Free True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole by Sue Townsend

think about it.”
    “Yes you must,” said my host. He then led me down the stairs, and out to freedom. I didn’t want to tramp the streets on Thursday evenings and neither did I want to wear a purple cloak and mutter incantations over an animal sacrifice with a jolly crowd once a week. So I didn’t go and live under Mr QZ Diablo’s roof. This was last week.
    Tonight my mother said, “Look, when are you leaving home? We want to let your room.”
    My mother is not an advocate of the tactful approach. It transpired that she had answered an advertisement from the University and arranged to act as a landlady to two male students. This would give her an income of seventy pounds a week. Fifty pounds more than she receives from me. No contest. The two students (of engineering) are moving into my room on Friday afternoon. A new single bed has been purchased and is leaning accusingly against the wall of my bedroom.
    Tuesday June 14 th
    I found it hard to concentrate on my work today. The Head Librarian, Mrs Froggatt (fat, fifty and with the colouring and features of a jaundiced badger), said at lunchtime, “Mole, you’ve moved all our Jane Austens from the great English Classics section to the Light Romance Section, pray explain.” I snapped, “In my opinion they have been given their proper classification. Jane Austen’s novels are merely trashy romances read only by snobbish, brainless cretins.” How was I to know that ‘Jane Austen, Her Genius, Her Relevance to England in the 1950 s ’ was the subject of Mrs Froggatt’s dissertation for her degree in English Literature many years before I was born? As I’ve said earlier in my diary, we didn’t discuss books or writers in the library.
    That afternoon I was called into Mrs Froggatt’s room. She informed me that the library was cutting down on staff due to Government financial restraints. I asked how many staff would be asked to leave. “Just the one,” said the Jane Austen admirer, “and, since you were the last to come, Adrian, you must also be the first to go.” Homeless and jobless!
    Wednesday June 15 th
    When I got home from work, where I was shunned and vilified (it turned out that all the library staff like Jane Austen), I went to my room to find that my mother had cleared out my toy cupboard. Pinky, my pink and grey rabbit, was nowhere to be seen! I burst into the kitchen, where my mother was entertaining her neighbours to tea. Through a thick smog of cigarette smoke I looked my mother in the eye and said, “Where’s Pinky?”
    “He’s outside in the dustbin,” she said. She had the grace to drop her eyes. She knew she’d done me and Pinky a terrible wrong. “How could you?” I said coldly. I flung open the door that led to the yard. Pinky’s threadbare ears were visible sticking out of a black plastic bag. I pulled him out of the bag and dusted him down, then I re-crossed the kitchen and slammed the door. Huge gusts of female laughter could be heard behind me as I ran up the stairs.
    Pinky is exactly the same age as me. He was purchased by my drunken father on the day of my birth. Pinky only has, only ever had, two legs; but he is still a rabbit. It is beyond my comprehension how anyone could even think about disposing of him. I packed my suitcase there and then. I placed Pinky carefully in a carrier bag. I went into the kitchen. I addressed my mother. “I’m going. I shall send for my books.” I went.
    Thursday June 16 th
    Living here with Sharon and eight other Botts is a nightmare. I am supposed to be sleeping on the living room couch but the Botts don’t go to bed. They stop up, in the living room, talking and shouting and quarrelling and watching violent videos. A few Botts, Sharon was one, went to bed at 3am but the remaining Botts had noisy discussions about babies, contraception, menstruation, death, funerals, the price of ice-cream, Clement Freud, the Queen, the man in the moon, dogs, cats, gerbils, various aches and pains they had