Sue Townsend lives in a handsome Victorian vicarage on a road in Leicester she has known most of her life. As a young mother, she used to come here to pay the rent to her landlord, never imagining a self-deluding teenager called Mole would one day buy her this house, with its cosy Aga and cast-iron fireplaces, and the sweet smell of lavender as you reach the front door. You might think that at 60, and increasingly waylaid by a diabetic condition that is robbing her of her balance, kidney function and, most poignantly, her eyesight, she might succumb to the comforts of richly cosy home and close family. “It’s nice to see you,” she says, still girlish in her short-sleeved mohair jumper and Ugg boots. “I haven’t seen anyone from the outside world for ages.”
Her world may have contracted, with no more fast trains to London for Private Eye lunches (Richard Ingrams is a huge Mole fan, seeing the books as an attack on that blight of the age, feminism); and she can’t leave the house unaccompanied or walk far without needing a wheelchair. But with her new book, Queen Camilla, she is on top form, never sharper or funnier in her prodding of our rulers and their fatal vanities, but always an optimist who believes there is more to like about people than hate.
“I describe myself as a cheerful manic depressive,” she laughs. “But now I’ll be accused of jumping on the Stephen Fry band-wagon.” (In the novel, the lumbering polymath is under house arrest in Norfolk for satirising the authorities: “I hope the publishers have told him,” laughs his jailer. Is he a friend? “Sort of.”)
A sequel to her 2002 novel The Queen and I, this book follows the path of the exiled royals — banished to an “exclusion zone”, along with other undesirables by the republicans — to restoration under the aegis of a new Tory government led by a David Cameron lookalike called Boy English. He is posh and plummy, but nobody minds, because his wife has a pierced bellybutton and the couple play darts. Not that the Windsors are clamouring for escape: Anne is happily shacked up with a petty criminal called Spiggy; Wills is a hunky scaffolder with a chav chick called Chanel; Charles is still talking to organic root vegetables in his council-house backyard; Camilla is soothed by her dogs, fags and a best mate called Bev, enduring her husband’s sulks and overweening sensitivities like a trouper. “I always thought it was true love with those two,” says an admiring Townsend. “I don’t think she was responsible for Diana and Charles’s unhappiness; they both had massive egos, were needy and neurotic, but Camilla would say, ‘Sit down, have a fag, tomorrow’s another day.’ And, unlike Charles, it wouldn’t bother her that that’s a cliché.
“I feel sympathetic to the royals as people, but I can’t stand the institution. I think it’s cruel. They are forced to live a lie about their own specialness. Inside, they surely must know they are not brilliant, wonderful people who deserve to be set apart.” Aren’t they good value for money? She laughs: “Alton Towers is way above them in tables of tourist attractions.”
The only heroes of her book are its dogs, pampered “dorgis” and underclass mongrels who, in tribute to an Orwellian fable, rise up against their human oppressors to force political change in a way that people, cowed by convention and consumerism, no longer can. “We feel powerless,” sighs Townsend, a natural dissenter, “so I have the dogs do it.” A lifelong admirer of Russia, its literature, its old state provision, its revolution (“a just one”), Townsend has been left-wing since childhood.
“I’ve been to Russia a lot. I saw they were no threat to us — they didn’t even have enough light bulbs.”
In her twenties, she ran an adventure playground on a tough Leicester estate (where Joe Orton grew up). She sees the Asbo families she satirises in Queen Camilla — mad Maddo Clarke and the tattooed tarts of Slapper Alley — as a product of our fear, laziness and disengagement. Personally, she is an interventionist, once following home a woman who was hitting a two-year-old in the street. “I knocked on her door and said I was with social services. She gave me a load of abuse, but it quietened her down.”
Townsend was born the eldest of three sisters (“Very Chekhovian,” she giggles. “You know, ‘Leicester, Leicester, Leicester.’ ”) to socialist parents, a postman father and a mother who took her to hear Harold Wilson speak when she was 13. They lived in locally disdained prefabs (the “rabbit hutches”) and consumed four library books each a fortnight; but their clever daughter didn’t learn to read until she was eight and a half. “I was terrified of the teacher; she smacked our legs if we got a letter wrong.” Once initiated, she skipped Enid Blyton for The Rights of Man and The Grapes of Wrath, later telling a careers teacher she wanted to be a journalist. “I wrote letters to the local paper under the name of Susie-Gone-Wong. Ridiculous!”
