Sue Townsend appreciation
Janet Fillingham met Sue Townsend in 1980 while a junior agent at Sheil Land Associates. Townsend, then 34, was a new playwright, beginning to dabble in prose. Fillingham became Townsend's first agent, representing the Leicester-born writer for 11 years. After a career that incorporated 15 novels and many plays, Townsend died on Thursday, aged 68.
Sue Townsend, soft-voiced and diffident, was first nurtured as a writer by the Phoenix Arts Centre, Leicester – still going strong, still delivering cultural and creative opportunities to its local community nearly 40 years after Sue tentatively pushed open their door. Her play Womberang, developed in Leicester, had a short run in 1979 at Verity Bargate's original Soho Poly theatre. Audience instructions on entry to that powerhouse of creativity: "Breathe in, we'll squeeze you in somehow."
I breathed in and was touched, inspired and enchanted by the freshness of Sue's writing voice. Sitting a little later in her Leicester kitchen, exploring what else she might want to write, she told me about her fascination with Daniel Lambert, the 18th-century fat man and cherished icon of Leicester, but also about an audition script she'd been working on and had tried out at the Phoenix writing group. It was about a spotty and mule-ish teenager…
I hadn't come across Daniel Lambert and was prepared to support Sue's enthusiasm for him, but my attention was diverted as she scurried around her kitchen retrieving pieces of handwritten paper from unlikely nooks and crannies and then read out to me the first stirrings of Adrian Mole. Sue was in her mid-30s at the time and I was in my 20s. Adolescence seemed far away. (And neither of us had ever been a teenage boy.) But the character who became Adrian – he was called Nigel, then – seemed to me in that kitchen to have an identity entirely his own and yet incorporated a universal awkwardness, yearning and sense of potential.
I badly wanted others to be able to enjoy him too. Sue – or perhaps Colin, her husband, I can't remember – typed up the manuscript and we sent it first to John Tydeman at BBC Radio Drama, suggesting that it could form a radio monologue. After that we sent it to Geoffrey Strachan at Methuen Books. The sharing of Adrian had begun. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ came out in 1982.
More than 30 years have passed, Sue wrote seven more diaries, and to the generation that includes my own children it seems as if Adrian Mole has always been with us. Well so he has, across generations, cultures and countries. The Adrian books (perfectly complemented by Caroline Holden's jaunty line drawings in the UK) were published in 30 languages.
Gentle Sue, how grateful we shall always be to you for your writing and your other gifts – your ability to always see the best in people, to help them sing in their own way, to lead us to healing laughter as well as cleansing tears. You made connections with people everywhere. Thank you for leading the way.