some new furniture.
My father has gone to Matlock to try to sell electric storage heaters to a big hotel.
Our gas boiler has packed in. It is freezing cold.
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 11TH
First Quarter
My father rang up from Matlock to say he has lost his Barclaycard and can’t get home tonight, so Mr Lucas and my mother were up all night trying to mend the boiler. I went down at ten o’clock to see if I could help but the kitchen door was jammed. Mr Lucas said he couldn’t open it just at that moment because he was at a crucial stage with the boiler and my mother was helping him and she had her hands full.
THURSDAY FEBRUARY l2TH
Lincoln’s Birthday
I found my mother dyeing her hair in the bathroom tonight. This has come as a complete shock to me. For thirteen and three-quarter years I have thought I had a mother with red hair, now I find out that it is really light brown. My mother asked me not to tell my father. What a state their marriage must be in! I wonder if my father knows that she wears a padded bra? She doesn’t hang them on the line to dry, but I have seen them shoved down the side of the airing cupboard. I wonder what other secrets my mother has got?
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 13TH
It was an unlucky day for me all right!
Pandora doesn’t sit next to me in Geography any more. Barry Kent does. He kept copying my work and blowing bubblegum in my ears. I told Miss Elf but she is scared of Barry Kent as well, so she didn’t say anything to him.
Pandora looked luscious today, she was wearing a split skirt which showed her legs. She has got a scab on one of her knees. She was wearing Nigel’s football scarf round her wrist, but Miss Elf saw it and told her to take it off. Miss Elf is not scared of Pandora. I have sent her a Valentine’s Day card (Pandora, not Miss Elf).
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 14TH
St Valentine’s Day
I only got one Valentine’s Day card. It was in my mother’s handwriting so it doesn’t count. My mother had a massive card delivered, it was so big that a GPO van had to bring it to the door. She went all red when she opened the envelope and saw the card. It was dead good. There was a big satin elephant holding a bunch of plastic flowers in its trunk and a bubble coming out of its mouth saying ‘Hi, Honey Bun! I ain’t never gonna forget you!’ There was no name written inside, just drawings of hearts with ‘Pauline’ written inside them. My father’s card was very small and had a bunch of purple flowers on the front. My father had written on the inside ‘Let’s try again’.
Here is the poem I wrote inside Pandora’s card.
Pandora!
I adore ya.
I implore ye
Don’t ignore me.
I wrote it left-handed so that she wouldn’t know it was from me.
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 15TH
Septuagesima
Mr Lucas moved back to his empty house last night. I expect he got fed up with all the rowing over the elephant Valentine’s Day card. I told my father that my mother can’t help it if a man secretly admires her. My father gave a nasty laugh and said, ‘You’ve got a lot to learn, son.’
I cleared off to my grandma’s at dinner-time. She cooked me a proper Sunday dinner with gravy and individual Yorkshire puddings. She is never too busy to make real custard either.
I took the dog with me and we all went for a walk in the afternoon to settle our dinners.
My grandma hasn’t spoken to my mother since the row about the cardigans. Grandma says she ‘won’t set foot in that house again!’ Grandma asked me if I believed in life after death. I said I didn’t and Grandma told me that she had joined the Spiritualist church and has heard my grandad talking about his rhubarb. My grandad has been dead for four years!!! She is going on Wednesday night to try to get in touch with him again and she wants me to go with her. She says I have got an aura around me.
The dog choked on a chicken bone but we held it upside down and banged it hard, and the bone fell out. I’ve left the dog at Grandma’s to recover from its ordeal.
Looked up ‘Septuagesima’ in my pocket dictionary. It didn’t have it. Will look in the school dictionary, tomorrow.
Lay awake for ages thinking about God, Life and Death and Pandora.
MONDAY FEBRUARY 16TH
Washington’s Birthday Observance
A letter from the BBC!!!!! A white oblong envelope with BBC in red fat letters. My name and address on the front! Could it be that they wanted my poems? Alas, no. But a letter from a bloke called John Tydeman, here is what he wrote:
Dear Adrian Mole,
Thank you for the poems which you sent to the BBC and which somehow landed up on my desk. I read them with interest and, taking into account your tender years, I must confess that they do show some promise. However, they are not of sufficient quality for us to consider including them in any of our current poetry programmes. Have you thought of offering them to your School Magazine or to your local Parish Magazine? (If you have one.)
If, in future, you wish to submit any of your work to the BBC may I suggest you get it typed out and retain, also, a copy for yourself. The BBC does not normally consider submissions in handwritten manuscript form and, despite the neatness of presentation, I did have some difficulty in making out all of the words – particularly at the end of one poem entitled ‘The Tap’ where there was a rather nasty blotch which had caused the ink to run. (A tea-stain or a tear-stain? A case of ‘Your Tap runneth over’!)
Since you wish to follow a literary career I suggest you will need to develop a thick skin in order to accept many of the inevitable future rejections you may receive with good grace and the minimum of personal pain.
With my best wishes to you for future literary efforts – and, above all, Good Luck!
Yours sincerely,
John Tydeman
P.S. I enclose a poem by a certain John Mole which appeared in this week’s Times Literary Supplement. Is he a relation? It is very good.
My mother and father were really impressed. I kept getting it out and reading it at school. I was hoping one of the teachers would ask to read it but none of them did.
Bert Baxter read it while I was doing his rotten washing-up. He said they were ‘all a load of drug addicts in the BBC’! His brother-in-law’s uncle once lived next door to a tea lady at Broadcasting House, so Bert knows all about the BBC.
Pandora got seventeen Valentine’s Day cards. Nigel got seven. Even Barry Kent whom everybody hates got three! I just smiled when everybody asked me how many I got. Anyway I bet I am the only person in the school to get a letter from the BBC.
TUESDAY FEBRUARY 17TH
Barry Kent said he would do me over unless I gave him twenty-five pence every day. I told him that he was wasting his time demanding money with menaces from me. I never have any spare money. My mother puts my pocket money straight into my building-society account and gives me fifteen pence a day for a Mars bar. Barry Kent said I would have to give him my dinner money! I told him that my father pays it by cheque since it went up to sixty pence a day, but Barry Kent hit me in the goolies and walked off saying There’s more where that came from.’
I have put my name down for a paper round.
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 18TH
Full Moon
Woke up with a pain in my goolies. Told my mother. She wanted to look but I didn’t want her to so she said I would have to soldier on. She wouldn’t give me a note excusing me from Games, so I had to stumble around in the mud again. Barry Kent trod on my head in the scrum. Mr Jones saw him and sent him off for an early shower.
I wish I could have a non-painful illness so I could be excused from Games. Something like a weak heart would be all right.
Fetched the dog from Grandma’s, she has given it a shampoo and set. It smells like the perfume counter in Woolworth’s.
I went to the Spiritualist meeting with my grandma, it was full of dead old people. One madman stood up and said he had a radio in
side his head which told him what to do. Nobody took any notice of him, so he sat down again. A woman called Alice Tonks started grunting and rolling her eyes about and talking to somebody called Arthur Mayfield, but my grandad kept quiet. My grandma was a bit sad so when we got home I made her a cup of Horlicks. She gave me fifty pence and I walked home with the dog.
Started reading Animal Farm, by George Orwell. I think I might like to be a vet when I grow up.
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 19TH
Prince Andrew born, 1960
It’s all right for Prince Andrew, he is protected by bodyguards. He doesn’t have Barry Kent nicking money off him. Fifty pence gone just like that! I wish I knew karate, I would chop Barry Kent in his windpipe.
It is quiet at home, my parents are not speaking to each other.