Sue Townsend was the writer whose diaries of spotty teenager Adrian Mole became a publishing sensation
Sue Townsend, who has died aged 68, was the creator of Adrian Mole, the spotty, lovestruck teenager from Ashby-de-la-Zouch whose comic chronicles of myriad anxieties – political, intellectual, social, sexual – proved the publishing phenomenon of the 1980s and were turned into successful television series, starring Gian Sammarco as the title character.
Including various omnibuses, there were eventually nine volumes of Mole’s diaries; the last – The Prostate Years, published in 2009 – documented him battling cancer as a middle-aged man who runs a bookshop. But it was the early books that particularly gripped the reading public, selling millions of copies and transforming Sue Townsend, a self-confessed “Old Labour type”, from a poverty-stricken single mother-of-three into a rich woman.
Sue Townsend's 'The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4'
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, as the first volume was titled on publication in 1982, unveiled a boy clear-eyed enough to assess the world around him but powerless to shape his own fate. His pursuit of the treacle-haired, middle-class Pandora is defeated by acne, and his self-declared intellectual inclinations by the fact that “I am not very clever”. His slight teenaged frame carried a large dollop of guilt about the state of the nation itself.
While The Secret Diary was devoured by teenagers looking for fiction that accurately reflected their own experiences, Adrian Mole was also a sufficiently convincing Everyman to appeal to other generations too. On the canvas that he provided, Sue Townsend was able to paint a satirical portrait of the day. Mole, she admitted, “is me. He is all of us, to a greater or lesser degree.”
Susan Lillian Townsend was born on April 2 1946 in Leicester, the eldest child in a working-class family. Her father worked in a factory making jet engines before becoming a postman; her mother was a housewife who also worked in the factory canteen. They were, Sue Townsend later said, “very clever” but “idiosyncratic”, and she did not learn to read until she was eight.
No scholar, Sue failed her 11-plus and left South Wigston High School at 15. But, belatedly, the internal, secret world of books increasingly played a central part in her existence. Having started on Richmal Crompton’s Just William, she quickly graduated to Jane Eyre, and from there to Dostoevsky. “Jane Eyre was the first book I read right through, non-stop,” she said. “It was winter, freezing cold, and I remember seeing this thin light outside and realising it was dawn. I got dressed reading, walked to school reading and finished it in the cloakroom at lunchtime. It was riveting.”
She devoured “all the Russians, then the French, then the Americans. I remember getting in trouble for reading The Grapes of Wrath under my desk in a boring lesson.” Yet her going to university “wasn’t even considered. You went into shoes or hosiery.”
She took on a series of unskilled jobs – on a garage forecourt, in a café making “tropical coffees” – and, at 18, married a sheet-metal worker. By the time she was in her early twenties she had three small children.
Life was hard. “Poverty grinds you down – it just pins you to a certain location,” she said. “There’s no movement – no freedom to move. Being poor with three small children is terrifying. You can’t make any plans. You know you’re not going on holiday, ever. There’s no way you could ever afford driving lessons or a car. And the guilt I used to feel: they had holes in their shoes and at one point I had to send them to school wearing Wellingtons when the sun was shining.”
Sue Townsend
But to the secret world of books she added, in the small hours of the night when the children were asleep, the secret world of writing. Her efforts accumulated in an empty box under the stairs: “I knew I wasn’t good enough. When you’re reading Updike, how can you be?” But whatever voice, whatever genre, she tried, the results always tended to the comic.
She was 25 when her husband left her, having belatedly discovered the hippie movement. Slaving away to make ends meet, she took on several jobs, one of them helping to run adventure courses for children. On a canoeing course she met Colin Broadway, who would become her second husband.
Her writing began to emerge from the shadows in 1978, when she joined the Writers’ Group at Leicester’s Phoenix Arts Centre. There she produced a play, Womberang, which won her a Thames TV bursary. (There would be several other stage plays, including Bazaar and Rummage (1982) and, in 1989, Disneyland It Ain’t.) It was one Sunday around this period when the character of Adrian Mole “descended” fully formed into her head.
