by Sue Townsend
She is an honorary MA of Leicester University, and in 2008 she was made a Distinguished Honorary Fellow, the highest award the University can give. She is an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Loughborough University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her other awards include the James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin, and the Frink Award at the Women of the Year Awards. In 2009 she was given the Honorary Freedom of Leicester, where she still lives and works.
Sue Townsend was registered blind in 2001, and had a kidney transplant in 2009. She writes using a mixture of longhand and dictation.
Sue Townsend Q & A
Does the thirtieth anniversary of the first publication of the Secret Diary feel like a milestone or a millstone?
A milestone. He’s certainly not a millstone. I think that authors who complain about the success of their most well-known characters are fools; although they mostly do this in private.
How did you spend your thirtieth birthday?
Nursing a month-old baby called Elizabeth; she was the last of my four children.
How has Adrian changed over the last 30 years?
In The Prostrate Years Mole has become more physically attractive, and is a much more sympathetic character.
Which is your favourite Adrian Mole book?
The Prostrate Years. I’ve had a lot of health problems and wanted to write about serious illness, yet still write in a comic form.
Do you have a favourite diary entry from the last thirty years?
Saturday April 3 1982 – The last line in the last entry of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13¾. Written after he had tried glue sniffing and accidentally stuck a model aeroplane to his nose: ‘I rang Pandora, she is coming round after her viola lesson. Love is the only thing that keeps me sane …’
I also like the sequence of entries in the same book made when Mole was trying to paint his bedroom black to cover the Noddy wallpaper; only to be repeatedly thwarted by the bell on Noddy’s hat.
What has been Adrian’s biggest mistake?
To ignore the many persons who have told him that his serial killer comedy, ‘The White Van’, and his memoir ‘Lo, the Flat Hills of my Homeland’, are unpublishable. Mole does not suffer from a lack of self-belief in this regard. Also at the Dept of the Environment when he misplaced a decimal point, and erroneously stated that the projection of live newt births for Newport Pagnall was 120,000.
And his greatest triumph?
He still believes his awful novels will be published one day. That he is still a decent, kind person.
If Adrian Mole was a teenager today, what would he be doing and writing about?
He would be exactly the same, but he wouldn’t be using Twitter to memorialize his life. He would keep a secret diary. Mole’s privacy is still intact. He would not use social networking. There are still Mole types everywhere, watching the absurdities of the world from the sidelines.
Are there any plot decisions that you made that you subsequently regretted?
I should not have made Bert Baxter so old. I hated it when I had to kill him off at the age of 105.
I regret Mole’s marriage to Jo Jo, and the subsequent birth of William. It was tiresome (as it is in life) to have the child constantly there, or having to account for his whereabouts. It restricted Adrian’s movements. He always had to be at the nursery at 3.15 p.m. every weekday. I solved this for myself by sending William to live with his mother in Nigeria, and then forgot about him.
Are any of the character in the books, such as Adrian, Pandora or Pauline, based on anyone in particular?
All those characters have elements of the author within them.
Before you put pen to paper, was there any point where Adrian might have been a girl? If so, did she have a name?
No, girls are more sociable, they talk to each other about their emotional lives; boys don’t.
I once wrote a column for the London Evening Standard, which took the form of a diary written by a teenage girl called Christabel Fox. It didn’t work for me, and after eighteen months it didn’t work for the Evening Standard either.
What does the future hold for Adrian?
I don’t know, but hopefully he will go onward, ever onward.
What limitations/opportunities are there to writing in diary form?
There are no limitations. The diary is one voice talking to you about people, places, events, high emotion, low spirits and the minutiae of everyday life. Diaries have a simple structure. You just plod on, day by day, week by week, month by month, until you’ve written a book.
What do you enjoy/dislike about the process of writing?
With each writing project I have a different type of nervous breakdown. I am convinced that I have chosen wrong words and placed them in the wrong order. Once published, I never read my own work. There are sometimes a few exhilarating moments when the words come easily, when the tone and rhythm feel right.
It’s great that writers don’t have to leave the house and struggle through the rain to their place of work. They can lie in bed all day with a pen and notebook, which are the minimum requirements. Unfortunately I cannot allow myself to loll about in bed for longer than about six hours, as I am still brainwashed by the Calvinist work ethic.
Which authors have most influenced you as a writer?
In rough chronological order:
Richmal Crompton, Charlotte Brontë, Alfred E. Nuemann (Mad comic), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Dickens, George Elliot, Oscar Wilde, Chekov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Stella Gibbons, Iris Murdoch, Flaubert, John Updike, Richard North.
Do you get much opportunity to meet or interact with your readers?
I have become a recluse lately as a result of ill health and late-onset shyness, but on rare outings I like to meet readers.
Is there any truth to the rumour put about by one A. Mole that you stole and profited from his life?
Yes. I ruthlessly exploited him. But he can’t afford to sue me due to the new legislation on legal aid. Mole no longer qualifies. He should have taken me to court years ago.
