Teen spirit

IN 1982 “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾”, Sue Townsend’s first novel, introduced readers to a bespectacled, spotty teenager who lived in a cul-de-sac in the Midlands. The setting was banal, but the book a wild success. It made Ms Townsend, then little-known, the bestselling author of the decade.

Ms Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946 and left school at 14. She worked in a shoe factory, sold encyclopedias and was sacked from a dress shop for reading a book in a changing room. By the time she was 23 she had three children. Her only training came from a writer’s workshop in a theatre in Leicester, which she joined at the suggestion of her second husband. That course confirmed what she already suspected: that she could write, and funnily. She was brilliant at catching the pompous voice of a moderately precocious teenage boy.

Adrian Mole manages his hapless parents; tries to escape school sports; pays off a bully; covers up his spots and aims to woo his classmate Pandora with poetry (“Oh Pandora/I adore ya./I implore ye/Don’t ignore me”). An aspiring intellectual, he reads voraciously (“I am reading Mill on the Floss, by a bloke called George Eliot”) and paints his bedroom black.

Three decades later, Ms Townsend’s novels are showing their age. Few teenagers today worry about “the bomb” killing them before they finish school (“I wouldn’t like to die an unqualified virgin”). Britain is now far more diverse: the arrival of the “brown-skinned” Singh family to Adrian’s street would not cause such a stir. But his teenage worries remain embarrassingly familiar.

Many novelists eventually tire of their most successful characters. Ms Townsend wrote several unrelated novels and essays. But she also penned a further seven books about Mr Mole, charting his life through school, his job as a bookseller and his struggle with prostate cancer as an older man. “The only way I will kill Adrian is when I die myself,” she once explained. She was wrong about that.