Blog Post 26: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (1982)
Thursday January 1st
BANK HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND,
IRELAND, SCOTLAND AND WALESThese are my New Year’s resolutions:
1. I will help the blind across the road.
2. I will hang my trousers up.
3. I will put the sleeves back on my records.
4. I will not start smoking.
5. I will stop squeezing my spots.
6. I will be kind to the dog.
7. I will help the poor and ignorant.
8. After hearing the disgusting noises from downstairs last night, I have also vowed never to drink alcohol.
Adrian Mole is one of the greatest ever comic creations. Quintessentially British with all the quirks, worries, frustrations, conformity, good intentions, disillusionments, and misinterpretations that come with it. And he is a teenager, on the cusp of growing up, dealing with his parents whose marriage is falling apart, his first love, comprehensive school, an uncooperative body, and a certain amount of existential angst.
It is fitting that Sue Townsend should be included in my list of #100WomenNovelists of the 20th Century. She was a rare gift, a writer who truly knew what it was to be human. She wrote with wit and empathy and always with a thread of poignancy and tenderness. Adrian Mole was her greatest creation. Like Pooter before him, and Bridget Jones after him, he is the fool who shines a light on the truth of the human condition. Often unreliable in his narration, we the reader can see the bigger picture that he unwittingly shows us.
Wednesday January 21st
Mr and Mrs Lucas are getting a divorce! They are the first down our road. My mother went next door to comfort Mr Lucas. He must have been very upset because she was still there when my father came home from work. Mrs Lucas has gone somewhere in a taxi. I think she has left for ever because she has taken her socket set with her. Poor Mr Lucas, now he will have to do his own washing and stuff.
Adrian Mole would now be 50. I have known him a long time. I have grown up with him. We were first introduced when I was 12 and he was 13 and I immediately found someone who I could laugh at and with. He is so recognisable and yet so unique, accompanying us through our own times, living through Thatcherism and Blairism, boil-in-the-bag cod and tinned peaches with Dream-topping. If you want social history, any history, read Adrian’s diary. And such a loss to our literary world that Sue Townsend died at 68, because Adrian is no longer able to grow old, except in our imaginations. Apparently Sue Townsend was about to write the next diary to be called ‘Pandora’s Box’. We shall never know whether Adrian finally wins back the love of his life.
David Nicholls, the same age as the diarist, wrote a piece for the Guardian earlier this year. He sums up my feelings.
‘The anxiety about acne and nuclear war, the perpetual sense of injustice, the anguish of the unrecognised intellectual, the reverence for the BBC and reliance on the public library in the endless quest for self-improvement, it was all here, and made blissfully funny in a sustained, near flawless piece of comic ventriloquism…Adrian was entirely average; a middle-achieving Everyboy from the Midlands, not as posh as Pandora or Nigel, posher than the terrifying Barry Kent, unremarkable, invisible, with everything happening below the surface like, well, a mole. The Secret Diary was smartly written, stuffed full of in-jokes and references to Orwell and Flaubert and Simone de Beauvoir, but it made sense to people who weren’t quite sure what a campus looked like, and there was also a compassion so much other comedy seemed to lack. Often touching, sometimes angry, never sentimental but always sympathetic, and with an extraordinarily high joke-per-page ratio, no wonder its appeal was so immense. Boys and girls read Adrian Mole, adults and teenagers, all of us wondering the same thing: “How does Sue Townsend know?”
How did she know?
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