The Mole Story
Adrian Mole is one of the most memorable and enduring comic creations of recent decades. Long before Bridget Jones we had the diaries of the neglected intellectual of Ashby de la Zouch: neurotic, acne ridden and hopelessly devoted to Pandora Braithwaite. Mole’s is a particularly British story: that of continued, almost heroic, failure. Despite his best intentions he never quite gets what he wants. Like Basil Fawlty and, more recently, David Brent, much of the comedy in these books derives from self-delusion. It is the repetition of the same errors which invests these characters with a kind of tragic grandeur. We identify with them not because they are grotesque caricatures but because we know there is something of all of us within them.
Throughout the Mole books, Townsend has offered a caustic evaluation of contemporary Britain. There is an underlying seriousness to her work, a political consciousness, the desire to attack injustice and intolerance. Townsend is able to say in a couple of sentences what it would take many political journalists a thousand words to convey. Mole is an unknowingly subversive character and that is why he causes such delight. Laugh-out-loud funny, yet often painfully sad and poignant, the Mole books reveal Townsend’s natural sense of comic timing and empathetic gifts.
Garan Holcombe, British Council Contemporary Writers
1946 – 1953
Sue Townsend is born in Leicester and brought up in a semi-rural suburb, where she lives in a prefabricated bungalow on an unadopted mud road. Most of her free time is spent playing in the surrounding fields and woods of a country estate.
1953
At eight, she is frightened of her violent teacher, can’t read, and has had the same book on her desk for three years. While Townsend is absent from school with mumps, her mother buys a stack of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, and teaches her to read in three weeks. It begins a
life-long addiction to print. She reads three books a day until local librarians accuse her of attention seeking.
1960
By fourteen she excels at English, writes for the school magazine and has toured various churches and mental institutions as Jesus in the Passion of Christ. Her book addiction is sated by second-hand orange Penguin classics bought from market stalls. ‘I would ponce about Leicester with the spines of the books pointing to the public. A very indifferent public.’ After a school visit to Rome, Capri and Naples, returning to the dour greyness of 1950s Leicester badly affects the young Townsend. After this trauma, and heavily influenced by a recent reading of Dostoevsky: ‘I took to the black. White face, white lips, black eyes, black clothing. Juliette Greco bohemian.’
Entering the only coffee bar in town, copy of The Idiot in hand, and asking a man who looks intelligent how to pronounce Dostoevsky, she is immediately accepted as a part of Leicester bohemian society. There are few suitable careers in Leicester for a black-clad aesthete with no qualifications. As school leaving day approaches Townsend is urged by her Drama and English teachers to transfer to the Grammar School and take some exams; but the uniform would cost her parents a month’s wages, and she leaves school a week before her fifteenth birthday.
She works in a shoe factory, sells encyclopaedias door to door, and is sacked from the best and most pretentious dress shop in Leicestershire for reading Oscar Wilde in a changing cubicle. She works as a petrol attendant, with a paperback stuffed into the BP standard-issue duffle coat. She misses writing and carries on in secret.
1964
At eighteen she marries a sheet metal-worker; the marriage doesn’t last, and at twenty-three she is on her own with three young children and three jobs. Always tired and always worried, she writes semi-autobiographical prose and poetry when the children are asleep and hides it.
The only good job is at the youth club on her estate, where she works for eleven years, overhearing the conversations adults are not meant to hear. It leads to building and running an adventure playground on the tougher estate next-door. She writes pantomimes and plays for the children, receiving regular deputations of young men requesting knife-fight scenes.
1975 Summer
‘I was living in a council house at the time, on my own with three kids and three part-time jobs to keep us going. So Sunday was a total collapse; I was exhausted. My eldest son said, ‘Why can’t we go to safari parks like other families do?’ The answer is that they have no money, no car and she feels sorry for the animals, but his martyred tone triggers the memory of her own harsh criticism of the adult world as a powerless child: ‘That adolescent, self-pitying voice. Mole’s voice. I just heard it. He descended with his family in the space of an afternoon.’ She writes it down in diary form, completing the opening two and a half months in one burst, files it in a box and forgets it.
1978
She meets Colin Broadway, who will become her second husband. Three weeks after the birth of their daughter she admits to him that she writes secretly, and has done for twenty years. It fills a fridge-box stuffed into the under-stairs cupboard. He has heard of a writers’ group at the Phoenix Theatre, and encourages her to join.
The Phoenix is Leicester’s 300-seat ‘second’ theatre, with a writers group which uses actors to perform new plays. She attends two meetings without speaking. At the third, director Ian Giles asks her to bring some work that they can read and discuss. She has never written a play, but returns two weeks later with Womberang, a comedy set in a gynaecological waiting room. It has ten female parts, one male, and lasts thirty minutes. The structure is ‘unorthodox’, but as soon as the actors begin to read they are laughing out loud.
