by Sue Townsend
I used to scoff at my dead grandmother Edna Mole’s assertion that microwaves damage the brain, but since upgrading to a superior wattage I have noticed a diminution of brain power. It took me more than an hour to remember whether it was Shakespeare who wrote, ‘He that sleeps feels not the toothache’, or Sir Walter Raleigh. I spoke these words at 4am to Glenn, who has got an abscess. However, he didn’t sleep but kept me awake with his groans of pain. It was just our luck not to have a single painkilling tablet in the house.
Sunday, September 10
At first light, I went to the emergency chemist and asked for Paracetemol. The chemist, a child of 10, asked me if I intended to kill myself. I assured her that I didn’t, and she handed over the pills. I tried to buy petrol today, but the queues were too long and there was a fight on the forecourt. Why?
Monday, September 11
Mohammed at the BP garage refused to sell me more than £5-worth of lead-free this morning. We were at school together, and our relationship has deepened in friendship over my fuel-buying years, yet he refused to help me out. How am I going to get William to school? There is no convenient public transport, and the journey is almost a mile.
Wednesday, September 13
I rang my MP, Pandora Braithwaite, to complain about the fuel crisis. She reminded me that when we were school-children together we used to walk a mile-and-a-half to Neil Armstrong Comprehensive School. I reminded her that, ‘This is the year 2000, where paedophiles stalk the avenues and cul-de-sacs.’
She said scornfully, ‘You’ve obviously forgotten that sweetshop keeper who used to pretend his trousers had fallen down when we innocently asked for a gobstopper’ I asked her why she was in such a bad mood. She said, ‘On the contrary, I’m in an excellent mood. I’m relieved that I’m not mentioned in Andrew Rawnsley’s book, Servants Of The People. I was sure he was going to use that story about me and Mo and Gordon Brown in that hotel service lift at Bournemouth.’
Thursday, September 14
Glenn has come home from school with a homework project about third world poverty. I took him to the library on the estate on a search for information. Unfortunately, it was closed due to ‘staff shortages’. I rang my mother and she brought round some statistics she’d found on the internet. I was shocked to realise that me and my boys have been living in third world poverty for the past two years.
Glenn is relieved: he was planning to do his project on Bangladesh, but now, as he says, ‘All I have to do is go walkin’ round the streets talkin’ to people, Dad.’
Thursday, September 14, 2000 (Continued)
Arthur Askey Walk, Ashby-de-la-Zouch
So much for a lifelong friendship! Mohammed refused to sell me any petrol today, even though I had pushed the Montego to his garage to save what little fuel I had. I reminded him that I had stuck up for him in the playground at Neil Armstrong Comprehensive when Barry Kent went on a bullying rampage after eating too many Walker’s crisps. ‘I don’t remember you stickin’ up for me, Moley,’ Mohammed said as he directed a midwife towards a pump.
I pointed out that I had advised Barry to go on a bullying-awareness course at the Off The Streets youth club. ‘That didn’t stop me from gettin’ my fingers bent back,’ he said sadly.
My mother drove up on the forecourt and joined the queue of essential users. ‘On what grounds are you an essential user?’ I asked. ‘Have you joined one of the emergency services since I saw you last?’
‘As a matter of fact, I have, in a way,’ she said. ‘I promised to take some of my unwanted vases to Laing ward at Ivan’s mental hospital. They’ve got nothing to put the visitors’ flowers in.’
I wondered how she would convince Mohammed that her need of fuel was legitimate, and was infuriated when she was allowed to go to the front of the queue and was served by Mohammed himself!
I made another attempt to procure some petrol for myself. Citing the time I directed Mohammed in the Nativity play, Jesus Christ Almighty!, and gave him the starring role. ‘Yeah, yeah, and I’m still in trouble with some of the community elders 15 years later,’ he said. ‘I said I’d be in trouble if I played Jesus as a heroin addict.’
‘You had free will, Mohammed,’ I pointed out.
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘You was going through a bad time. Your parents were splittin’ up, so I dun it to help you out.’
As I pushed my car back home, I puzzled over how a man could hold a grudge for so long. A grudge so powerful that it influenced his judgment when it came to petrol distribution.
