CHERISHED writer Sue Townsend witnessed the horrifying murder of a 12-year-old girl aged just eight, it has been revealed. The renowned Adrian Mole author was climbing trees in the woods with two of her friends in 1953 when they saw a man strangling a schoolgirl with her tie.Adrian Mole author reveals she ‘turned in on herself’ following horrific murder Watching in horror from the safety of a tree, the group waited for the killer to leave before jumping “down over her body” and running into town to get help. Cops later charged Irish labourer Joseph Reynolds with the murder of Janet Walker, 12, after he confessed to the crime. The killer was hanged five months later. The shocking revelation comes more than two years after Townsend’s death in 2014, and is set to be aired in a documentary about her life called The Secret Life of Sue Townsend (Aged 68 ¾) on BBC2 this coming Saturday. Adrian Mole … creation of self-proclaimed intellectual rocketed Townsend to fame
Speaking to cameras before her shock death of a stroke at the young age of 68, Townsend says: “My memory is that he was dragging her by the throat and he strangled her.” The famed author adds that the group went to a local sweet shop for help, but the shopkeeper kicked the trio out as he didn’t believe their sensational story. Townsend’s widower, Colin Broadway, told The Sunday Times it was this aspect of the ordeal that upset her most. While Townsend didn’t draw on the incident directly in any of her writing, she insists it influenced her life. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole … Townsend is believed to have been mid-way through the last instalment in the Adrian Mole series before she died She says: “My memory is of me at eight being an adult — being grown-up, and coping in a grown-up way with things that little children shouldn’t have to cope with. “It is also astonishing how many writers have suffered similar things. “It turns you in on yourself.
“You become very aware of atmosphere. 'Their deaths weren't in vain' Britain's first pokemon go murder Townsend went on to achieve great commercial success with the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, when it was published in 1982. The cult classic details the life and loves of the angst-ridden, spotty teenager who considers himself an intellectual while growing up in Leicester during Margaret Thatcher’s early years in office. Townsend followed Mole’s first diary with seven more, going on to sell over eight million copies worldwide. Her books were so popular they were translated into nearly 30 languages, adapted for stage and a television programme.Townsend went on to sell over eight million copies of the hilarious diary series Townsend came from a working class family, left school aged just 15 and had three kids under five by the time she was 22. The beloved author started her writing career while her children were in bed, leaving her with just five hours to sleep at night.
She struggled with life as a single mother, working three part-time jobs after her first husband left her aged just 25. The wordsmith only considered writing as a career after she met her second husband and joined a writer’s group in Leicester.Townsend struggled as a single mother working three jobs for years before breaking the commercial market After achieving worldwide success with Adrian Mole, Townsend went on to write plays, non-fiction books and other novels. She was in the middle of writing the last Adrian Mole novel before her death. The working title, Pandora’s Box, led fans to believe she planned to romantically reunite Adrian Mole with eternal love interest Pandora Braithwaite. We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368.Sue Townsend, who beat the odds of a difficult early life to become one of Britain’s most popular writers and social critics, chronicling life on the economic fringes of post-imperial Britain with insight and wit, died on Thursday in Leicester, England.
She was 68.The cause was complications of diabetes, a spokesman for Penguin Books said.Ms. Townsend dropped out of high school, read voraciously to educate herself, and wrote in secret for more than a decade before achieving success with her first novel, “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾” (1982), a satirical first-person account of one luckless adolescent’s high hopes and shrinking opportunities in the era of Margaret Thatcher.Adrian’s earnest ordinariness struck a chord with the British public, and Ms. Townsend went on to write nine more novels narrated by him, the last of which is reportedly being published posthumously. The series found a wide international audience as well, with 20 million books sold to date.“The Secret Diary” was adapted for a stage musical and made into a British television mini-series, which was shown on public television in the United States in 1987. Young fans scooped up Adrian Mole computer games, pencil cases, writing pads and diaries throughout the 1980s.
“When the social history of the 1980s comes to be written,” a commentator for a weekly BBC journal declared, “the ‘Mole’ books — astonishing as it may seem now — will probably be considered as key texts.”Part Holden Caulfield, part P. G. Wodehouse’s comic foil Bertie Wooster, Adrian Mole is perceptive and funny — always unintentionally.“I’m not sure how I will vote,” he tells his diary in “The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole” (1984), the second Mole book, which was also adapted for television. “Sometimes I think Mrs. Thatcher is a nice kind sort of woman. Then the next day I see her on television and she frightens me rigid. She has got eyes like a psychotic killer, but a voice like a gentle person. It is a bit confusing.” Ms. Townsend’s series follows the life of her protagonist as he grows up in a chronically underemployed working-class family, gets a shabby education in an underfinanced public school system, learns to love royal weddings (“We truly lead the world when it comes to pageantry”) and bemoans his teenage virginity.
“I have just realized, I have never seen a dead body or a real female nipple,” he says. “This is what comes of living in a cul-de-sac.” Ms. Townsend took Adrian through teenage angst to single parenthood, brief television stardom and near bankruptcy, when he falls victim to predatory lenders and is forced to move into a converted pigsty on his parents’ retirement farm. At age 39 ¾, he learns he has prostate cancer. But deluded and hapless as he may be, Adrian never seems to feel sorry for himself, never tires of making new observations (however shaky) for his diary. In “Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years” (2009), the last book published in Ms. Townsend’s lifetime (its title a play on his medical condition), he says, “It is good to know that whatever travails we may suffer in life, Woolworths will always be there.” The chain’s retail stores closed in Britain in 2009.Susan Elaine Townsend was born in Leicester on April 2, 1946, the eldest of five sisters.
Her father worked in a jet engine factory and, after it closed, as a mail carrier. Her mother worked in the factory canteen. Ms. Townsend told interviewers that she could not read until she was 8, and that it was her mother who taught her, using Richmal Crompton’s “Just William” children’s books, which she later drew on in creating Adrian Mole.After failing to score well on the “11-plus” exam, the once-universal standardized test for British children to determine whether they would pursue academics or a trade, she dropped out of school at 15 and undertook to educate herself, reading British, American and Russian literature. She also started writing in secret, a habit she continued after she married for the first time, at 18, had three children and became a single mother. She wrote at night, between working and child-raising throughout her 20s and early 30s.Her second husband, Colin Broadway, who survives her, was, she said, the first to encourage her writing. At his urging, Ms. Townsend entered a government-sponsored playwriting contest, which led to the production in 1979 of her first play, “Womberang,” about an upper-class woman and a working-class woman who meet in a gynecological clinic.
Ms. Townsend went on to write a dozen more plays and teleplays, many of which reflected her socialist and feminist views, and several novels apart from the Adrian Mole series. One, “The Queen and I” (1992), imagines the royal family living in a public-housing project after they have been overthrown in a socialist revolution. (They do O.K., especially Charles, who delights in the opportunities for organic gardening.)Ms. Townsend, who developed diabetes as an adult, was frequently ill in the last decade. She received a kidney transplant in 2009 and had a stroke in 2013 but continued to write from a wheelchair. In addition to her husband, she is survived by four children: Sean, Daniel and Victoria, from her first marriage, and Elizabeth, from her second; In an interview with a writer’s journal, Ms. Townsend once suggested that Adrian Mole would be another of her survivors. “Oh, he has a life of his own,” she said. “We get together once every few years and catch up.