It was good to see you on Tuesday. The prison uniform suits you. You should wear more blue when you get out. Also Baz, non-smoking seems to agree with you, your breath was not as repellent as usual, why not give up for good? I’m sorry I have to be the bearer of bad news but somebody has to tell you that your fiancée Cindy is living with Gary Fullbright, the body builder, remember him? He won the ‘Mr Muscle’ competition in 1985. Cindy is expecting his baby in four months’ time. I expect you have just reeled back with the shock, so I’ll give you time in which to recover.

Baz, Cindy isn’t worthy of your love, don’t for God’s sake grieve over her. Her fingernails were never clean, and she had no dress sense at all. I will never forget that black rubber-outfit she wore (with scuffed stilletos and laddered fishnet tights) to your father’s funeral. Also, Baz, she had the intellectual capacity of a withered rubber band. I was chatting to her once about Middle Eastern politics and it became clear to me that she thought Mr Arafat was the Arab equivalent to Mr Kipling – a type of foreign biscuit.

On to other subjects. Nigel sends his regards, he would like to come and see you but doesn’t trust himself not to burst into tears at the prison gate. Also he thinks his appearance might startle your fellow prisoners and leave you open to a certain amount of bullying in the dormitory. He is now a bald-headed Buddhist and wears orange robes and orange flip-flops (in all weathers). But, apart from these superficial changes he is still the same old Nigel, although, sadly, he got the sack from the bank: religious persecution is still alive and well in this country, I fear.

Nothing much has happened here; provincial life drags its weary way through the hours and days and months and years; I think it’s time I left the library, Baz. The attitude of the general public towards the books they borrow is contemptuous. Yesterday I found a rasher of bacon inside
A Dictionary of Philosophy
. It had obviously been used as a bookmark. Further on, in the same book, I found a note addressed to a milkman:

Dear Milkman

I’d be most terribly grateful if, from now on, you would be as kind as to leave one further pint of skimmed milk. That is to say dating from today (Tuesday) I would like you to deliver two pints of skimmed milk per day. I hope you will join me in my happiness at the news that my wife has returned to me. I know how much you and she enjoyed your little early morning doorstep chats. Alas, I fear I do not have my wife’s common touch. However, I am fully appreciative of your achievement in delivering our milk in all weather conditions, and if, in the past, I have given the impression of being surly and uncommunicative, I’m sorry. I’m not at my best in the early morning. I am plagued with a recurring nightmare: I am lecturing to a Hall full of students when half-way through I realize I am naked. Perhaps you have similar disturbed nights? From what I’ve seen of you from my bedroom window, you seem to be a sensitive person. You have an intelligent mien.

Don’t be offended, milkman, but I would guess that you have had little education, so, why not let us help you to educate yourself by browsing along our well-stocked bookshelves? You are welcome to borrow any book – apart from the first editions which need
very
careful handling – normally I would suggest that the ill-educated use the library but our local branch is staffed by cretins.

Do think about this proposition and communicate either ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ at the bottom of this page.

With warmest regards,

Richard Blythe-Samson (N°19)

>

Nay. You owe me 6 weeks money. Milkman
.

Well Baz, I’ll sign off now. Hope you don’t take it too hard about Cindy, but somebody had to tell you and who better than your old mate,

Adrian ‘Brains’ Mole

PS. It’s my birthday today. I am nineteen and God am I weary of this life.

Unit 2

April 9
^th1987

Dear ‘Brains’

Cindy as wrote to me and said it is lies about her and Gary Fullbright and she said she is not in the club she as just put on some wait because of working in the hot spud shop she swears on her dogs head that she stills love me and she is weighting for me. The reeason she as not bin to see me is becars she has had migraine you have got a nerv to critisize her you should look in the mirrer sometime at yourself I av herd bad things about Pandorra that she is having it off with allsorts including china men and yugoslavians their is a screw in hear who as got a son at oxford university he nows pandorra an he says she is a
slagg
wye did you tell me that stuff about the milkman it was drivval I am goinng mad in hear I want to now what is goinng on with the lads outside did spig get sentensed yet as marvin got parrole things like that do not bothur writin if you write drivvel and if you come to see me argain dress up smart I was ashammd last time and I got greif from the lads after visitting. I told them you was not all their but I still got greif my cell mate is a fat slob is name is clifton there is not room to move when he is standing up I am asking for a transferr he is the fart champion of the prison gary fullbright is lookinggg for you