Saturday, September 16
Pandora is thinking of buying a house in the Suffolk countryside so she can escape from her constituents. It is called Oakley Park, in Hoxne village. I looked the property up on the net, and was alarmed to discover that it was the scene of a macabre double murder in 1777, when Sir Frederick Brownlow discovered his wife Felicity in bed with Fergus Bellington, a young groom.
When I say ‘bed’, I am using the term loosely – the lovers were actually participating in a sexual act behind the clock over the arched entranceway. As midnight struck, Sir Frederick, tormented by jealousy, chopped them into bite-sized pieces with his sword. (‘It was manayee times sharpen-ed beinge much blunted be ye bones’) The pieces were then fed to the pigs. I warned Pandora that there was a curse on the house, and that anybody with the initials FB came to a bad end if they so much as stepped foot into the courtyard.
‘For God’s sake,’ she said, ‘what are you drivelling on about? My initials are PLEB’ She then went into a tirade saying that idiots were clogging up the internet with uninteresting and unnecessary information.
Sunday, September 17
Battle of Britain Day: Radio 4 was dominated this morning by a dreary church service commemorating this important historical occasion. Why does the C of E allow such very terrible music to be played in its name? And why do church officials speak in such unnatural voices like aliens?
Radio 4 should have played the soundtrack of that Douglas Bader Story. It would have given joy to many.
Monday, September 18
Arthur Askey Walk, Ashby-de-la-Zouch
Life is dull after the excitement of the petrol crisis. I have been out and about doing a little panic buying of bottled water, granulated sugar, bread mix and tinned pilchards. But nothing can compare with last week’s frenzy, when, for a few moments, I truly believed that civilisation was at an end and that we would be back to driving a pony and trap.
I have been called to the Job Centre on Friday to explain why I filled in a form recently stating that I am not available for work and that I would like to continue to claim benefits. I have spent all day today preparing my case. I have written a manifesto. Its main thrust is that society should support its artists. Its concluding paragraph states: ‘How tragic would be the loss to the nation if a great work of mine were to remain unwritten due to the banal necessity of clocking on as an assistant warehouseman, eg.’
Tuesday, September 19
At 1pm, I was contacted on my mobile by my mother, who screamed, ‘Drop whatever you’re doing and start queueing for petrol now!’ As I scrambled into my car, I shouted the news to the neighbours in the street. A convoy, stretching 30 cars long, soon formed behind me. By the time we got to Mohammed’s garage, we were more than 100 strong and had a police escort. Mohammed’s jaw dropped when he saw me leading the convoy on to the forecourt. He was just about to take his wife panic buying in Iceland – she had heard that toddler-sized disposable Pampers were in short supply.
I now feel slightly ashamed of myself for getting caught up in the hysteria, but I need my car. I’m too sensitive to be a full-time pedestrian. The non-car-owning public are unpredictable, their voices are loud and their tempers are uncertain. I feel safer in my car with my Abba tapes and Radio 4.
Friday, September 22
I presented myself at the Job Centre at the appointed time, 10.30am, and was surprised to be taken immediately through to an interview suite by a personable youn
g woman called Jane Doxy. She was neatly turned out in a navy skirt suit and a white shirt. The outfit would, in my opinion, have benefited from high heels, but no doubt Jane enjoyed the comfort of her Gucci-copy loafers. I’d had the foresight to take a copy of the Guardian with me, to impress on Jane that I was an intelligent and literate person. Though, when I saw the Daily Mail in her bag, I wondered if I had done the right thing.
She had read my manifesto with great interest, she said. However, she (and the department) felt that my writing was ‘only a hobby’ and that ‘the government was not in the game of subsidising my leisure interests’. She gave me two telephone numbers to ring. The first was that of Eddie’s Tea Bar. Eddie himself answered. The job was assistant caterer in Eddie’s café, which was a trailer parked in a lay-by next to the cement works. I asked what my duties would be. Eddie growled, ‘You’d be doin’ all sorts, fryin’ burgers, changin’ the Calor Gas bottle, ‘n’ stuff like that, for £3.60 an hour’ Under the watchful eye of Jane Doxy, I then rang the second number. A gentle pensioner called Mrs Banbury-Pryce answered, and said that she needed somebody to take her six dogs out twice a day for a walk. I start at Eddie’s on Monday. I just knew that, with my soft heart, I’d end up helping Mrs Banbury-Pryce with the fastenings on her corset and cutting her toenails.
