I rang my grandma and she came round in a taxi and took me to her house and put me to bed. I am there now. It is very clean and peaceful. I am wearing my dead grandad’s pyjamas. I have just had a bowl ofbarley and beef soup. It is my first proper nourishment for weeks.
I expect there will be a row when my mother comes home and finds that I have gone. But frankly, my dear diary, I don’t give a damn.
Moon’s First Quarter
The emergency doctor came to my grandma’s last night at 11.30 PM. He diagnosed that I am suffering from acne vulgaris. He said it was so common that it is regarded as a normal state of adolescence. He thought it was highly unlikely that I have got lassa fever because I have not been to Africa this year. He told grandma to take the disinfected sheets off the doors and windows. Grandma said she would like a second opinion. That was when the doctor lost his temper. He shouted in a very loud voice, ‘The lad has only got a few teenage spots, for Christ’s sake!’
Grandma said she would complain to the Medical Council but the doctor just laughed and went downstairs and slammed the door. My father came round before he went to work and brought my Social Studies homework and the dog. He said that if I was not out of bed when he got home at lunchtime he would thrash me to within an inch of my life.
He took my grandma into the kitchen and had a loud talk with her. I heard him saying,’ Things are very bad between me and Pauline, and all we are arguing over now is who doesn’t get custody of Adrian’. Surely my father made a mistake. He must have meant who did get custody of me.
So the worst has happened, my skin has gone to pot and my parents are splitting up.
It is official. They are getting a divorce! Neither of them wants to leave the house so the spare room is being turned into a bedsitter for my father. This could have a very bad effect on me. It could prevent me from being a vet.
My mother gave me five pounds this morning and told me not to tell my father. I bought some bio-spot cream for my skin and the new Abba L.P.
I rang Mr Cherry and said I had personal problems and would be unable to work for a few weeks. Mr Cherry said that he knew that my parents were divorcing because my father had cancelled my mother’s Cosmopolitan.
My father gave me five pounds and told me not to tell my mother. I spent some of it on buying some purple paper and envelopes so that the BBC will be impressed and read my poems. The rest of it will have to go on Barry Kent and his menaces money. I don’t think anybody in the world can be as unhappy as me. If I didn’t have my poetry I would be a raving loonie by now.
Went out for a sad walk and took Pandora’s horsetwo pounds of cooking apples. Thought of a poem about Blossom. Wrote it down when I got back to the house where I live.
Blossom, by Adrian Mole, aged nearly fourteen
I have sent it to the BBC. I marked the envelope ‘Urgent’.
Second in Lent
The house is very quiet. My father sits in the spare room smoking and my mother sits in the bedroom smoking. They are not eating much.
Mr Lucas has phoned my mother three times. All she says to him is ‘not yet, it’s too early’. Perhaps he has asked her to go to the pub for a drink and take her mind off her troubles.
My father has put the stereo in his bedroom. He is playing his Jim Reeves records and staring out of thewindow. I took him a cup of tea and he said ‘Thanks, son’ in a choked-up voice.
My mother was looking at old letters in my father’s handwriting when I took her tea in; she said, ‘Adrian, what must you think of us?’ I said that Rick Lemon, the youth leader, thinks divorce is society’s fault. My mother said, ‘Bugger society’.
I washed and ironed my school uniform ready for school tomorrow. I am getting quite good at housework.
My spots are so horrific that I can’t bear to write about them. I will be the laughing stock at school.
I am reading The Manin the Iron Mask. I know exactly how he feels.
Went to school. Found it closed. In my anguish I had forgotten that I am on holiday. Didn’t want to go home, so went to see Bert Baxter instead. He said the social worker had been to see him and had promised to get Sabre a new kennel but he can’t have a home help. (Bert, not Sabre.)
There must have been a full week’s washing up in the sink again. Bert says he saves it for me because I make a good job of it. While I washed up I told Bert about my parents getting a divorce. He said he didn’t hold with divorce. He said he was married for thirty-five miserable years so why should anybody else get away with it? He told me that he has got four childrenand that none of them come to see him. Two of them are in Australia so they can’t be blamed, but I think the other two should be ashamed of themselves. Bert showed me a photograph of his dead wife, it was taken in the days before they had plastic surgery. Bert told me that he was a hostler when he got married (a hostler is somebody doing things with horses) and didn’t really notice that his wife looked like a horse until he left to work on the railways. I asked him if he would like to see a horse again. He said he would, so I took him to see Blossom.
It took us ages to get there. Bert walks dead slow and he kept having to sit down on garden walls, but we got there eventually. Bert said that Blossom was not a horse, she was a girl pony. He kept patting her and saying ‘who’s a beauty then, eh?’ Then Blossom went for a run about so we sat down on the scrap car, and Bert had a Woodbine and I had a Mars bar. Then we walked back to Bert’s house. I went to the shops and bought a packet of Vesta chow mein and a butterscotch Instant Whip for our dinner, so Bert ate a decent meal for once. We watched Pebble Mill at One, then Bert showed me his old horse brushes and photographs of the big house where he worked when he was a boy. He said he was made into a communist when he was there, but he fell asleep before he could tell me why.
Came home, nobody was in so I played my Abba records at the highest volume until the deaf woman next door banged on the wall.
St Patrick’s Day. Bank Holiday in N. Ireland and Rep. of Ireland
Looked at Big and Bouncy. Measured my ‘thing’. It was eleven centimetres.
Mr O’Leary who lives across the road from us was drunk at ten o’clock in the morning! He got thrown out of the butcher’s for singing.
My mother and father are both speaking to solicitors. I expect they are fighting over who gets custody of me. I will be a tug-of-love child, and my picture will be in the newspapers. I hope my spots clear up before then.
Mr Lucas has put his house up for sale. My mother says the asking price is thirty thousand pounds!!
What will he do with all that money?
My mother says he will buy another bigger house. How stupid can you get?