Sue Townsend - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3⁄4

I have got to concentrate on getting my GCEs if I want to be a vet.

St Matthias

Got up at six o’clock for my paper round. I have got Elm Tree Avenue. It is dead posh. All the papers they read are very heavy: The Times , the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian . Just my luck! Bert said Sabre is better, he tried to bite the milkman.

Bed early tonight because of my paper round. Delivered twenty-five Punches as well as the papers.

The papers got mixed up today. Elm Tree Avenue got the Sun and the Mirror and Corporation Row got the heavy papers.

I don’t know why everybody went so mad. You’d think they would enjoy reading a different paper for a change.

Last Quarter

Early this morning I saw Pandora walking down the drive of 69 Elm Tree Avenue. She had a riding hat and jodphurs on so she couldn’t have been on her way to school. I didn’t let her see me. I don’t want her to know that I am doing a menial job.

So now I know where Pandora lives! I had a good look at the house. It is much bigger than ours. It has got rolled-up wooden blinds at all the windows, and the rooms look like jungles because of all the green plants. I looked through the letterbox and saw the big ginger cat eating something on the kitchen table. They have the Guardian,Punch, Private Eye , and New Society . Pandora reads Jackie , the comic for girls; she is not an intellectual, like me. But I don’t suppose Malcolm Muggeridge’s wife is either.

Pandora has got a little fat horse called ‘Blossom’. She feeds it and makes it jump over barrels every morning before school. I know because I hid behind her father’s Volvo and then followed her to a field next to the disused railway line. I hid behind a scrap car in the corner of the field and watched her. She looked dead good in her riding stuff, her chest was wobbling like mad. She will need to wear a bra soon. My heart was beating so loudly in my throat that I felt like a stereo loudspeaker, so I left before she heard me.

People complained because the papers were late. I had a Guardian left over in my paper bag so I took it home to read. It was full of spelling mistakes. It is disgusting when you think of how many people who can spell are out of work.

Quinquagesima. St David’s Day

I took some sugar to Blossom before I did my paper round. It brought me closer to Pandora somehow.

Have strained my back because of carrying all the Sunday supplements. Took the leftover Sunday People home as a present to my mother but she said it was only fit for lining the dustbin. Got my two pounds and six pence for six mornings, it is slave labour! And I have to give Barry Kent half of it. Mr Cherry said hehad a complaint from number 69 Elm Tree Avenue, that they didn’t get a Guardian yesterday. Mr Cherry sent a Daily Express round with his apologies, but Pandora’s father brought it back to the shop and said he ‘would rather go without’.

Didn’t bother reading the papers today, I am fed up with papers. Had chow mein and beansprouts for Sunday dinner.

Mr Lucas came round when my father had gone to visit grandma. He was wearing a plastic daffodil in his sports jacket.

My spots have completely gone. It must be the early morning air.

My mother has just come into my room and said she had something awful to tell me. I sat up in bed and put a dead serious expression on my face just in case she’d got six months to live or she’d been caught shoplifting or something. She fiddled with the curtains, dropped cigarette ash all over my Concorde model and started mumbling on about ‘adult relationships’ and ‘life being complicated’ and how she must ‘find herself. She said she was fond of me. Fond!!! And would hate to hurt me. And then she said that for some women marriage was like being in prison. Then she went out.

Marriage is nothing like being in prison! Women are let out every day to go to the shops and stuff, andquite a lot go to work. I think my mother is being a bit melodramatic.

Finished Animal Farm . It is dead symbolic. I cried when Boxer was taken to the vet’s. From now on I shall treat pigs with the contempt they deserve. I am boycotting pork of all kinds.

Shrove Tuesday

I gave Barry Kent his protection money today. I don’t see how there can be a God. If there was surely he wouldn’t let people like Barry Kent walk about menacing intellectuals? Why are bigger youths unpleasant to smaller youths? Perhaps their brains are easily worn out with all the extra work they have to do making bigger bones and stuff, or it could be that the big youths have got brain damage because of all the sport they play, or perhaps big youths just like menacing and fighting. When I go to university I may study the problem.

I will have my thesis published and I will send a copy to Barry Kent. Perhaps by then he will have learnt to read.

My mother had forgotten that today was pancake day. I reminded her at 11 PM. I’m sure she burnt them deliberately. I will be fourteen in one month’s time.

Ash Wednesday .

Had a nasty shock this morning. Took my empty paper sack back to Mr Cherry’s newsagent’s and saw Mr Lucas looking at those magazines on the top shelf. I stood behind the Mills and Boon rack and distinctly saw him choose Bigand Bouncy , pay for it and leave the shop with it hidden inside his coat. Big and Bouncy is extremely indecent. It is full of disgusting pictures. My mother should be informed.

My father got his car back from the garage today. He was cleaning it and gloating over it for a whole two hours. I noticed that the stick-on waving hand I bought him for Christmas was missing from the rear window. I told him he ought to complain to the garage but he said he didn’t want to make a fuss. We went to my grandma’s to test-drive the car. She gave us a cup of Bovril and a piece of yukky seedcake. She didn’t ask how my mother was, she said my father was looking thin and pale and needed ‘feeding up’.

She told me that Bert Baxter had been thrown out of the Evergreens because of his bad behaviour at Skegness. The coach was waiting for two hours for him at the coach station. A search party was sent out to look in the pubs, then Bert came back, drunk butalone and another search party was sent out to look for the first search party. In the end the police had to be sent for and they took hours to round up all the pensioners and get them in the coach.

My grandma said the journey back was a nightmare. All the pensioners kept falling out (with each other not out of the coach). Bert Baxter was reciting a dirty poem about an Eskimo and Mrs Harriman had a funny turn and had to have her corsets loosened.

Grandma said two pensioners had passed on since the outing, she blamed Bert Baxter and said ‘He as good as murdered them’, but I think it was more likely that the cold wind at Skegness killed them off. I said, ‘Bert Baxter is not so bad when you get to know him’. She said she didn’t understand why the Good Lord took my grandad and left scum like Baxter. Then she pulled her lips tight and dabbled her eyes with a handkerchief, so we left.

My mother was out when we got home, she has joined some women’s group.