by Sue Townsend
Sunday July 20th
Nobody knows where Daisy is. Her suitcase had been taken from Beeby on the Wold.
I was accused of many things yesterday. Many angry voices were raised against me, the most angry being Marigold’s, who accused me of sabotaging her wedding.
I did my fair share of grovelling and apologizing to Brain-box, Netta Flowers and my mother, for ‘showing her up’. And this morning I sent an email to the hotel manager apologizing for failing to stop the fight in the car park between my mother and Netta Flowers, during which a trolley full of clean, pressed laundry was overturned.
But even as I flagellated myself I heard a tiny voice inside my head, protesting, ‘But I only told the truth.’
Monday July 21st
Mark B’astard came round to give me a valuation early this morning. He told me that clients were queuing outside his office each morning waving their cheque books at him in their eagerness to buy a place in Rat Wharf.
He particularly liked the Smeg fridge, and it was bad luck that it started whining on about the stale-egg situation while he was there. He reckoned that given a lick of paint and the removal of the rat traps, the apartment could fetch £220,000.
He went out on to the balcony and said, ‘Nobody can afford to live in London now, and Leicester is only a seventy-minute commute.’ He asked me why I was selling up.
I said I had flown too close to the sun.
He looked puzzled, but he could not have been as puzzled as me. Why did I say it? What is happening to me?
I was reading aloud to Nigel tonight when he suddenly burst out, ‘Jesus Christ! No more Crime and Punishment!’
I was hurt, diary, but I managed to keep my voice light and melodious, and said, ‘Would you like me to read you something a little less intellectual?’
Nigel said, ‘No, it’s not the book I have a problem with. It’s your reading of the thing. Try to put a bit of Dostoevsky’s tormented soul into it, will you? As it is, you sound like metrosexual man.’
‘Metrosexual?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he said contemptuously. ‘A straight guy who’s into skincare and interior design.’
I carried on reading, with a rougher edge to my voice, but when the hero, Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, or Rodya for short, was trying to decide whether or not to kill the old woman, Nigel said, ‘You’re making him sound as if he’s trying to decide between curtains or blinds!’
Graham, the guide dog, got up, saw me to the front door and let me out.
I said goodnight, and heard the cur drop the latch behind me.
Tuesday July 22nd
Robbie is dead.
A home reserve officer from his regiment, Captain Hayman, knocked on my door last night. My first reaction on being told that Robbie was dead, killed by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade, was relief that it wasn’t Glenn.
I made Captain Hayman a cup of coffee. He was dressed in a smart uniform, brown suit, beige shirt and displayed a row of ribbons across his chest.
I asked him why I had been formally notified.
He said, ‘Robert put you down as his next of kin.’
I said, ‘But I’m not related to him. He’s my son’s best friend.’ I asked him if Glenn was OK.
He said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know the details of the incident.’
I asked him to phone and find out. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t in front of this good man who had been deputed to break the news of death.
I asked if Glenn would be given compassionate leave.
Captain Hayman said, ‘No, friends don’t count as far as the army is concerned.’
He told me that the army would arrange Robbie’s funeral and asked me to choose the hymns and readings. He said that Robbie’s body would be sent back to England in a batch of five within the next few days, and told me that he would contact me about the funeral arrangements later in the week.
Half an hour later, the phone call I was dreading. It was Glenn.
He accused me of being responsible for Robbie’s death. He said, ‘You told me that I was fighting for democracy, but Robbie’s dead, Dad. Robbie’s dead!’
He said, ‘You’re my dad, you shouldn’t have let me go to Iraq, you should have stopped me.’
I let him shout and swear at me and didn’t try to defend myself, because he was correct in everything he said.
When I told him to try and get some sleep, he said, ‘After what I seen today, I’ll never sleep again.’
*
When I rang to tell Mr Carlton-Hayes about Robbie, he said, ‘The bastards, they send children to fight their filthy wars.’
I told him that I was feeling very low and wouldn’t be in today.
Wednesday July 23rd
I am morally, spiritually and financially bankrupt. Stayed in bed all day.
Thursday July 24th
Stayed in bed all day, switched my phone off.
Friday July 25th
Stayed in bed all morning. The fridge told me that the contents of the salad drawer had passed their use-by date. I ignored its nagging for as long as I could, then got out of bed, pulled the salad drawer out and threw the lettuce to Gielgud, who was guiding his sons and daughters down the canal.
At 6.30 I heard Mr Carlton-Hayes calling from the towpath. I put my bathrobe on and went out on to the balcony. He was shaking his walking stick at Gielgud.
I shouted down that I would let him in and told him to press the buzzer for unit 4; it was very strange to see him in these surroundings.
He went straight to my bookshelves and examined the contents. He took down a volume and murmured, ‘Thoreau’s Walden: Or Life in the Woods, is it a favourite of yours?’
I told him that I had read Thoreau’s rural experiment when I was nineteen and had concluded that the simple life was for simpletons.
Mr Carlton-Hayes placed the book on my coffee table and said, ‘Perhaps you should read it again.’ He was like an old-fashioned family doctor leaving a prescription.
I couldn’t make him tea or coffee because there was no milk, tea or coffee. So I opened a bottle of wine and we sat on the balcony and watched the young swans.