Sunday, September 24
Woke at 5pm to find that a small earthquake had shaken the East Midlands. A few dogs barked, but tragically for the local media nobody was killed.
Monday, October 2
Eddie’s Tea Bar, Cement Works, Leicestershire
I am on my break and am sitting on a white plastic chair, writing on a matching picnic table. I am surrounded by lorry drivers and motorists. It is only 11.30am, but I am already exhausted. I have been on my feet since 5am (though, to be strictly honest, and at the risk of being labelled ‘pedant’, I did sit down in the car during the journey here).
Eddie and his third wife, Sandra, were already here and the urn was warming up, as were the deep-fat fryers and the griddle. Eddie and Sandra seem to have fat running through their bloodstreams. Their hair, skin and pores seem to be clogged with it. Eddie said to me, as he gave me a huge wrap-around apron, ‘You’ll never shake off the stink of the fat, lad. It makes it ‘ard to get a woman outside the trade’ All Eddies wives have been in the frying business, apparently. I reassured him that I was not actively seeking a woman at the moment, and told him that I was due to start a course at the adult education centre in Leicester called Living Without A Partner. He looked at me, pityingly, and asked quietly whether I had ‘Somethink wrong under yer clothes’.
I reassured Eddie that I was made as other men were made, but that my heart had been broken a few times recently and needed time to recover. Eddie lifted the spatula off the sizzling bacon slices and said, ‘I get bad headaches if I don’t have a bit of sausage-hiding once a day, don’t I Sandra?’
Sandra tucked a strand of oily hair behind an ear and said, ’ ‘E was on a box of Nurofen every 24 hours when I went in the General to have my veins done’ Eddie shook his head and gazed into the middle distance where the lorries were parked, obviously re-living the horrors of sexual deprivation.
I phoned my mother to ask how the child-care arrangements had gone this morning. She said, ‘Badly, I can’t get up and come to your house at five every morning. I’m falling asleep at the wheel’ I pointed out to her that day nurseries don’t open until 7am and begged her to continue. She said bitterly, ‘I blame Tony Blair and Jack Straw for this. Why should grandmas have to be dragged in to look after their grandkids, eh? I’ve already served my sentence with you and your sister.’
She made me and my sibling’s upbringing sound a joyless business. I asked how her new husband, Ivan, was doing in the mental hospital. ‘He’s developed an aversion to all things technological,’ she said. ‘A male nurse used an electronic Ronson to light a patient’s birthday cake and Ivan had to be sedated’ I wondered if Ivan ‘techno’ Braithwaite would be capable ever again of coping with the modern world.
Tuesday, October 3
Ashby-de-la-Zouch
DH Lawrence, my literary hero, enjoyed working with his hands and reputedly took a pride in his jam-making. I, too, have discovered the small joys of manual labour. I like to think that DH would have been proud of me as I serve up a bacon ‘n’ egg sandwich to our first customer, Les, who was driving an Eddie Stobbart lorry full of mineral water from Liskeard to Dundee. Though I say it myself, Les’s sandwich was a work of art. The bacon was succulent, the egg was cooked sensitively, so as to prevent yolk leakage, and the bread was as white and soft as a newly-hatched maggot. I was quietly pleased when Les pronounced it to be ‘champion’.
Friday, October 6
Couldn’t sleep for wondering about the necessity of hauling mineral water from Liskeard to Dundee. Scotland is awash with the stuff.
Saturday, October 7
Living Without A Partner has been cancelled. I was the only one to turn up.
Thursday, October 5
Eddie’s Tea Bar, the Cement Works, Leicestershire
Working in Eddie’s has given me a unique glimpse of how capitalism works. Eddie goes to the cash-and-carry and buys catering packs of bacon, beefburgers, white sliced bread, ketchup, etc, and then uses me at £3.60 an hour to convert the ingredients into food items that sell for 200% profit. Eddie does not have a computerised till. His is strictly a cash business. There is a notice on the trailer wall next to the peeling Samantha Fox poster: ‘Please do not ask for a receipt, as refusal often offends.’
