Adrian Mole author Sue Townsend saw girl strangled aged 8
SHE is known as the creator of angst-ridden teenage diarist Adrian Mole. But Sue Townsend had a secret childhood trauma of her own – when she was eight she witnessed the murder of a young schoolgirl.
The author’s chilling ordeal has emerged in a new TV documentary about her life. It comes two years after she died aged 68 following a stroke and includes footage filmed by a friend in 2005 but never previously broadcast.
The programme tells how on May 22, 1953, the then Susan Johnstone had climbed a tree while playing with friends in a wood near her Leicester home. Hidden among the branches they watched in horror as a man, later revealed to be Joseph Reynolds, arrived dragging his 12-year-old victim Janet Warner behind him.
The children froze as the unemployed labourer from Dublin strangled the girl against the tree trunk. ‘My memory was that he was dragging her by the throat and he strangled her,’ Townsend recalls in the documentary to be shown on BBC2 on Saturday.
The terrified children waited for the killer to leave before they had the courage to ‘jump down over her body’ and run for help, the author says. They arrived at a sweet shop run by a ‘bloke called Mr Gibson’ where Townsend told him what they had seen. ‘But he disbelieved us and told us to get out,’ she says in the film, The Secret Life of Sue Townsend (Aged 68¾). However, she and her friends were vindicated within days when police charged Reynolds, 31, with murder.
Janet had been strangled with her school tie after being attacked by Reynolds while walking her dog. He confessed and was hanged five months later.
Although the novelist never wrote about the incident directly, she recognises that it had a profound impact on her.
‘My memory is of me at eight being an adult – being grown-up and coping in a grown-up way with things that little children shouldn’t have to cope with. It is also astonishing how many writers have suffered similar things. It turns you in on yourself. You become very aware of atmosphere. You notice things,’ she says.
Her widower, Colin Broadway, recalled in the Sunday Times how his wife would talk about the traumatic ordeal.
‘Sue would tell me what really upset her was that she was not believed by that shopkeeper. She felt this was probably because she came from the wrong side of the tracks,’ he said.
Townsend, the daughter of a postman and school dinner lady, left school at 15 with no qualifications. At 18 she married childhood sweetheart Kei t h Townsend, a metal worker, and they had three children.
The marriage collapsed when she was 25 but she had been writing in secret and was later encouraged to continue by Mr Broadway, with whom she had a fourth child. The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ was published in 1982 and was hailed as a comic masterpiece, selling more than 20 million copies.
The author’s health deteriorated in her later years. She went blind in 2001, used a wheelchair because of degenerative arthritis and needed a kidney transplant.