stay cool

Baz

April 18
^th1987

Dear Baz

How dare you infer that Pandora is a slag? She mixes with Chinese, Russians and Yugoslavians because she is taking Russian, Serbo-Croat and Chinese at Oxford. She no doubt entertains them in her rooms until quite late at night, but believe me Baz she is not engaging in sexual intercourse with them. I know for a
fact
that Pandora is a virgin. Unlike you and Cindy, Pandora and I have a completely honest relationship. If she were no longer a virgin I would be the first to know. I will make no further comment on the Cindy/Gary situation apart from saying that I saw them
together
in
Mothercare
buying a
baby’s bath
and two maternity bras, but from now on my lips are sealed. I’m sorry you are of the opinion that parts of my last letter were drivel. I thought the note to the milkman would amuse you and take your mind off your present surroundings. I don’t blame you for being bitter, though. Two years’ imprisonment for criminal damage to a privet hedge does seem harsh. I’m scared to
cough
in the street these days in case I get done under the new Public Order Act.

I haven’t had a poem from you for ages Baz. I hope you haven’t given up scribbling. You have a rare, muscular sort of talent which you mustn’t waste. You once had a lucrative career as ‘Baz, the Skinhead Poet’ on the poetry club circuit. Why not take this opportunity to write a new collection?

Yours

Adrian ‘Brains’ Mole

May 12
^th1986

Dear Brains

Banged Up

Ok. I done it

I damaged a hedge

I broke a few twigs

A few leaves fell off

Hedges grow again.

They said it was privet

in court, in evidence.

Me, I didn’t know

I was falling, drunk.

I grabbed this green thing

I fell in, got scratched

couldn’t get out again.

The hedges owner called 999.

An old bloke he was

If he’d pulled me out I

woulda gone.

Instead the filth come.

“Hello Baz, you’ve broken

an hedge.

That’s criminal damage, vandalism, wanton,

mindless”

Honest, it was a few twigs, a few green

leaves.

It needed cutting,

“I shan’t press charges,” said the old man.

But it was too late,

the law had started its machinery up.

It couldn’t stop.

Not until the prison gate

opened and took me in.

“Criminal damage to an hedge”

I’m a joke in here.

Psychopaths get more respect

the old man, he was in court.

He wasn’t happy. He looked at me

in the dock. His face said,

“I’m not happy.”

I gave him a salute one man to

another.

Then I went down.

BAZ KENT

(The Skinhead Poet)

June 30
^th1987

Dear Baz

It’s some months since I wrote to you I know but I’ve been very busy with my opus, ‘Tadpole’, which I am hoping to get published either in
The Literary Review
or
The Leicester Mercury
, whichever pays the most. ‘Tadpole’ is the story-in-rhyme of a tadpole’s difficult journey to froghood. It is 10,000 words in length so far and the tadpole in question is still in the canal squirming about. So, Baz, as a fellow poet, you can see my problem. All my waking hours – apart from those in the stinking library where I am forced to earn my living – are spent writing. I care nothing for food or rest or taking hot baths. I haven’t changed my clothes in months (apart from socks and underpants); what care I for the outward trappings of petit bourgeois society?

There have been complaints at work about my appearance: Mr Nuggett, Deputy Librarian, said yesterday, “Mole, I am giving you the afternoon off. Go home, bathe, wash your hair and change into clean clothes!”

I replied (with dignity), “Mr Nuggett, would you have spoken to Byron, Ted Hughes, or Larkin as you’ve just spoken to me?” He was dumbfounded. All he could think to say eventually was: “You used the wrong tense as far as Ted Hughes is concerned, because, unless there has been a tragic accident or a sudden illness, I believe Mr Hughes to be most vigorously alive.”

What a pedant!

Your poem ‘Banged Up’ was quite nice. Must stop now, ‘The Tadpole’ calls.

