The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (17 page)

Got up at 5 AM to intercept the postman. Took the dog for a walk in the drizzle. (It wanted to stay asleep, but I wouldn’t let it.) The dog moaned and complained all the way round the block so in the end I let it climb back into its cardboard box. I wish I was a dog; they haven’t got any ethics or morals.

The postman delivered the letters at seven-thirty when I was sitting on the toilet. This is just my luck!

My father collected the letters and put them behind the clock. I had a quick look through them while he was coughing on his first cigarette of the day. Sure enough there was one addressed to my parents in Mr Cherry’s uneducated handwriting!

My mother and father slopped over each other for a few minutes and then opened the letters whilst their Rice Krispies were going soggy. There were seven lousy Christmas cards, which they put up on a string overthe fireplace. My eyes were focused on Mr Cherry’s letter. My mother opened it, read it and said, ‘George, that old git Cherry’s sent his bloody paper bill in’. Then they ate their Rice Krispies and that was that. I wasted a lot of adrenalin worrying. I won’t have enough left if I’m not careful.

My mother has told me why she left creep Lucas and returned to my father. She said, ‘Bimbo treated me like a sex object, Adrian, and he expected his evening meal cooked for him, and he cut his toe-nails in the living room, and besides I’m very fond of your father’. She didn’t mention me.

I am in an experimental Nativity play at school. It is called
Manger to Star
. I am playing Joseph. Pandora is playing Mary. Jesus is played by the smallest first-year. He is called Peter Brown. He is on drugs to make him taller.

Another letter from the BBC!

Dear Adrian Mole,

Thank you for submitting your latest poem. I understood it perfectly well once it had been typed. However, Adrian, understanding is not all. Our Poetry Department is inundated with autumnal poems. The smell of bonfires and the crackling of leaves pervade the very corridors. Good try, but try again, eh?

Yours with best wishes,

John Tydeman

‘Try again’! He is almost giving me a commission. I have written back to him:

Dear Mr Tydeman,

How much will I get if you broadcast one of my poems on the radio? When do you want me to send it? What do you want it to be about? Can I read it out myself? Will you pay my train fare in advance? What time will it go out on the airways? I have to be in bed by ten.

Yours faithfully,

A. Mole

P.S. I hope you have a dead good Christmas.

Moon’s Last Quarter

Today’s rehearsal of
Manger to Star
was a fiasco. Peter Brown has grown too big for the crib, so Mr Animba, the Woodwork teacher, has got to make another one.

Mr Scruton sat at the back of the gym and watched rehearsals. He had a face like the north face of the Eiger by the time we’d got to the bit where the three wise men were reviled as capitalist pigs.

He took Miss Elf into the showers and had a ‘Quiet Word’. We all heard every word he shouted. He said he wanted to see a traditional Nativity play, with a Tiny Tears doll playing Jesus and three wise men dressed in dressing gowns and tea towels. He threatened to cancel the play if Mary, alias Pandora, continued to go into simulated labour in the manger. This is typical of Scruton, he is nothing but a small-minded, provincial, sexually-inhibited fascist pig. How he rose to become a headmaster I do not know. He has been wearing the same hairy green suit for three years. How can we change it all now? The play is being performed on Tuesday afternoon.

My mother has had a Christmas card from creep Lucas! Inside he had written, ‘Paulie, Have you got the dry-cleaning ticket for my best white suit? Sketch-ley’s are being very difficult’. My mother was very upset. My father rang Sheffield and ordered Lucas to cease communications, or risk getting a bit of Sheffield steel in between his porky shoulder blades. My father looked dead good on the telephone. He had a cigarette stuck between his lips. My mother was leaning on the corner of the fridge. She had a cigarette in her hand. They looked a bit like the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall postcard on my wall. I wish I was a
real
gangster’s son, at least you would see a bit of life.

I’ve got no money for Christmas presents. But I have made my Christmas list in case I find ten pounds in the street.