1979
Ian Giles puts Womberang forward for the 1979 Thames Television Playwright Award. John Mortimer is chair of the panel; he likes the play, reads it aloud and makes his fellow judges laugh. Townsend wins the prize, a £2,000 bursary to work for a year as writer in residence at the sponsoring theatre. She is terrified, and her training as a professional dramatist begins.
1980 July
Phoenix actor Nigel Bennett is auditioning for Huckleberry Finn and asks Townsend if she has anything he can use. She remembers the Mole diary and digs out the handwritten script. Bennett is the first to perform the Mole character, in a writers’ group meeting. He types the script up and works on adapting it for a one-man show.
October
Townsend rewrites part of the original diary for a new local arts publication, edited by Leicester playwright David Campton, and put together on her kitchen table. Mole is published for the first time in the October 1980 edition of the arts journal magazine, under the title Excerpts From the Secret Diary of Nigel Mole, aged 14 ¾.
November
On a visit to Townsend’s home, her theatrical agent Janet Fillingham sees a file of Mole material. Fillingham thinks it would make a good radio script and sends a Nigel Mole monologue to Vanessa Whitburn at BBC Radio Birmingham. Ms Whitburn turns it down.
1981
February
A version of ‘The Diary of Nigel Mole’ is sent to the Assistant Head of Radio Drama for Radio 4, John Tydeman. It sit on his desk for a month, but ‘When I finally read it, I thought it was marvellous.’ He decides to produce it as a thirty-minute monologue.
March 10th
John Tydeman officially commissions ‘The Diary of Nigel Mole’ for Radio Four, and promises more episodes will be considered ‘if it is as successful as it ought to be’.
April
There are concerns at the BBC that the character’s name is too similar to the public schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, from the Down with Skool! books by Geoffrey Willans. Tydeman writes to Townsend that the character is established as Nigel Mole and will be broadcast under that title. He advises her that there ‘is a lot of mileage in Mole’ and that she should try to get a diary published.
September
Janet Fillingham sends the radio script to Geoffrey Strachan at Methuen, who is responsible for the Monty Python books and Simon Bond’s hugely successful 101 Uses of a Dead Cat. He is, in the words of Fillingham’s colleague Giles Gordon, later Townsend’s agent – ‘the greatest publisher of the humour book’.
November/December
Geoffrey Strachan is keen on the script and the writer. ‘I met Sue soon after and was immediately impressed. She was very funny and had a tremendous sense of what she was doing.’ He requests a treatment for the book that he can sell to the Methuen board, but is unhappy with the similarity to ‘Nigel Molesworth’ and asks for a name change. Townsend sends him a typescript treatment using ‘Malcolm Mole’. A contract is signed with Methuen.
‘Malcolm’ reminds Townsend of blocked sinuses and she looks for an alternative. A handwritten sheet shows her working through some unlikely variations; wisely putting a cross next to the name of her second son, who would have been very unhappy with ‘Daniel Mole’. She is looking for something ‘upper working class’, unthreatening, with a soft, feminine quality. After the low point of ‘Darius’ and ‘Marius’, ‘Adrian’ appears twice at the right-hand side of the page.
Townsend is not convinced and writes to Strachan, asking him to reconsider. ‘Are you absolutely dead set against “Nigel Mole”? I am suffering severe withdrawal symptoms. I have lived closely with Nigel for a couple of years and Adrian can’t take his place. I’ve tried to accommodate him but failed.’ Strachan’s long experience as a publisher tells him that the two characters would always be confused, and he is not persuaded. It is a bad moment for university lecturer Adrian Mole, who in an interview in a Sunday broadsheet, claimed that his life has been ruined by sniggering students.
1982 January 2nd
The Diary of Nigel Mole, aged 13¾ is broadcast on Radio Four’s Thirty Minute Theatre, read by Nicholas Barnes. The Times calls it ‘a delightful original’, and within days five publishers have contacted John Tydeman.
April/May
The book is sent to Strachan in ins
talments. He commissions Caroline Holden to provide the illustrations. A number of people at Methuen are in favour of printing 3,000 copies, but Strachan thinks the book is ‘a bit special’ and decides on a first edition of 7,500, at the accessible price of £4.95.
Townsend asks Strachan if her name can be removed from the cover, arguing that ‘It was supposed to be written by a 13¾-year-old boy. It seemed stupid to have my name on it. But he said gravely it was a wonderful thing to write a book, and that I should take the credit.’ She has an advance of £1,500 and is worried about covering it.
‘I thought Methuen were mad to print 7,500. I thought it would be remaindered by Christmas’.
June
The Methuen sales team are selling the book before it even exists. Often the booksellers have heard the radio production and are enthusing about the character to the reps.
July 30th
In the first mention of an Adrian Mole book in print media, Leo Cooper in Publishing News praises ‘The funniest book I have read for ages … I welcome a genuine new talent.’