by Sue Townsend
After the twins had turned the offer down, Brianne explained that she and her brother would follow the famous professor of mathematics, Lenya Arovnikova, to Leeds. ‘Ah, Leeds,’ said the chairperson. ‘It has a remarkable mathematical faculty, world class. We tried to tempt the lovely Arovnikova here by offering her disgracefully extravagant inducements, but she emailed that she preferred to teach the children of the workers, an expression I have not heard since Brezhnev was in office, and was taking up the post of lecturer at Leeds University! Typically quixotic of her!’
Now, in the Hall of Residence, Brianne said, ‘I’d sooner try the dress on in private. I’m shy about my body.’
Poppy said, ‘No I’m coming in with you. I can help you.’
Brianne felt suffocated by Poppy. She did not want to let her inside her room. She did not want her as a friend, but despite her feelings she unlocked the door and let Poppy inside.
Brianne’s suitcase was open on the narrow bed. Poppy immediately began to unpack and put Brianne’s clothes and shoes away in the wardrobe. Brianne sat helplessly on the end of the bed, thinking that when Poppy had gone she would arrange her clothes to her own satisfaction. Poppy opened a jewellery box decorated in tiny pearlized shells and began to try on various pieces. She pulled out the silver bracelet with the three charms: a heart, a little house and a French poodle. ‘I’ll borrow this,’ said Poppy. Brianne made no objection, though she hated seeing her beloved bracelet dangling from Poppy’s thin wrist. The bracelet had been bought by Eva in late July to celebrate Brianne’s five A stars at A level. Brian Junior had already lost the cufflinks his mother had given him to commemorate his six A stars.
Brian Junior paced up and down in his shockingly tiny room. It took only three steps to move from the door to the window. He wondered why his mother had not rung as she had promised. He had unpacked earlier and everything had been neatly put away. His pens and pencils were lined up in colour order, starting with yellow and finishing with black. It was important to Brian Junior that a red pen came exactly at the centre of the line.
At ten o’clock Brian Senior came into the bedroom and started to get undressed. Eva closed her eyes. She heard his pyjama drawer open and close. She gave him a minute to climb into his pyjamas, then with her back turned to him she said, ‘Brian, I don’t want you to sleep in this bed tonight. Why don’t you sleep in Brian Junior’s room? It’s guaranteed to be clean, neat and unnaturally tidy.’
‘Are you feeling poorly?’ Brian asked. ‘Physically?’ he added.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m in good health.’
‘You’re distraught because the twins have left home.’
‘No, I’m glad to see the back of them.’
Brian’s voiced trembled with anger. ‘That’s a very wicked thing for a mother to say.’
Eva turned over and looked at him, ‘We made a pig’s ear of bringing them up,’ she said. ‘Brianne lets people walk all over her and Brian Junior panics if he has to talk to another human.’
Brian sat on the edge of the bed. ‘They’re sensitive children, I’ll give you that.’
‘Neurotic is the word,’ Eva said. "They spent their early years sitting inside a cardboard box for hours at a time.’
Brian said, ‘I didn’t know that! What were they doing?’
‘Just sitting there in silence,’ Eva replied. ‘Occasionally they would turn and look at each other. If I tried to take them out of the box they would bite and scratch. They wanted to be together in their own world.’
‘They’re gifted children.’
‘But are they happy, Brian? I can’t tell, I love them too much.’
Brian went to the door and stood there for a while as though he were about to say something more. Eva hoped that he wouldn’t make any kind of dramatic statement. She was already worn out by the strong emotion of the day. Brian opened his mouth, then evidently changed his mind, because he went out and closed the door quietly.
Eva sat up in bed, peeled the duvet away, and was shocked to see that she was still wearing her black high heels. She looked at her bedside table, which was crowded with almost identical pots and tubes of moisturizing cream. ‘I only need one,’ she thought. She chose the Chanel and threw the others one by one into the waste paper basket on the far side of the room. She was a good thrower. She had represented Leicester Girls High School in the javelin at the County Games. When her Classics teacher had congratulated her on setting the new school record, he had murmured, ‘You’re quite an Athena, Miss Brown-Bird. And by the way, you’re a smashing looking girl.’
She needed the lavatory. She was glad that she had persuaded Brian to knock through into the box room and create an en-suite bathroom and toilet. They were the last in their street of Edwardian semis to do so.
The Beavers’ house had been built in 1908. It stated so under the eaves. The Edwardian numbers were surrounded by a stone frieze of stylized ivy and sweet woodbine. There are a few house buyers who choose their next property for purely romantic reasons and Eva was such a person. Her father had smoked woodbine cigarettes and the green packet, decorated with wild woodbine, was a fixture of her childhood. Luckily, the house had been lived in by a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge who had resisted the 1960s hysteria to modernize. It was intact, with spacious rooms, high ceilings, mouldings, fireplaces and solid oak doors.
Brian hated it. He wanted a ‘machine for living’. He imagined himself in a sleek white kitchen waiting by the espresso machine for his morning coffee. He did not want to live a mile from the city centre. He wanted a Corbusier-style glass-and-steel box with rural views and a big sky. He had explained to the estate agent that he was an astronomer and that his telescopes would not cope with light pollution. The estate agent had looked at Brian and Eva and was mystified as to how two such extremes of personality and taste could have married in the first place.
Eventually, Eva had informed Brian that she could not live in a minimalist modular system, far from street lighting, and that she had to live in a house. Brian had countered that he did not want to live in an old house in which people had died, with bed bugs, fleas, rats and mice. When he first viewed the Edwardian house he’d complained that he could feel a ‘century of dust clogging his lungs’.