“I was living in a council house at the time,” she recalled, “on my own with three kids and three part-time jobs to keep us going. So Sunday was a total collapse; I was exhausted. My eldest son said: 'Why can’t we go to safari parks like other families do?’” It was she, said, “that adolescent, self-pitying voice. Mole’s voice. I just heard it.”
Sue Townsend set out to capture the claustrophobia that teenagers feel in the family home, “a brooding and seething: you feel it coming through the floorboards”. Mole’s first incarnation was as Nigel, but Nigel Mole was too similar to another fictional schoolboy, Nigel Molesworth. So she changed the name to Adrian and sent a radio play to John Tydeman, head of drama for Radio 4. Broadcast in January 1982, it was a huge popular success and led to a book contract. Nine months later The Secret Diary was published, and within a month it was top of the bestseller lists; within a year it had sold a million copies.
Gian Sammarco as Adrian Mole
Her books were adapted into three television series, The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole ( Thames Television, both starring Gian Sammarco, 1985-87) and Adrian Mole: the Cappuccino Years (starring Stephen Mangan, BBC One, 2001). The fame and fortune Adrian Mole brought Sue Townsend ultimately allowed her to escape the poverty of her early years. She even bought the pretty Victorian vicarage to which, in her days as a struggling young mother, she had come to pay rent to her landlord.
But she was not able to enjoy her new, comfortable existence for long. In the mid-1980s, when she was still in her 30s, she suffered a heart attack, the first dramatic sign of the debilitating diabetes that would afflict her for the rest of her life. That ill health was compounded, in her last decade and more, by Charcot’s joint – degenerative arthritis, which meant she could not move far without a wheelchair.
She was, by her own admission, “the world’s worst diabetic”, finding the disease hard to manage. Worst of all, however, was the loss of her sight. For someone as passionate about books as Sue Townsend, it was a heavy blow. “Learning to be blind is incredibly hard work,” she told The Observer in 2001. “In my sleep I had a haemorrhage in both eyes and when I woke my eyes were full of this black haze, like thick black smoke. I thought there was a fire. I staggered around, trying to put it out. It wasn’t on the stove, so I thought it was upstairs, and of course I took the black smoke with me, looking for it. It was inside my head. Oh God. So I went to the doctor and said: 'Am I utterly blind now?’ And he said to me, 'Yes, you’re quite blind.’ And that was it. All very English. There are no ceremonies for these things.”
She mourned the fact that she would “never see an individual snowdrop again... never see my grandchildren grow and change”. But she remained resolutely upbeat — at least in public, confessing that when it came to bouts of self-pity: “I prefer to do it in private.”
The many interviewers she met recorded the tumbling, throaty laughter that continued to lace her conversation. And the books kept coming too. As well as the periodic arrival of a new volume of Adrian Mole, she wrote six other novels, including The Queen and I (1992), a satire about the Royal family living on a housing estate after a republican uprising. A sequel, Queen Camilla, came out in 2006. Her last book, The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year, was published in 2012. These she completed by dictating, usually to her son Sean, who in 2009 donated to his mother one of his kidneys .
Last year Sue Townsend suffered a stroke. She had plans for a new volume of Adrian Mole, which she hinted, possibly jokingly, might be “about anarchy, with the ensuing rape and pillage”. Social media was another possibility: “He will be blogging and twittering – but in a quite incompetent way.”
As her health continued to deteriorate, however, Sue Townsend realised that she was unlikely to complete a new volume. This did not dispirit her: “I honestly think of [Adrian Mole] as a character living his own life. He’s doing things that I don’t even know about. And he hasn’t told me; I haven’t been to see him for a while.”
Sue Townsend was awarded two honorary doctorates, including one from the University of Leicester, her home town.
She is survived by her husband and four children.
Sue Townsend, born April 2 1946, died April 10 2014
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