Of Adrian Mole creator I had to call ‘Daddy’
A childhood spent in fear, a family living a lie . . . and a story that so traumatised Sue Townsend she could not share it until after her death
shop assistant and as a youth worker on adventure playgrounds before, finally, her literary talent burst into the open.
It was two decades ago that Sue told me the awful truth about those teenage years, but I remember it vividly because the repercussions of my questions about her father were so violent and distressing. She looked devastated as I took out the article by John Lahr and began to read from it. She didn’t move from her chair. She simply said: ‘I have been waiting for this. I knew it would happen one day.’ She went on to say that she would not, could not, talk about it. I wondered if she would ask me to leave, but she didn’t. There was no bad feeling, no reproach. It was obvious that she was pulled in two directions – both wanting to talk and fearing to talk. But she was happy to confirm to me everything that she had told to Lahr. Indeed she expanded the story and embellished it.
Sue recalled how, when Ball appeared for the first time that day at breakfast, her mother said to her and her sisters: ‘Aren’t you going to talk to your daddy?’
During our interview, Sue was frank and open about her life. We had both had similar operations as young women and I remember comparing scars. Most of her life had been plagued by ill health. She had peritonitis in her 20s, a heart attack in her late 30s; was diagnosed with diabetes in 1986 and would go on to lose her sight in the late 1990s.
But the first time she recalled being seriously ill, she told me, was when she was eight – around the time that her real father died.
As we went on to talk about this, I asked her why she had not challenged her mother, then or later, about the ‘lie’ that she had maintained all her life.
Sue said only that it was extremely important to her mother to maintain face on the council estate that they had recently moved to. It was a convenient lie, Sue said.
She was so uninhibited as a personality and so candid that I summoned up the courage to ask her about the suspicion that was growing in the back of my mind.
Did your stepfather abuse you? ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course he did.’
Shocked at her reaction, I offered to abandon the interview. In the end we agreed that I would write it and send it to her for her approval before publication.
And that is how we parted. I had no sense that she would not approve. I sent her the article a few days later.
Then all hell broke loose. I was telephoned by her literary agent, the late Giles Gordon, who told me that he feared Sue would have another heart attack if a piece claiming John Ball was not her father was published.
Then came two phone calls from a female caller. She was hysterical and abusive – as unlike Sue as could be imagined.
In the first call, she told me that Sue had threatened to commit suicide if the interview appeared. The next phone call was directly threatening. ‘We know you have young children and we know where you live,’ the caller said.
Confronted with so much emotional turmoil and fearing for Sue’s health, it was decided that the piece should not be published.
Sue never contacted me herself and, over the years, I wondered if she would one day decide to tell the story in her own words.
As time went by she revealed more and more of her ‘secrets’ in her interviews.
In 1997, with the publication of her novel Ghost Children, she talked about the two abortions she had after the birth of Elizabeth – her only child with Colin.
At the time she said: ‘ Ghost Children is about people who have children and treat them terribly. And I guess that’s how I feel about family life.’
Later, in a telling interview for the Observer, she referred to her ability for ‘blocking things off’. Some secrets she evidently used as protection. She kept her writing private from all her family until the point came in the writing group she attended where it was so transparently brilliant it could no longer be ignored. And she was always brave.
ON THAT odd day in her home, we talked a lot about big moral themes and she spoke about betrayal. Her first husband left her for an 18year-old, ‘very beautiful, dressed in purple velvet’. Sue never judged her. She believed in great passion, she said. ‘They just fell in love.’
She was brave enough twice to tell complete strangers that she had been sexually abused, painful as it must have been to do so.
The day that she told me, I knew that she must also have told John Lahr. When I asked him if he was happy for me to reveal finally that she had told him she had been abused, he said: ‘Of course.’
Sue had an extraordinary talent for happiness. The day she received her first royalty cheque she wandered up and down London’s Bond Street, going into shops looking for anything she might want. For the first time in her life she could buy anything. ‘And there was nothing.’ Later she bought homes for all her children and, as her success grew, she was able to buy a canoe-making factory for her husband. But ostentation was never her style. She liked her life just as it was.
Yet there is one statement she made that is truly haunting, and which many of her readers – seeing only the cosier side of her writing – will find hard to reconcile
‘My dark secrets are life threatening,’ she told me. ‘ Pockets of unhappiness set in aspic that build and build. I have this primitive feeling that if something good happens, it is going to be followed by something bad. There is always a price to pay.’
The way she lived her life was in many ways an antidote to this.
Gradually, her secrets were told and they lost their power over her. I hope that, by the end, they had lost that power completely.