He asked me why I hadn’t phoned him.
I told him that I had been paralysed with shame and couldn’t bring myself to communicate with anybody. I said, ‘I believed them, when they told me our country needed to go to war, and I even encouraged my son to go to fight.’
I told him the truth about everything else that had gone wrong with my life and ended by confessing that for almost a year I had been living wildly beyond my means, spending money I hadn’t got and that I was now being forced to sell my apartment.
Mr Carlton-Hayes poured me another glass of wine and said, ‘Like Icarus, you flew too close to the sun, and your wings have melted, but I won’t let you fall into the sea, as he did, my dear. I cannot run the bookshop without you. Bernard is a hopeless drunk and I do hope he moves on soon. He’s getting rather tiresome.’
I told him that I had been having an affair with Marigold’s sister, Daisy.
He took his pipe out, packed it with aromatic tobacco and set light to the bowl. He said, ‘Love makes fools of us all. Leslie and I left our partners for each other thirty-odd years ago. It caused the most dreadful scandal at the time, but hardly a day goes by when I don’t look at Leslie and think that I did the right thing.’
He told me that he had often talked to Leslie about me, and that Leslie had said that it would be good if the three of us met up some time. He made me promise that I would do my best to come into work tomorrow. He said that we were doing very good business lately, thanks to the recent innovations, and that he wanted to talk to me about my salary.
Saturday July 26th
I hardly slept last night. I kept doing mental calculations and trying to work out when I would be clear of debt. I concluded that I will still be paying off my credit card bills when I am a pensioner. There is no possible way I can afford to pay the capital, and the int
erest will mount and mount and mount with every breath I take.
At 3.30 a.m. I got up and walked about, but the consumer durables I had so recklessly spent somebody else’s money on seemed to mock me in the pre-dawn light. As I passed the fridge, I heard it sneer, ‘Loser’.
I went into work and was given an affectionate, almost loving, welcome from Mr Carlton-Hayes. He told me, blushing and stammering, that he had talked to Leslie last night and they had agreed that the shop could afford to pay me an extra £200 a month. I blushed and stammered my thanks. Then we turned away from each other and busied ourselves in different parts of the shop.
2004
Saturday July 21st 2004
Today is the first anniversary of Robbie’s death. My mother brought a letter round to us this morning, dated yesterday.
Adrian Mole
1 The Old Pigsty
The Piggeries
Bottom Field
Lower Lane
Mangold Parva
Leicestershire
Dear Mr Mole
As you must have read recently in the press or surmised from the Butler report, Mr Tony Blair has conceded that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction within reach of Cyprus that could be deployed within forty-five minutes.
I hope that you will now desist from writing to me and asking for the return of your deposit of £57.10.
You may be interested to note that, at the time of writing, sixty British and over a thousand American troops have been killed during the war. It is estimated that between ten and twenty thousand Iraqi people have died. Nobody knows for sure, because no official body has kept count.
Yours sincerely
Johnny Bond
Latesun Travel Ltd
Daisy said, ‘Write to Johnny Bond and admit that he was right.’
At four o’clock this afternoon, Daisy and I pushed Gracie into Mangold Parva to buy a Leicester Mercury. I hardly miss the car, but Daisy complains that it is hard going walking down country lanes in high-heeled shoes.
On the way back to the Piggeries, we passed my mother and Animal, who were foraging in the hedgerows and feeding the occasional ripe berry to my father in his wheelchair.
My poor father is now Sir Clifford Chatterley to my mother’s Connie and Animal’s Mellors. But this ménage à trois seems to suit the baby boomers well enough.
My mother picked Gracie out of her pram and said to the fat little baby, ‘Oo, I could eat you alive.’
Animal broke off a piece of cow parsley and Gracie took it in her fat little fist.
When we got home we opened the Mercury at the ‘In memoriam’ page and read the notices about Robbie. There were only two: one from me and one dictated by Glenn from Bosnia.
Stainforth, Private Robert Patrick, died on July 21st 2003, in Iraq, while serving on active duty. He was sent there because vainglorious, arrogant men wanted war and he died a terrible death. He was eighteen years old.
To Private Robbie Stainforth
The old men safe behind their desks,
Who dropped the bombs on you
Will suffer in the dead of night
For in their hearts, they knew
They sent the young to fight and die on Iraqi soil
To feed the cuckoo in the West
With what it most needs:
Oil.
A. A. Mole
Stainforth, Robert (Robbie) Robbie, you were the best mate ever. This is the poem you learned off by heart.
Glenn Bott-Mole
Survivors
No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk
Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ –
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, –
Their dreams that drip with murder, and they’ll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride...
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
Siegfried Sassoon, October 1917
Sunday July 22nd
‘Happy people don’t keep a diary.’ I said this to Daisy this morning in bed.
She said, a little alarmed, ‘So why are you starting one again?’
I said, ‘I’m thinking of writing an autobiography.’
She said, ‘Kipling, I think you’re fantastically interesting, but I’m not sure other people will. I mean, you live in a pigsty with your wife and baby, bike to work, bike back, play with Gracie, work on the garden, go to bed, read, make love and sleep. What’s to write about?’