Postie's daughter who made us laugh at the agonies of adolescence

By Harry Mount

Published: 18:18 EST, 11 April 2014 | Updated: 03:44 EST, 12 April 2014

Sue Townsend, who managed to capture the mind and spirit of a 13-year-old better than any other

Sue Townsend, who managed to capture the mind and spirit of a 13-year-old better than any other

When the 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!’

Child star: Adrian Mole, as played by Gian Sammarco in the television series

Child star: Adrian Mole, as played by Gian Sammarco in the television series

The Adrian Mole books gave an insight into many different things, from the minds of teenagers to the political upheaval of the time

The Adrian Mole books gave an insight into many different things, from the minds of teenagers to the political upheaval of the time

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.

 

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To put it in crude, class-based terms, Adrian’s parents, George and Pauline, are working-class 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.’

Sue Townsend died, after a battling ill health, of a stroke, aged 68

Sue Townsend died, after a battling ill health, of a stroke, aged 68

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.

THE WIT & WISDOM OF ADRIAN MOLE

  •  ‘My SPOTS are so horrific that I can’t bear to write about them. I will be the laughing stock at school. I am reading The Man In The Iron Mask. I know exactly how he feels.’
  • 'Perhaps when I am famous and my diary is discovered people will understand the torment of being a 13 ¾-year-old undiscovered intellectual.’
  • ‘My MOTHER wants to move. She wants to sell the house that I have lived in all my life. She said that we will need more room ‘for the baby’. How stupid can you get? Babies hardly take any space at all. They are only about 21 in long.’
  • On Pandora, the object of his desire: ‘Pandora smiled at me in school dinner today, but I was choking on a piece of gristle so I couldn’t smile back. Just my luck!’
    n Valentine’s Day ditty: ‘Pandora!/ I adore ya./  I implore ye/ Don’t  ignore me.’
  • ‘I have never seen a dead body or a female nipple. This is what comes from living in a cul de sac.’
  • ‘I was racked with sexuality, but it wore off when I helped my father put manure on our  rose bed.’
  • ‘Now I know I am an intellectual. I saw Malcolm Muggeridge on the television last night and I understood nearly every word.’
  • ‘Evelyn Waugh must be dead proud of his daughter, Auberon.’
  • And Sue Townsend’s favourite quote? It’s the last line of the first diary, written after Mole 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 …’

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 from a working-class background — and she could write about working-class life without being patronising or trying to flaunt any bleeding-heart 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.

Political incidents of the time the books are set are mentioned, but are never heavy-handed, and instead viewed from the perspective of the eponymous hero

Political incidents of the time the books are set are mentioned, but are never heavy-handed, and instead viewed from the perspective of the eponymous hero

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 like Barbara Taylor Bradford, in furs.’

The original book jacket cover of The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4

The original book jacket cover of The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4

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, in 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.

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Read all your novels absolutely fabulous from adrian to the queen to being in bed for a year, I will miss this truly great authoress rip sue love is the only thing that keeps me sane xxx

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So sad about this, RIP Sue Townsend, and thank you

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Loved her book The Queen and I

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HEY SUE-----HOW ABOUT A SEQUEL NOW ---DIARY OF A TEENAGE ANGEL !!!

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Idiot

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Idiot

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So sad she had so much ill health, she comes across as a genuine and genuinely loved, talented human being. Glad she stayed down-to-earth, I'm sure it informed her writing. Blessings to her family.

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such a sad loss, RIP Sue :(

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Sad sad sad ! :( I have read all the Adrian Mole books so many time I cannot count,, I read them when I am having a hard time because they make me cry with laughter ! I quote Adrian with a friend when the situation calls and we laugh then ! Sue Townsend THANK YOU SO SO MUCH !

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Loved the tv series and the books they were brilliants but gently observed so far funnier and also occasionally poignant. Much better crafted than much to today's crude in your face humour.

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Am I alone in finding Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole character and stories repellant? This supposedly brilliant writer ("everybody" agrees so it must be true) far from having insight into the pains of adolescence always seemed to me to be mining the problems of adolescence (male specifically) as a rich source of laughs. In the process she helped create a popular image of teenage boys as sad and pathetic with their private doubts and anxieties held up to ridicule.

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Clearly you are more of a "pie in the face" kind ! You know,, subtle humour is far above your reach,,, rather like Adrian me thinks !

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How insensitive. Judging by your Jpeg you enjoy causing sorrow.

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Proof indeed how much her work permeated the lives of her readers... I proper cried when I heard the news yesterday. I was given TSDOAM when I myself was 13 and 3/4 and roared laughing whilst reading it. And as I grew older so did Adrian. THANK YOU so much Sue for so many years of laughter that I will always be grateful for. RIP XX

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