Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years

by Sue Townsend

  LADY ELEANOR: A cucumber sandwich, Edwin?

  EDWIN: Don’t try to fob me off with your bourgeois ideas of gentility. I know the truth!

  LADY ELEANOR (gasps): No! Surely not! You don’t know the secret I have kept for forty years!

  EDWIN (contemptuously): Yes, I do. The servant girl, Millie, told me.

  A bell rings.

  MILLIE: You rang, mum? Sorry to keep you, only I was ‘elpin’ cook with Master Edwin’s twenty-first birthday cake.

  LADY ELEANOR: You are dismissed, Millie. You have blabbed my secret.

  MILLIE: What secret? Oh! The one about your being born a man?

  To be continued

  I do not wish to prejudice you in any way, but after I had finished reading this text, there was a stunned silence from my fellow writers. Angela’s only comment was, ‘You should have spun the secret out until the last scene of the play.’

  Good advice, I think.

  Anyway, I hope you enjoy The Cucumber Sandwich.

  Yours,

  With best wishes,

  Adrian Mole

  Faxos

  Thursday April 9th

  Dear Jo Jo,

  The sun has shone for two days now and has turned Naxos into Paradise. The colours are breathtaking: the sea is peacock blue, the grass is peppermint green and the wild flowers are scattered on the hillside like living confetti.

  Something has happened to my body. It feels looser, as though it has broken free and is floating.

  I have been going to dream workshops at 7.00 a.m. The facilitator is a nice American woman dream therapist called Clara. I told her about a recurring dream I have that I am trying to pick up the last pea on my dinner plate by stabbing it with a fork. Try as I may, I cannot get the prongs of the fork to stab into the flesh of the pea.

  For years I have woken up feeling frustrated and hungry after dreaming my pea dream.

  Clara advised me to look at the dream from the pea’s point of view. I did try hard to do this and, by discussing it with Clara later, I understood that I, Adrian Mole, was the pea and that the fork represented DEATH.

  Clara said that my pea dream showed that I am afraid to die.

  But who is looking forward to death? I don’t know anybody who is cock-a-hoop at the prospect.

  Clara explained that I am morbidly afraid of death.

  How do you feel about death, Jo Jo?

  I have made friends with the bloke with the beaded plaits like yours. His name is Sean Washington. His mother is Irish; his father is from St Kitts. He is here taking the stress management course, but he hangs out with the writers’ group on the bar terrace.

  We were both on vegetable chopping duties today and I was complimented by him and others on my expertise. I think I would like to be a chef. I may ask Savage if he’ll give me a trial when I get back.

  Angela Hacker has forbidden her writers’ group to use cliches, but she will not be reading this letter, so I’ll sign off by saying:

  Wish you were here,

  Adrian

  Saturday April 11th

  My first fax! It was addressed to Adrian Mole, Naxos Institute’, and arrived at the travel agent’s shop in the town. It was then conveyed to the Naxos Institute by greengrocer’s van and delivered to me on the bar terrace by Julian, the handsome bald-headed administrator. It caused a sensation.

  Dear Adrian,

  Thank you for your letters. I wish I were there with you. It sounds idyllic.

  I’m so glad that you feel at ease. When I first saw you in Savage’s kitchen, I thought: that man is in pain. I wanted to touch you and comfort you there and then, but of course one does not do such a thing – not in England.

  I think you have it in your power to become a happy man, providing you can let go of the past. Why not try to live in the present and leave all that baggage behind on Faxos when you return?

  I couldn’t wait to tell you that I have been offered a shared exhibition of ‘Young Contemporaries’ in September. Will you come to the opening? Please say you will.

  Roberto is complaining that the man Savage has hired to take your place for a fortnight is massacring the vegetables and he now regrets letting you go on holiday.

  Everybody at ‘Savages’ sends their best wishes. Roberto asks if you will bring a bottle of ouzo back for him.

  I miss you.

  I send you my best wishes as well,

  Jo Jo

  Hut Number Six

  Faxos Institute

  Faxos

  Sunday April 12th

  Dear Jo Jo,

  What fantastic news about the exhibition! Of course I will come to the opening. September seems a long way off, though. The spring is so glorious here. I’ve never seen such colours before.

  At our meeting yesterday morning Angela Hacker asked the writers’ group to write the first page of a novel.

  I wanted to run up the hill to my hut immediately and present her with the whole manuscript of Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, but I restrained myself. The book was only a few pages short of completion. Why spoil the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar? (Since being forbidden to use cliches, I find myself using them all the time.)