Hey ho.

A. Mole

PS. Cindy has called the baby Carlsberg.

∨
The True Confessions
∧

Adrian Mole Leaves Home

June 1988

Monday June 13
^th

I had a good, proper look at myself in the mirror tonight. I’ve always wanted to look clever, but at the age of twenty years and three months I have to admit that I look like a person who has never even
heard
of Jung or Updike. I went to a party last week and a girl of sixteen felt obliged to tell me who Gertrude Stein was. I tried to cut her off – inform her that I was conversant with Ms Stein, but I started to choke on a cheese and tomato pizza so the opportunity was lost.

So, the mirror showed me myself, as I am. I’m dark but not dark enough to be interesting: no Celtic broodiness. My eyes are grey. My eyelashes are medium length, nothing exciting here. My nose is high-bridged, but it’s a Roman centurion’s nose, rather than a senator’s. My mouth is thin. Not cruel and thin, and it gets a bit sloppy towards the edges. I
have
got a chin, though. No mean achievement considering my pure English genes.

Since I was a callow youth I’ve spent a fortune on my skin. I’ve rubbed and applied hundreds of chemicals and lotions onto and into the offending pustulated layer of epidermis, but alas! to no avail. Sharon Botts, my present girl friend, once described my complexion as being like ‘one of them bubble sheets what incontinent people use to protect their mattress’.

As can be seen from the above reproduction of Sharon’s speech her knowledge of correct English grammar is minimal, therefore I have taken it upon myself to educate her. I am Henry Higgins to her Eliza Dolittle.

She is worth it. Her measurements are 42–30–38. She’s a big girl. Unfortunately she measures thirty inches round the tops of her thighs, and fifteen inches round her ankles. But isn’t that just like life? The most beautiful and exotic places on earth also attract mosquitoes don’t they? Nothing and nobody is perfect, are they? Apart from Madonna, of course.

Anyway, I suggested to Sharon that she would look wonderful in floor-length skirts but she said, “Who the bleedin’ hell d’you think I am, sodding Queen Victoria?”

Summer will soon be here and I have a recurring nightmare that Sharon decides to buy and
wear
a miniskirt. In my dream she takes my arm and we stroll down the crowded high street. The public stop and stare, guffawing breaks out. A three-year-old child points at Sharon and says, “Look at the lady’s fat legs.” At this point I wake up sweating and with a pounding heart.

You may be wondering why I, Adrian Mole, a provincial intellectual working in a library and Sharon Botts, a provincial dullard, working in a laundry are having a relationship. The answer is, sex. I have grown to be rather keen on it and find it difficult to stop doing it now I’ve started.

Sharon and I were both virgins when we met which is a piece of good fortune too rare to overlook. What with AIDS and herpes rampaging round the world. But sex is where our relationship begins and ends. Sharon is as bored by my conversation as I am by hers, so we go elsewhere for that. She goes to see her mother and five sisters, and I go to see Pandora Braithwaite, who is the true love of my life.

I’ve loved Pandora since 1980. Two years ago we went our separate ways, Pandora to Oxford to study Russian, Chinese and Serbo-Croat, and me to stamp books in the library in the town where I was born. I chose library work because I wanted to immerse myself in literature. Ha! The library I work in could easily double as the headquarters of the local Philistines Society. I have never had a literary conversation at work, never. Neither with the staff nor the borrowers of the books.

My days are spent taking books off shelves and putting books back on the shelves. Occasionally I am interrupted by members of the public asking mad questions: “Is Jackie Collins here?” To this I reply, after first glancing round the library in an exaggerated fashion. “Highly unlikely, madam. I believe she lives in Hollywood.”

Sometimes my mother visits me at work, although I have given her strict instructions not to do so. My mother cannot modulate her voice. Her laugh could pickle cabbage. Her appearance is striking and now, in her forty-third year, merging on the eccentric. She has no colour sense. She wears espadrilles. Summer and winter. She disobeys the No Smoking signs and enters doors labelled, Private Staff Only.

My father never visits the library. He claims that the sight of so many books makes him ill.

