The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Read Free Page B

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

    Little Brown Horse
    Eating apples in a field,
    Perhaps one day
    My heart will be healed.
    I stroke the places Pandora has sat
    Wearing her jodphurs and riding hat.
    Goodbye, brown horse.
    I turn and retreat,
    The rain and mud are wetting my feet.

    I have sent it to the BBC . I marked the envelope ‘Urgent’.

Sunday March 15th
    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.

Monday March 16th
    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