• Pandora—Big bottle of Chanel N°5 (£1.50)
  

• Mother—Egg-timer (75p)
  

• Father—Bookmark (38p)
  

• Grandma—Packet of J cloths (45p)
  

• Dog—Dog chocolates (45p)
  

• Bert—20 Woodbines (95p)
  

• Auntie Susan—Tin of Nivea (60p)
  

• Sabre—Box of Bob Martins, small (39p)
  

• Nigel—Family box of Maltesers (34p)
  

• Miss Elf—Oven-glove (home-made)
  

Fourth in Advent

Pandora and I had a private Mary and Joseph rehearsal in my bedroom. We improvised a great scene where Mary gets back from the Family Planning Clinic and tells Joseph she’s pregnant. I played Joseph like Marion Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Pandora played Mary a bit like Blanche Dubois; it was dead good until my father complained about the shouting. The dog was supposed to be the lowly cattle, but it wouldn’t keep still long enough to make a tableau.

After tea my mother casually mentioned that she was going to wear her fox-fur coat to the school concert tomorrow. Shock! Horror! I immediately went round to Pandora’s house to get the mangy coat, only to find that Pandora’s mother has borrowed it to go to the Marriage Guidance Christmas dinner and dance! Pandora said that she hadn’t realized that the coat was only on loan; she thought it was a lover’s gift! How can a 14¾-year-old schoolboy afford to give a fox-fur coat as a gift? Who does Pandora think I am, a millionaire like Freddie Laker?

Pandora’s mother won’t be back until the early hours so I will have to go round before school and sneak the coat into its plastic cover. It’s going to be difficult, but then nothing in my life is simple or straightforward any more. I feel like a character in a Russian novel half the time.

Woke up with a panic attack to see that it was eight-fifty by my bedside digital! My black walls looked unusually light and sparkly; one glance outside confirmed my suspicions that indeed the snow lay outside like a white carpet.

I stumbled through the snow to Pandora’s house in my father’s fishing boots but found that the house was devoid of humans. I looked through the letterbox and saw my mother’s fur coat being mauled about by Pandora’s ginger cat. I shouted swear-words at it butthe lousy stinking cat just looked sarcastic and carried on dragging the coat around the hall. I had no choice but to shoulder-charge the laundry-room door and rush into the hall and rescue my mother’s coat. I left quickly (as quickly as anyone can wearing thigh-length fishing boots, four sizes too big). I put the fur coat on to keep me warm on my hazardous journey home. I nearly lost my bearings at the corner of Ploughman’s Avenue and Shepherd’s Crook Drive, but I fought my way through the blizzard until I saw the familiar sight of the prefabricated garages on the corner of our cul-de-sac.

I fell into our kitchen in a state of hypothermia and severe exhaustion; my mother was smoking a cigarette and making mince pies. She screamed, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing wearing my fox-fur coat?’ She was not kind or concerned or anything that mothers are supposed to be. She fussed about, wiping snow off the coat and drying the fur with a hair dryer. She didn’t even offer to make me a hot drink or anything. She said, ‘It’s been on the radio that the school is closed because of the snow, so you can make yourself useful and check the camp beds for rust. The Sugdens are staying over Christmas.’ The Sugdens! My mother’s relations from Norfolk! Yuk, Yuk. They are all inbred and can’t speak properly!

Phoned Pandora to explain about the fox-fur and the damage, etc., but she had gone skiing on the slope behind the Co-op bakery. Pandora’s father asked me to get off the line, he had to make an urgent phone call to the police station. He said he had just comehome and discovered a break-in! He said the place was a shambles (the cat must have done it, I was very careful), but fortunately the only thing that was missing was an old fox-fur coat that Pandora had lined the cat’s basket with.

Sorry Pandora, but this is the final straw that broke the donkey’s back! You can find yourself another Joseph, I refuse to share the stage with a girl who puts her cat’s comfort before her boyfriend’s dilemma.

School was closed this morning because the teachers couldn’t manage to get in on time because of the snow. That will teach them to live in old mill houses and windmills out in the country! Miss Elf lives with a West Indian in a terraced house in the town, so she bravely turned out to prepare for the school concert in the afternoon. I decided to forgive Pandora for the fox-fur in the cat’s basket incident after she had pointed out that the cat was an expectant mother.