He keeps the coins in an old Cadbury’s Luxury Biscuits tin. It offends my sense of order to see the coinage jumbled up together, but it works well enough. Banknotes are kept in Eddie’s apron pocket. I suspect that Eddie pays little tax or VAT, though he is vociferous enough on the subject of social security cheats. ‘They should be took to a island somewhere in the North Sea an’ left to fend for themselves,’ he said this morning. ‘Though,’ he added compassionately, ‘I’d give ‘em a packet of seeds an’ a spade.’
Eddie’s biscuit tin is the proletarian equivalent of a Cayman Islands tax shelter. All it lacks is financial advisers and accountants. Eddie’s wife does his ‘books’ while watching the omnibus edition of EastEnders. It’s a weekly ritual, apparently.
The lorry drivers provide another facet of globalisation. Some truckers have travelled three days to haul Romanian fridges to Bolton, England. Others have taken gerbil food from Bury St Edmunds to Hamburg and returned with a cargo of Hamburgian carrots, which they’ve dropped off at a warehouse in Stowmarket, Suffolk. This is madness.
As I serve each trucker, I make a point now of enquiring as to his ultimate destination and the nature of his load. I have thus come to the conclusion that capitalism is no way to run the world’s economy – it is inefficient and it exploits workers such as myself.
I put this argument to Eddie as I was scraping the griddle clean with a spatula. He profoundly disagreed with my analysis and said, ‘If you carry on shoutin’ for revolution, Moley, you’ll find yerself outta a job so far yer stupid Birkenstock shoes won’t touch the bleedin’ ground.’
Friday, October 6
William and Glenn are both away from school because their hair is infested with head lice. I rang Eddie on his mobile and told him that I wouldn’t be in today, as I would be preoccupied with banishing the nits from my boys’ heads. Eddie said, ‘Me an’ the missus was up all night scratching our soddin’ bonces as if they was scratchcards. You should examine yer own ‘ead, Mole.’
Glenn and William sat me at my desk and aimed my anglepoise lamp on to my head. There were so many nits in my hair that Glenn said, ‘You could fill Wembley stadium with ‘em, Dad’ He is going to watch the England-Germany match tomorrow with a group from the school. They are doing a project on English historical monuments and he is hoping to bring a few blades of grass back to paste into his project folder. Though, as the headmaster said in his email to me, ‘Glenn’s head w
ill be examined by myself in the morning, and if evidence is found of head lice or their progeny, in the form of unhatched eggs, he will NOT be allowed to board the coach to Wembley.’
I was up most of the night going through Glenn’s hair with a fine-tooth comb. Eventually, at 3.30am, I cracked and shaved his head. I used five disposable razors. He looks decidedly thuggish, but at least he was allowed on to the coach.
Saturday, October 7
Glenn returned victorious with a plastic seat, a square foot of turf and one of Kevin Keegan’s chewed-up finger-nails. The boy will go far.
Sunday, October 15
Ashby-de-la-Zouch
Pandora rang me today and sought my advice on whether or not she should confess to have smoked cannabis at Oxford. ‘Why are you asking me?’ I said. ‘You’re the voice of middle England,’ she snapped. ‘You’re a perfect barometer of public opinion’ I resented her impication that I was a dull provincial, but at the same time was pleased and flattered that my opinion was being sought. I advised her to keep quiet in the matter of her drug-taking, and warned that a confession would almost certainly jeopardise her ultimate ambition of becoming the next-but-one prime minister. She rang off after saying, ‘You are right, Aidy, I must keep the Daily Mail on my side.’
Monday, October 16
The shadow of headlice infestation continues to fall across our house. What more can I do to exterminate the vile creatures? My mother went to the hairdresser’s on Saturday, and her stylist, Sebastian, fled in horror to the colour mixing room after spotting a colony of them nesting at the nape of her neck. She is furious with me, and claims she hasn’t been so humiliated since the wire from her Gossard bra poked out of her wedding dress at the register office when she married Ivan Braithwaite. Even my father, who is still in an isolation cubicle at the general hospital, has nits. What is going on? I told Glenn that I suspect foul play: ‘It’s obvious that a foreign power, possibly Iran, has introduced a virulent form of nits into this country in an attempt to demoralise the population and destabilise the pound’ Glenn shook his head in a pitying way and said, ‘Go an’ lie down, Dad, an’ put a wet towel on yer ‘ead.’
