Sue Townsend

26/01/2010

Author and creator of classic Adrian Mole series, aged 63

I left school at 15 and at 16 was working as a petrol pump attendant. The garage wasn’t very successful – there weren’t many cars around in 1962 and we were in the immigrant part of Leicester where no one owned one. It was perfect because the boss was usually away driving a taxi, leaving me to sit in a glass box, sell the occasional gallon of petrol and read. I usually got through a Penguin paperback a day. I resented any time spent not reading.

I got in with a kind of beatnik-y crowd. Well, not even a crowd. There weren’t enough beatniks in Leicester to call it a crowd. The beatnik life in Leicester didn’t consist of being an artist’s model in a Paris garret, just wearing black clothes and liking jazz and reading beat authors like Jack Kerouac.

I’d tell young Sue to be sure she really knows who she falls for. I’d been 18 for a week when I got married. The man I married was wearing a duffle coat and carrying books under his arm when we met – it was love at first sight. It turned out the coat and the books were both borrowed from his friend. He fell for me while I was wearing my mother’s clothes for a job interview. So we both fell for completely different people to who we really were.

I was a secret writer at 16. It was semi-autobiographical stuff so I got used to hiding it. I didn’t want anybody finding it and judging me. So I was practising for over 20 years. Finally my new life did begin when the man who became my second husband encouraged me to join a writer’s group.

I would try to get across to my 16-year-old self how afraid of men I was. I was quite often afraid of men I went out with or who fancied me. If you allowed them to, and I did, they behaved so badly back then. They could just give you a slap round the chops – women were kind of casually hit. Even supposedly liberal men, as soon as they got married, turned into their fathers. I’d be terrified to think I wouldn’t have dinner on the table at six o’clock.

I’d never heard the word ‘feminist’ in the mid-1960s. My friends were the same and we were all intelligent women. One Sunday, getting dinner ready, I said, ‘Isn’t it strange how all the men are in the pub while we battle all those saucepans, with a baby in the other arm?’ We sort of looked at each other and said, ‘That’s not fair is it?’

You need to learn to be braver in stating your case. Not just in a marriage but also in work. I’ve come to realise that if you stand up for yourself the sky doesn’t fall in on your head.

I would tell my 16-year-old self she has to get over having no concept of aging. It’s like The Who – ‘Hope I die before I get old’ – they didn’t expect to get past 30.

I’d warn her to value her eyesight. Mine is very bad now – I could sympathise with Gordon Brown and the mess over the Mrs Janes letter. I also use a thick black marker pen to write these days [Sue is registered blind]. I don’t think Mrs Janes understood that a hand-written note, however scruffy, is the best form of manners.

Sue Townsend’s new book Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (Michael Joseph) is out now