Postie’s daughter who made us laugh at the agonies of adolescence
WHEN t he Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ was published in 1982, I was a little younger than the Sage of Leicester. I was aged 11 ½, to be precise, but, still, Adrian Mole spoke to me like no other book published during my childhood.
It’s hard enough to write a character of a different gender. How Sue Townsend — who died, aged 68, after suffering a stroke on Thursday night — managed to get inside the tortured, self-doubting mind of a teenage boy is miraculous.
Some have said she was inspired by her oldest son, Sean. But even with a real-life inspiration, Mole’s creation was an extraordinary feat of imagination.
He deserves a slot among the immortal children of comic literature — alongside Billy Bunter, Just William, Alice In Wonderland and Nigel Molesworth, the Fifties prep school pupil created by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.
Adrian Mole mirrored my thoughts as I negotiated the horrifically awkward foothills of adolescence. Boys of that age are far less mature than girls — and they view those girls with half fear, half adulation.
Townsend got that cocktail of emotions spot on in Adrian’s clumsy devotion to the heavenly Pandora Braithwaite: ‘ Pandora has got hair the colour of treacle, and it’s long like girls’ hair should be. She has quite a good figure. I saw her playing netball and her chest was wobbling. I felt a bit funny. I think this is it!’
That sort of writing is easy to read, but ever so hard to write. And, reading Adrian Mole again, it’s still compelling. Like all great children’s literature, it’s great adult literature, too. And, indeed, it went on to become the biggest-selling novel of the Eighties: the eight Adrian Mole novels were translated into 40 languages, selling ten million copies.
Adrian Mole didn’t just give an insight into adolescence; he also gave an insight into the Thatcher age, which was just getting into its stride in 1982.
To put it in crude, classbased terms, Adrian’s parents, George and Pauline, are workingclass with few of the self-improvement aspirations of their son. Part of Adrian’s charm is his desperate desire to get on in life: ‘None of the teachers at school have noticed that I am an intellectual. They will be sorry when I am famous.’
Political incidents are woven into the books, but they are never inserted in a heavy-handed way. Pandora later becomes a Blair Babe MP; Pauline Mole briefly becomes an extreme feminist and decamps to Greenham Common.
In the 2004 novel, Adrian Mole And The Weapons of Mass Destruction, Adrian is convinced that the WMDs in Iraq exist. one of the side themes of the books is how wonky Adrian’s political radar is.
Townsend was an avowed socialist but Margaret Thatcher, who pops up a lot, is no wicked witch in the books, more another useful comic device: ‘Sheffield looks oK, just like home really. I didn’t see any knife and fork factories. I expect Margaret Thatcher has closed them all down.’
Unlike most British writers at the time, Townsend came f rom a working-class background — and she could write about workingclass life without being patronising or trying to flaunt any bleedingheart credentials.
Townsend was born, the oldest of five sisters, in 1946 in Leicester — also Adrian’s home town before the Moles move to nearby Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Her father worked in a jet-engine factory and as a postman; her mother worked in the factory canteen.
Early signs of a writer’s career were not plentiful. She only started reading at eight, failed the 11-plus and left school at 15. At 18, she married a sheet-metal worker and had three children (with a fourth child by her second husband).
After her seven-year marriage ended, her jobs, too, didn’t promise great things. She worked as a receptionist, both at a petrol station and for Birds Eye Foods.
But, always, from the age of 14, she was writing away. Yesterday, her old milkman in Leicester in the late Seventies rang the Mail to explain how devoted to writing she was.
‘She was hard-up and living in reduced circumstances,’ says Brian Belsher, now 77.
‘I once saw her with her shopping bags, picking up empty bottles as she walked along. She told me that she was collecting the empties to reclaim the deposit. She’d pay for her milk with welfare tokens. Then, one day, I knocked on the door and she didn’t answer.
‘When I left, she ran down the street after me, saying: “I’m sorry. I was writing.” She was holding grey exercise books that she’d written long-hand. It was Adrian Mole.’
It still took a few years for Adrian Mole to make it out of those books and into the big-time. Her second husband, Colin Broadway, urged her to join a writers’ group at Leicester’s Phoenix Arts Theatre.
Her first play, Womberang, set in an NHS gynaecological ward, won the 1979 Thames Television Playwright award. This encouraged her to re-work those exercise books and their starring character — originally called Nigel Mole.
Nigel Mole first appeared in a Radio 4 play in 1982 before jumping onto the page as Adrian Mole. The name was changed because of its similarity to Nigel Molesworth. Fame and fortune came pouring in, and the books started pouring out.
Townsend wrote the eight Mole novels, two non-fiction books, 12 plays and six other novels, including The Queen And I, a 1992 fantasy about the monarch living on a council estate after a British revolution. Her last novel, The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year, was published two years ago.
Despite her millions, Townsend didn’t move from her home city, buying a Victorian vicarage there. She admitted that all the money hadn’t been entirely beneficial — and she had given lots of it away.
The fame, too, had its downside. ‘I felt people were disappointed when they met me,’ she said. ‘They wanted someone l i ke Barbara Taylor Bradford, in furs.’
It didn’t help that she had rotten luck with her health. At 23, she had TB peritonitis. In her 30s, she had a heart attack and developed arthritis, which led to her using a wheelchair.
SHE was diabetic and, from the Nineties, the disease began to affect her sight — awful for anyone, but particularly so for someone addicted to reading and writing. By 2001, she was registered blind and began dictating her books, usually to her son, Sean.
When kidney failure struck, it was Sean who, i n 2009, donated a kidney. Last year, she suffered a stroke, as she did again this week.
Her ill-health is often reflected in the books. Adrian Mole develops cancer, while his best friend, Nigel Hetherington, goes blind.
Like all great literary characters, her greatest creation transcends time and place. He falls into a peculiarly British category of comedy, too — what you might call the celebration of failure, which was encapsulated in characters like Captain Mainwaring and Basil Fawlty.
Sue Townsend was sometimes concerned that she was so closely identified with a single character. ‘Adrian Mole, c’est moi,’ as she put it. But perhaps the truth of it was that there is a part of Adrian Mole in all of us, and that is why we loved him so much.