She failed her 11-plus (they couldn’t have afforded the grammar-school uniform, anyway) and went to a girls’ secondary modern, on whose unlikely diet of classics, Shakespeare and school plays she thrived. In the playground, she charged friends to see her imitations of teachers, but she was mostly an observer of life rather than a full participant, leaving biscuits and apple cores for days to watch their incremental decomposition. “I was interested in the ending of things.” After school, she worked in shops, factories, a garage forecourt; she married a sheet-metal worker, had three children under five by the time she was 22 and wrote stories late into the night while they slept. An empty fridge box under the stairs contained her discarded efforts, about which her husband had no idea. “It was a secret, because I knew I wasn’t good enough. When you’re reading Updike, how can you be? I had no voice of my own, I didn’t know which genre, but against my will it was always funny.”
Her marriage fell apart when — the way she tells it — her hunter-gatherer husband discovered liberation, velvet jackets and long hair. She met Colin Broadway, a canoe-maker and expedition leader, who is the cornerstone of her life and father of her last child, Lizzie, and the person to whom she finally confessed her writing habit. “I said, ‘I have something to tell you.’ He thought I was going to tell him something shameful.” She joined the Phoenix Arts Centre writers’ group in 1978, wrote a play, Womberang, about a gynaecologist’s waiting room, won a Thames Television bursary in 1981 (John Mortimer chaired the panel, and remains a champion), became a full-time writer at the Phoenix and wrote plays for mosques, temples, working men’s clubs. One, for mentally handicapped children, took six minutes to collapse. “When they got on stage, all they did was wave,” she says, shaking with laughter at the memory.
Life-changing success arrived like lightning one Sunday afternoon when her son asked why his struggling, exhausted mother didn’t take him to safari parks like other
families; the outrageous ingratitude and criticism made her laugh and cry, and the dysfunctional Mole family was born. The books have sold millions. She bought her vicarage, hardbacks and Prada shoes; donated to community projects and helped people who wrote telling her their car needed mending. “But it hasn’t impinged
on me. It’s amazing, it’s translated into 43 languages — more as different territories become independent, I’ve just signed a Kurdistan contract — but I’ve detached myself. I’m not tempted to leave Leicester, because I live inside my head. I think writers should be in the background, watching, not part of a show.”
Before the 1982 publication of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, she asked her publisher if she could have her name removed from the cover. “It was supposed to be written by a 13¾-year-old boy. It seemed stupid to have my name on it. But he said gravely it was a wonderful thing to write a book, and that I should take the credit.”
Actually, she isn’t much interested in the life or personality of the character who made her name. Mole is a device through which she reappraises England at times of significant socio-political shift. If Cameron comes to power, Mole will be 40, and the urge to write another chapter will be irresistible. “I loved the webcam in Cameron’s kitchen, making porridge for the children,” she hoots. “They have been clever. Tell me, is there a hint of a dimple and a chin that turns up?” Yes, I confirm, and a slight prep-school pudginess. “Ah, yes, I thought so!” But her heart bleeds for Gordon Brown, who she thinks is a “fabulous bloke”, but simply can’t provide the required acting skills for the celebrity job bequeathed by that “flitting dragonfly Blair”. “Gordon is mixed up in my mind with Mr Rochester, gruff and a bit Asperger’s, saturnine, mysterious, sexy and blind at the end.” Brown has lost an eye, too. “Ah, yes. Why don’t they make more of that?”
The new book was written last winter in Majorca, 1,000 words a day dictated to her husband; although she has now been taught to touch-type by a blind man, she still writes in thick black marker on ring-bound notebooks, a few words a page, and reads it under her electric magnifier. Once she has completed a play for BBC radio, she wants to travel somewhere extraordinary with her husband. “I’d like to go to North Korea. I’ll be in a wheelchair, but I want to know what it is like to live in a totalitarian state.
I want to know how people can fall in with the worship of the leader, as they did with Mao.” How will she get in? “I’ll be doing research on how North Korea rations its dialysis,” she laughs. “Everyone’s on it, you know, even Bin Laden.”