  I worked all day and most of the night on Lo! And I think that now the book is finished. This is how it ends:

  Jake got up from his computer terminal and paced around his study. He adjusted the painting of a stately African woman that he had recently bought in an exhibition.

  He then stared moodily out of the window and watched a child dragging a stick along the ground.

  Jake was desperate to finish Sparg from Kronk. He could hear the printer banging on his door, demanding the finished manuscript. His publisher had been admitted to hospital the night before with nervous strain, but the ending of his book continued to elude him.

  The child outside the window stopped to scratch the stick into the dry earth of drought-hit London.

  ‘Goddit!’ shouted Jake, and he leaped into his state-of-the-art typing chair and began to write the end of his book.

  Sparg wrestled with Krun, his father, for possession of the stick. He wondered why they were fighting over this particular stick. There were plenty of others lying around.

  He looked at his father’s old face, now disfigured by anger, and thought: why are we doing this? He let go of the stick and allowed his father to take it away.

  Sparg sat on the baked earth and thought, if only there was language, we wouldn’t have to be so damned physical.

  He poked his finger into the dust. He drew it along. In a few minutes, he had made marks and symbols.

  Before the sun had gone down, he had written the first page of his novel. He hoped it wouldn’t rain in the night and obliterate his work.

  Tomorrow, he would continue his work inside a cave, he thought. What should he call his novel? He grunted to himself and tried out several titles. Finally, he settled on one and hurried to the big cave to scratch it on the wall before he forgot:

  A BOOK WITH NO LANGUAGE

  Yes, that was it. And he picked up a stick and began to gnaw the end of it into a point.

  Jake could hardly wait for the electronic printer to spew out the typewritten page.

  ‘At last,’ he jubilated, ‘I have finished Sparg from Kronk!’

  Please let me know what you think, Jo Jo. I really value your opinion.

  I gave the completed manuscript to Angela Hacker this morning. She took it from me and groaned, ‘Sodding hell. I only asked for one page!’ Then she put it into the blue raffia bag that she carries everywhere with her and continued her conversation with Clara about a dream she’d had of being chased by a giant cockroach.

  At 11.00 p.m., after spending the evening with my friends, singing on the bar terrace, I got back to my hut to find that the following note had been slipped under my door:

  Adrian,

  I’ve skipped through Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland. I won’t waste words. It’s typical juvenilia and has no merit at all. Sparg from
Kronk has been done a million times, dearest boy. But A Book With No Language – Sparg’s novel – is a truly brilliant concept.

  I would like you to come and see me when we get back to London. I’d like to introduce you to my agent, Sir Gordon Giles. I think your originality will appeal to him.

  Congratulations! You are a writer.

  Angela Hacker

  I may be a writer, Jo Jo, but I can’t find the words to express my happiness.

  My plane gets into Gatwick on Wednesday at 3.00 p.m.

  Love from,

  Adrian

  Tuesday April 14th

  Angela Hacker announced this morning that the writers’ group’s last meeting was to be held on ‘Bare Bum Beach’. My penis shrivelled at the thought. I have never appeared in the nude in public before. ‘Bare Bum Beach’ is where the extrovert and confident desport themselves. I am neither of these things. However, after three glasses of retsina at lunchtime I found myself slithering over the rocks, heading for the nudist beach.

  I was astounded by the ridiculous blue of the sea. The rocks shone pink as I stumbled towards the beach which was the colour of custard. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to shrug my shorts off and embrace the sand. For twelve long years I have worried about the size of my penis. Now, at last, by glancing at my fellow male writers I could see that I am made as other men. I easily fell within the ‘normal’ range.

  At half past six in the evening I turned over and exposed myself to the sun. Nothing terrible happened.

  There was no thunderbolt. Men and women did not run away, shrieking in horror at the sight of my full frontal nakedness.

  I walked into the sea and swam towards the blood-red sunset. I allowed myself to float and to drift. It was almost dark when I swam back to the beach. I did not use my towel. I let the water dry on my body.

  I walked back to the Institute in pale moonlight. I took a short cut through the woods. The floor was covered in pine needle debris, every footstep was a crackling aromatic delight.

  I walked ankle deep through a glade of soft grass and wild flowers. Then I smelled honeysuckle and felt a tendril brush across my face. I reached the headland and stood for a moment, looking down at the Institute. The kitchen door was open. Out of it spilled bright light, laughter and the delicious smell of grilling meat.

  Wednesday April 15th

  10.00 p.m. I saw Jo Jo waiting beyond the barrier. I threw all my baggage down and ran towards her.