Eva liked the fact that the house was opposite another road, and that through the large, handsome windows she could see the tall buildings of the city centre, and beyond that, woodland and the open countryside with hills in the far distance. Eventually, due to the extreme shortage of modernist living quarters in rural Leicestershire, they had bought the detached Edwardian villa at 15 Bowling Green Road, for £46,999. Brian and Eva took possession in April 1985 after three years of living with Yvonne, Brian’s mother. Eva had never regretted standing up to Brian and Yvonne about the house. It had been worth enduring the three weeks of sulking that followed.
When she turned the light on in the bathroom she was confronted by myriad images of herself. A thin, early-middle-aged woman with cropped blonde hair, high cheekbones and French-grey eyes. At her instruction, as she thought it would make the room appear larger, the builder had installed large mirrors on three sides of the room. Almost immediately she had wanted to tell him to take most of it away but hadn’t had the courage, so whenever she sat down on the loo she could see herself ad infinitum.
She removed her clothes and stepped into the shower, avoiding the mirrors. Her mother had said to her recently, ‘No wonder you’ve got no flesh on your bones, you never sit down. You even eat your dinner standing up.’ This was true. After she had served Brian, Brian Junior and Brianne she would go back into the kitchen and pick at the meat and vegetables in their respective saucepans and roasting tins. Anxiety about cooking a meal, taking it to the table on time, keeping it hot and hoping that the conversation around the table would not be too contentious, seemed to produce a surge of stomach acid that made food dull and tasteless.
The wire shelf unit in the corner of the shower was a jumble of shampoos, conditioners
and shower gels. Eva spent a few moments selecting her favourites and threw the rejects into the bin next to the sink. She re-dressed quickly and put on her high-heeled court shoes. They gave her an extra three and a half inches in height, and she needed to feel powerful tonight. She strode around the room rehearsing what she was going to say to Brian when he next tried to get into her bed. She would have to act quickly, before she lost her nerve. She would bring up how he undermined her in public; the way he introduced her to his friends by saying, ‘And this is the Klingon.’ How he had bought her twenty-five pounds’ worth of lottery tickets for her last birthday. But then she thought about how quickly his bombast deflated, and how sad he had looked when she had asked him to sleep somewhere else. She stood near the bedroom door for a few moments, thinking through the consequences, then climbed back into bed, withdrawing from the potential battle.
She was startled awake at 3.15 a.m. by Brian screaming and fighting the duvet. His bedside light snapped on. When her eyes became accustomed to the light, she saw Brian stamping his foot on the carpet and holding his right calf.
‘Cramp?’ she said.
‘Not cramp. Your high heels. You’ve kicked a hole in my leg!’
‘You should have stayed in Brian Junior’s room and not come sneaking back into mine.’
Brian said, ‘Your room? It used to be ours.’
Brian was not good with pain or blood and here he was in the early hours of the morning, with both. He began to wail. When Eva had orientated herself she could see that there actually was a hole in his leg.
‘A lot of blood; wash the wound clean,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to bathe it with distilled water and iodine.’
Eva had no intention of leaving the bed. Instead, she reached over and plucked the bottle of Chanel No. 5 off her bedside table. She pointed the nozzle at Brian’s wound and pressed, keeping her finger on the spray mechanism. Brian squealed, hopped across the beige carpet and out of the door.
She had done the right thing, Eva thought, as she drifted back off to sleep. Everybody knows that Chanel No. 5 is a good antiseptic in an emergency.
At about four thirty Eva was woken again. Brian was limping around the bedroom shouting, ‘Ouch!’ at regular intervals. When she sat up, Brian said, ‘I phoned NHS Direct. They employ morons! Idiots! Plonkers! Fools! Half-wits! Ding-bats! Cretins! Hamburger-flippers! Pond-life!’
Eva said wearily, ‘Brian, please. Don’t you get tired of fighting the world?’
He said, ‘No, I don’t much like the world.’
Eva felt a terrible pity for her husband as he stood at the end of the bed, naked, with a white linen napkin tied around one leg and with toast crumbs in his beard. Eva turned away from him. He was an intrusion in what was now her bedroom.
Sue Townsend
Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946 and left school at fifteen. She married at eighteen, and by twenty-three was a single parent with three children. She worked in a variety of jobs, including as a factory worker, shop assistant, and as a youth worker at adventure playgrounds. She wrote in secret for twenty years, eventually joining a writers’ group at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in her thirties.
At the age of thirty-five, she won the Thames Television Playwright Award for her first play, Womberang, and started her writing career. Other plays followed, including The Great Celestial Cow (1984), Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990) and You, Me and Wii (2010), but she is most well-known for her series of books about Adrian Mole, which she originally began writing in 1975.
The first of these, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾, was published in 1982 and was followed by The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984). These two books made her the best-selling novelist of the 1980s. They have been followed by several more in the same series, including Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993); Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004); and most recently Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009). The books have been adapted for radio, television and theatre, the first being broadcast on radio in 1982. Sue also wrote the screenplays for television adaptations of the first and second books, and Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (published 1993, BBC television adaptation 2001).
Several of her books have been adapted for the stage, including The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾: the Play (1985) and The Queen and I: a Play with Songs (1994), which was performed by the Out of Joint Touring Company at the Vaudeville Theatre and toured Australia. The latter is based on another of her books, in which the Royal Family become deposed and take up residence on a council estate in Leicester. Other books include Rebuilding Coventry (1998), Ghost Children (1997), and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (2012).
She was an honorary MA of Leicester University, and in 2008 she was made a Distinguished Honorary Fellow, the highest award the University can give. She was an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Loughborough University, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her other awards included 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.
Sue was registered blind in 2001, and had a kidney transplant in 2009. She continued writing using a mixture of longhand and dictation. Sue passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight. She is widely regarded as Britain’s favourite comic writer.
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.