Townsend has written a book about dogs, but the dog one might expect to meet in the home of a woman who was registered blind in 2001 is nowhere to be seen. She has accepted her frailties, but also resisted their onward march. When we begin talking, she is shading her right eye with a hand, as if from a nonexistent sun; later, she puts on huge (and stylish) sunglasses, apologising. She has no plans to write about her illness — she hates self- pitying writers, and the loss of reading is “still raw” — and she is feeling better than she has for an age.
What is remarkable about Townsend is how much you laugh with a woman who has so much to rail against; how acutely focused she is on the outside world when her window on it is opaque, how much she cares about feckless young hoodies she never has to meet, let alone live next door to. “The gods give and the gods take away,” she says of her illness. “It’s okay, I’m used to it now. I mean, what’s it all about, Alfie? It’s about love and family, and I have those.”
Extract
The royal family, those who had not fled abroad, were living in the Flowers Exclusion Zone (known locally as the Fez), 119 miles from Buckingham Palace, in the East Midlands Region. Arthur Grice, a scaffolding magnate and multimillionaire, owned and managed the estate; he considered it to be his personal fiefdom. The royals lived in Hell Close, a cul-de-sac of 16 semi-detached ex-council houses. They had small front gardens, fenced to waist height. A few were lovingly kept. Prince Charles regularly won the Grice Best Kept Garden Award, whereas his neighbours’, the Threadgolds’, garden was an eyesore of old mattresses, vicious brambles and festering rubbish bags. A 20ft-high metal fence topped with razor wire and CCTV cameras formed the boundary between the back gardens of Hell Close and the outside world.
At the only entrance to the Fez, on a triangular piece of muddy ground, squatted a series of interconnected Portakabins, housing the Grice Security Police. The residents of the zone were required to wear an ankle tag and carry an identity card at all times. Their movements were followed on a bank of CCTV screens. When Camilla’s tag had been fitted, immediately after her wedding on the estate, she had said, with her usual cheerful pragmatism, “I think it flatters my ankle beautifully.”
One evening, Camilla was at the bottom of the garden, in the dark, poking at a smouldering bonfire of wet leaves with a long stick. She was glad to put away her summer clothes and throw on a baggy sweater, jeans and wellingtons.
In the old days, when her affair with Charles was still a secret from the public, she had lived for fox-hunting days. She would rise early to begin the ritual of dressing: in the tight jodhpurs, the white high-necked shirt, the fitted red coat with the brass buttons. And last, but best of all, the tight, black, knee-high riding boots. She knew she looked good in the saddle and was regarded by her fellow huntsmen as a fearless rider. When she strode from the house towards the stables, whip in hand, her breath visible in the frosty air, she felt contained and powerful, and, if she was honest with herself, there was the tiniest frisson of sexual excitement.
With a horse between her legs and the open countryside in front of her, surrounded by friends she could trust with her life, she experienced a sort of ecstasy; and how wonderful it was to return at twilight, to lie in a hot bath with a drink and a fag and, occasionally, Charles.
When she went indoors, after dousing the bonfire, Charles was sitting in the front room, composing a letter at a small writing bureau. She could see from the wastepaper basket next to him that he had already gone through several drafts. He was obviously in a state of anxiety. “Who are you writing to, darling?”
“The milkman,” said Charles. “I’ve been through several drafts, I’ve written and rewritten the damn thing so many times and don’t know how to end it.” Camilla picked up the last draft and read: Dear Milkman, Awfully sorry to inconvenience you, but would it be at all possible to change our order for today (Thursday) and have two bottles of semi-skimmed instead of our usual one? If this addition to your usual order leaves you in the ghastly position of being overstretched as far as your stock is concerned, then please do not worry. I would be simply devastated if my request gave you a moment’s anxiety or inconvenienced you in the slightest.
May I just add that your cheery whistle in the morning, and in all weathers, somehow exemplifies the very essence of the indomitable British character.
Charles said, “Do I sign it ‘Sincerely, Charles’, or, ‘With best wishes’ or ‘Yours respectfully’, because I do respect him, or what?”
Camilla tore a strip off the bottom of the letter and quickly scrawled ‘One extra pint, please’. She rolled the scrap of paper up, pushed it in the neck of an empty Grice’s milk bottle and put it on the doorstep.
Extracted from Queen Camilla by Sue Townsend, published by Michael Joseph on October 26; copies can be ordered through The Sunday Times Books First for £16.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