The school concert was not a success. The bell ringing from class One-G went on too long, my father said ‘The Bells! The Bells!’ and my mother laughed too loudly and made Mr Scruton look at her.

The school orchestra was a disaster! My mother said, ‘When are they going to stop tuning-up and start playing?’ I told her that they had just played a Mozart horn concerto. That made my mother and father and Pandora’s mother and father start laughing in a veryunmannerly fashion. When ten-stone Alice Bernard from Three-C came on stage in a tutu and did the dying swan I thought my mother would explode. Alice Bernard’s mother led the applause, but not many people followed.

The Dumbo class got up and sang a few boring old carols. Barry Kent sang all the vulgar versions (I know because I was watching his lips) then they sat down cross-legged, and brainbox Henderson from Five-K played a trumpet, Jew’s harp, piano and guitar. The smarmy git looked dead superior when he was bowing during his applause. Then it was the interval and time for me to change into my white T-shirt-and-Wranglers Joseph costume. The tension backstage was electric. I stood in the wings (a theatrical term—it means the side of the stage) and watched the audience filing back into their places. Then the music from
Close Encounters
boomed out over the stereo speakers, and the curtains opened on an abstract manger and I just had time to whisper to Pandora ‘Break a leg, darling’, before Miss Elf pushed us out into the lights. My performance was brilliant! I really got under the skin of Joseph but Pandora was less good, she forgot to look tenderly at Jesus⁄Peter Brown.

The three punks⁄wise men made too much noise with their chains and spoiled my speech about the Middle East situation, and the angels representing Mrs Thatcher got hissed by the audience so loudly that their spoken chorus about unemployment was wasted.

Still, all in all, it was well received by the audience. Mr Scruton got up and made a hypocritical speechabout ‘a brave experiment’ and ‘Miss Elf’s tireless work behind the scenes’, and then we all sang ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas’!

Driving home in the car my father said, ‘That was the funniest Nativity play I have ever seen. Whose idea was it to turn it into a comedy?’ I didn’t reply. It wasn’t a comedy.

9AM
. Only two shopping days left for Christmas and I am still penniless. I have made a
Blue Peter
oven-glove for Miss Elf, but in order to give it to her in time for Christmas I will have to go into the ghetto and risk getting mugged.

I will have to go out carol singing, there is nothing else I can do to raise finance.

10 PM
. Just got back from carol singing. The suburban houses were a dead loss. People shouted, ‘Come back at Christmas’, without even opening the door. My most appreciative audience were the drunks staggering in and out of the Black Bull. Some of them wept openly at the beauty of my solo rendition of ‘Silent Night’. I must say that I presented a touching picture as I stood in the snow with myyoung face lifted to the heavens ignoring the scenes of drunken revelry around me.

I made £3.13½ plus an Irish tenpence and Guinness bottle-top. I’m going out again tomorrow. I will wear my school uniform, it should be worth a few extra quid.

Took Bert’s Woodbines round to the home. Bert is hurt because I haven’t been to see him. He said he didn’t want to spend Christmas with a lot of malicious old women. Him and Queenie are causing a scandal. They are unofficially engaged. They have got their names on the same ashtray. I have invited Bert and Queenie for Christmas Day. My mother doesn’t know yet but I’m sure she won’t mind, we have got a big turkey. I sang a few carols for the old ladies. I made two pounds eleven pence out of them so I went to Woolworth’s to buy Pandora’s Chanel N°5. They hadn’t got any so I bought her an underarm deodorant instead.

The house looks dead clean and sparkling, there is a magic smell of cooking and satsumas in the air. I have searched around for my presents but they are not in the usual places. I want a racing bike, nothing else will please me. It’s time I was independently mobile.
11 PM
. Just got back from the Black Bull. Pandora came with me, we wore our school uniforms and reminded all the drunks of their own children. They coughed up conscience money to the tune of twelve pounds fifty-seven! So we are going to see a pantomime on Boxing Day and we will have a family bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk each!

Christmas Day