I read the Adrian Mole books in the mid-Eighties when I was nine or ten years old and found them hilarious, although on rereading them as an adult I’ve realised how many subtleties and references went over my head at the time. This entry, though, I found as affecting then as I do now; it’s only now that I’m a bit better able to articulate why. The diary format gives Adrian’s notes a self-containment that sometimes lends them the quality of a short story. Here Sue Townsend is at her brilliant best in creating a sketch of domestic life that subtly conveys the tensions of a relationship and the fears that can come with old age: of death, of losing one’s dignity, of loneliness.

Bert Baxter, the elderly man whom Adrian has volunteered to assist through his school’s Good Samaritan scheme, urgently summons him one evening while he’s at home eating his spaghetti Bolognese. Adrian arrives at Bert’s council house to find that the television has been turned off, ‘so I knew something serious had happened’. It turns out that Bert’s wife, Queenie, has had ‘a bad turn’. She’s in bed without her make-up on. This is how Adrian relates the subsequent exchange:

“I asked her what was wrong. ‘I’ve been having pains like red-hot needles in my chest.’ Bert interrupted. ‘You said the pains were like red-hot knives five minutes ago!’

‘Needles, knives, who cares?’ she said.”

It’s a brilliant exchange of dialogue that says so much in so few words about the participants’ characters and their testy but affectionate relationship. Adrian asks Bert if he’s called the doctor, and Bert says he hasn’t because Queenie is frightened of doctors. Adrian phones home instead, and soon both his parents come round and take control. They call an ambulance.

“It was a good job they did because while it was coming Queenie went a bit strange and started talking about ration books and stuff,” reports the perennially naive Adrian: later, his mother will call from the hospital to confirm that Queenie has had a stroke. Bert’s brusque concern for his wife becomes clear as he holds her hand and calls her a “daft old bat”. Just as the ambulance men are shutting the doors and preparing the drive away, Queenie calls to Adrian to fetch her rouge. “I’m not going until I’ve got me rouge.” Adrian has to rifle through Queenie’s possessions in her bedroom to find it. The dire circumstances mean that the usual social protocols fall away and he is suddenly foraging through the accumulated private clutter of these elderly people’s lives, glimpsing something of their interiors: their emotional attachments, their fears. “The top was covered in pots and hairnets and hairpins and china dishes and lace mats and photos of babies and weddings.” He finds the rouge in a drawer. Once she’s gone, a forlorn Bert says: “What am I going to do without my girl to help me?”

The Mole family invite to come home with them but he won’t leave the house, as he’s scared the council will take it away from him. The story has such a mixture of the particular and the universal: a few paragraphs set in an elderly couple’s council house in Leicester in 1982 and you’re deep inside Thatcher’s Britain, but of course the issues that come with old age always resonate. Townsend handles this little story with such tenderness, such economy and poignancy. She’s a writer I miss very much.

First published by Puffin/Methuen, 1984