Unfortunately, I am still living at home with my parents (and my five-year-old sister Rosie). This
ménage à quatre
co-exists in a sullen atmosphere. Half the time I feel like somebody in a Chekhov play. We’ve even got a cherry tree in the front garden.

I’ve tramped the streets looking for my own cheap apartment. I put an advertisement in the local paper.

Writer requires a room, preferably garret.

Non-smoker, respectable.

Clean habits. References supplied.

Rent no more than £10 a week.

I received three replies: the first from an old lady who offered me rent-free accommodation in return for helping her to feed her thirty-seven cats and nine dogs. The second from an anonymous person who wished to ‘thoroughly irrigate my colon’. The third from a Mr QZ Diablo.

I went to inspect the room offered by Mr Diablo. As soon as he opened the front door I knew I would not enjoy living in close proximity to him. Beards irritate me at the best of times and Mr Diablo’s cascaded down from his chin and came to a straggling end somewhere near to his navel. However, I allowed him to lead the way up the swaying staircase. The room was at the top of the house. It was part-furnished, with a bed and a structure resembling an altar. Purple cloaks hung from hooks in the walls. Mr QZ Diablo said, “Of course I shall need this room on Thursday evenings for our meetings. We finish just after midnight, would that be too inconvenient?”

“I’m afraid it would,” I said. “I’d prefer to sort of have the place to myself.”

“You
could
join us,” he suggested, helpfully. “We’re a jolly crowd, though cursed with a diabolical public image.”

I stared down at a red stain. It was on a multi-coloured carpet that only a mad man or mad woman could have designed, possibly in a workshop within the high walls of an institution.

“Only animal blood,” said QZ, reassuringly poking the stain with his bare big toe. “We don’t go in for human sacrifice,” he said comfortingly.

I said the words of the timid and cowardly: “I’ll think about it.”

“Yes you must,” said my host. He then led me down the stairs, and out to freedom. I didn’t want to tramp the streets on Thursday evenings and neither did I want to wear a purple cloak and mutter incantations over an animal sacrifice with a jolly crowd once a week. So I didn’t go and live under Mr QZ Diablo’s roof. This was last week.

Tonight my mother said, “Look, when are you leaving home? We want to let your room.”

My mother is not an advocate of the tactful approach. It transpired that she had answered an advertisement from the University and arranged to act as a landlady to two male students. This would give her an income of seventy pounds a week. Fifty pounds more than she receives from me. No contest. The two students (of engineering) are moving into my room on Friday afternoon. A new single bed has been purchased and is leaning accusingly against the wall of my bedroom.

Tuesday June 14
^th

I found it hard to concentrate on my work today. The Head Librarian, Mrs Froggatt (fat, fifty and with the colouring and features of a jaundiced badger), said at lunchtime, “Mole, you’ve moved all our Jane Austens from the great English Classics section to the Light Romance Section, pray explain.” I snapped, “In my opinion they have been given their proper classification. Jane Austen’s novels are merely trashy romances read only by snobbish, brainless cretins.” How was I to know that ‘Jane Austen, Her Genius, Her Relevance to England in the 1950
^s’ was the subject of Mrs Froggatt’s dissertation for her degree in English Literature many years before I was born? As I’ve said earlier in my diary, we didn’t discuss books or writers in the library.

That afternoon I was called into Mrs Froggatt’s room. She informed me that the library was cutting down on staff due to Government financial restraints. I asked how many staff would be asked to leave. “Just the one,” said the Jane Austen admirer, “and, since you were the last to come, Adrian, you must also be the first to go.” Homeless and jobless!

Wednesday June 15
^th

When I got home from work, where I was shunned and vilified (it turned out that all the library staff like Jane Austen), I went to my room to find that my mother had cleared out my toy cupboard. Pinky, my pink and grey rabbit, was nowhere to be seen! I burst into the kitchen, where my mother was entertaining her neighbours to tea. Through a thick smog of cigarette smoke I looked my mother in the eye and said, “Where’s Pinky?”

