Author tells of life as single mother

Author Sue Townsend has told how she was a struggling single mother juggling three jobs when she wrote The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.

Ms Townsend, 56, in an interview with the Sunday Times magazine said she found solace in writing the diary on “scraps of paper stuffed in a box” after she was left to raise three children alone.

“My daughter once said, ‘Mum you never smile’. I was always worried. There was a heaviness about me. I was never fun. I felt alienated from everyone,” she said.

“I was writing the beginnings of Adrian Mole secretly, on scraps of paper which I stuffed in a box.”

She was 18 when she married, had her first child at 19, the second at 21 and the third at 22.

Her husband was a sheet metal worker and she stayed at their Leicester home looking after the babies and writing silently, hiding everything in a box under the stairs.

She said: “He left suddenly. It’s still too painful to recount, even after all this time.

“The children suffered and I still feel terrible about that. Separation and loss early in life marks them; they become detached.”

Ms Townsend is now blind and dictated her latest novel, Number Ten, to her second husband Colin Broadway.