“He’s outside in the dustbin,” she said. She had the grace to drop her eyes. She knew she’d done me and Pinky a terrible wrong. “How could you?” I said coldly. I flung open the door that led to the yard. Pinky’s threadbare ears were visible sticking out of a black plastic bag. I pulled him out of the bag and dusted him down, then I re-crossed the kitchen and slammed the door. Huge gusts of female laughter could be heard behind me as I ran up the stairs.

Pinky is exactly the same age as me. He was purchased by my drunken father on the day of my birth. Pinky only has, only ever had, two legs; but he is still a rabbit. It is beyond my comprehension how anyone could even
think
about disposing of him. I packed my suitcase there and then. I placed Pinky carefully in a carrier bag. I went into the kitchen. I addressed my mother. “I’m going. I shall send for my books.” I went.

Thursday June 16
^th

Living here with Sharon and eight other Botts is a nightmare. I am supposed to be sleeping on the living room couch but the Botts don’t go to bed. They stop up, in the living room, talking and shouting and quarrelling and watching violent videos. A few Botts, Sharon was one, went to bed at 3am but the remaining Botts had noisy discussions about babies, contraception, menstruation, death, funerals, the price of ice-cream, Clement Freud, the Queen, the man in the moon, dogs, cats, gerbils, various aches and pains they had suffered from, clothes they had tired of. Then, after an hour of malicious gossip about a woman I’d never heard of called Cynthia Bell, I closed my eyes, feigning sleep. Would they take the hint and go to bed? No.

“Funny looking bugger isn’t he?” said Mrs Bott. “What does our Sharon see in him?”

Was she referring to me?

“He’s supposed to be dead brainy,” said her eldest daughter Marjorie, “though I ain’t seen no evidence of brains. He just
sits
there looking like a wet weekend.”

“He’s a randy little sod,” said Farah, the youngest Bott, “our Sharon reckons ‘e can do it four times a night.”

“Do what?” screeched Mrs Bott, “thread a needle?”

The Botts screeched and cackled for quite some time then finally, after a lot of noisy stair climbing, went to bed. Dawn was breaking as I stretched out on the couch and went to sleep.

At 6am Mr Bott, a timid and, not surprisingly, quiet man, came into the living room, and switched on breakfast television.

“‘pe I’m not disturbin’ you,” he said politely.

“Not at all,” I said. I got up, retrieved my suitcase from the hall, and walked out into the cool morning air.

I was on the first stage of my journey to Oxford, where I intended to fall on Pandora’s neck and plead sanctuary.

Friday June 17
^th

It was lunchtime when I got to Pandora’s flat. Pandora wasn’t in. She was having a tutorial. However, a languorous youth called Julian Twyselton-Fife
was
in. We shook hands. I’ve grasped firmer rubber gloves.

To make conversation I asked him what he was doing at Oxford.

“Oh I’m just farting about,” he said airily. “I shan’t sit my finals, only people who intend to
work
do that.”

He offered me Turkish coffee. I accepted, not wanting to appear provincial. When it came I regretted my inferiority complex. I asked if he shared the flat with Pandora.

“I’m married to Pandora,” he said. “She’s Mrs Twyselton-Fife. I did it as a favour to her last week. Pandora has this dinky little theory that first marriages should be gotten over with quickly, so we intend to divorce quite soon. We don’t
love
each other,” he added. Then, “In fact, I prefer my own sex.”

“Good,” I said, “because I intend to be Pandora’s second husband.”

Pinky had slid out of his carrier bag. “I say, who
is
that divine creature?” brayed Twyselton-Fife. He grasped Pinky to his tweedy bosom. I said, “It’s Pinky.”

He crooned, “Oh, Pinky, you’re a handsome one, aren’t you? Now, don’t deny it, sir, accept the compliment!”

Pandora came in. She looked clever and lovely.

“Hello Mrs Twyselton-Fife.” I said.

“Oh, you know then?” she said.

“Can I stay here?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

So that was that. I am now in a
ménage à trois
. With a bit of luck it will soon be a
ménage à deux
. For ever.

Saturday June 18
^th

I phoned home this morning. One of the engineering lodgers answered. “Hello, Martin Muffet speaking.”

“Martin
Muffet
!” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “and spare the jokes about tuffets and spiders will you?”

BOOK: True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole