Sue Townsend (née Johnstone) was born in Leicester on 2 April 1946. She was the eldest of five daughters; her father was a jet-engine factory worker turned postman, and her mother worked in the factory canteen. Townsend disliked primary school, where she was frequently punished by having her legs slapped by a teacher and made to do handstands.

It was her mother, not a teacher, who eventually taught her to read at the age of eight using the Just William series by Richard Crompton. When Townsend failed the 11-plus examination, she went on to South Wigston high school but left just shy of her fifteenth birthday, having already started writing in secret by this time: “Stories about a teenage girl, much influenced by the Russians. She certainly suffered privations,” she once said. The tone is pure Mole; in his aspiration and his inability to find support for it, he was far more like his creator than is generally credited.

As a teenager and young adult, the aspirant Leicester Tolstoy moved between jobs, working in retail and at a garage where she spent most of her time reading books on the forecourt. She was sacked from a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms. Her first pay packet was £3 a week (equivalent to around £84 today) at a print factory that made merchandising displays. Aged 18, she married a sheet-metal worker and quit her job to have her first baby, after which she worked night shifts selling hot dogs at a bus station.

By 22, she was living on the Saffron Lane estate in Leicester with three children under five. She divorced her husband in 1971 and became a single mother, living a precarious financial existence. One familiar anecdote has her making pea soup out of one Oxo cube and a tin of garden peas. Unable to afford mascara, she made do with boot polish, applied in the style of Juliette Gréco. Such stories, typically, made jokes of the situation. Less amusing was her tale, told to the Daily Telegraph in 2012, of having “to keep my children off school because it was raining and they didn’t have suitable shoes to wear […] That was so humiliating for them, but it’s something you don’t forget and makes you value what you’ve got.”

The change in her fortunes began with a job at an adventure playground. It was while working with under-18s at a site in Leicester that Townsend met her second husband, Colin, who, she said, impressed her by trying to remove his jumper while simultaneously smoking a cigarette. Colin would become a pivotal believer in Townsend’s writing, encouraging her to participate in a writers’ group hosted by Leicester’s Phoenix arts theatre. Her first play, Womberang, set in the waiting room of a gynaecology clinic, won the 1979 Thames Television Playwright award and earned her a bursary to write more for the theatre.

She then excavated the earlier-begun bones of what would become Adrian Mole and shared the script with a friend, the actor Nigel Bennett. Bennett responded positively and spoke about it to contacts at the BBC. This then led to the play being commissioned and broadcast on Radio 4. Methuen Publishing Ltd (whose rights have now largely been purchased by Penguin) commissioned the novel shortly afterwards, with the caveat that the titular character, “Nigel”, be renamed Adrian to avoid any IP conflict with the Molesworth series. Townsend rectified the situation by swapping the original Nigel for Adrian.

Townsend wrote multiple plays after Womberang, notably: The Ghost of Daniel Lambert (1981); Dayroom (1981); Captain Christmas and the Evil Adults (1982); The Great Celestial Cow (1984); Bazaar and Rummage (1984); Groping for Words (1983); Ear, Nose and Throat (1988); Disneyland It Ain’t (1989); Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990); The Queen and I: A Play with Songs (1994); and Plays 1 (1996). She also wrote two works of non-fiction, Mr Bevan’s Dream (1989) and The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman (2001). Her other novels include Rebuilding Coventry (1988); The Queen and I (1992); Ghost Children (1997); Number Ten (2002); Queen Camilla (2006); and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (2012). It is a significant body of work. Some of us who admire Townsend’s work feel that if she had been French, say, it might be taken more seriously by British scholars. In Europe, she has long been regarded as a rewarding subject for critics and postgraduate students.

Her series of Adrian Mole titles, written between 1982 and 2009, did garner her a global fanbase. It comprised The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (1982); The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984); The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (1989); Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993); Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (1999); Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004); The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999–2001 (2008); and, finally, Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009). The collective success transformed her life, not least because the series has been adapted for radio, TV and stage multiple times, with Townsend writing the screenplays for the first and second books.

As writer Toby Litt wrote in 2024, “Once the money from Adrian Mole – the original book, the follow-ups, the TV shows – transformed (or attempted to transform) Sue’s life, she was able to have an architect design and build for her a top-floor workspace with large windows and a huge writing desk and bookshelves and whatnot. It was intended to create perfect working conditions.” (“I’ve never written a word up there,” she later admitted. “I can hardly bear to go in […] I’m so embarrassed by it […] I still write in the corner of the front room, or on the kitchen table,” she said. “With the ironing off to one side, if I can make space.”)

In later life she was bestowed the freedom of Leicester, made a Doctor of Letters at Loughborough University, and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Additionally, Townsend was a vocal supporter of the Labour party, despite her disappointment in New Labour. She invested a significant portion of her earnings into her hometown, including buying up two Leicester pubs at risk of closure.

Adrian Mole is particularly affixed, however, to its temporal context and geography. Leicester in the 1980s was, like many regions of the UK, affected by the hot-button issues of the decade: the Falklands, second-wave feminism, mass unemployment, and unrest in Northern Ireland. This was a largely working-class, multicultural, youthful population, which reflected liberal attitudes towards political issues of the time (and, indeed, today), including race and immigration; Leicester was one of the UK’s first cities to found a Race Equality Centre in 1967, and the creation of De Montfort University in 1992 attracted a wealth of young people to the city, as well as global musicians such as Iron Maiden. Professor Corinne Fowler notes that Townsend was “very connected to the region” and insisted on retaining the original Leicester cast for the Adrian Mole musical’s London outing. Similarly, her original manuscripts contained “a few references to Leicester […] but it seems the editor must have asked them to be removed. I think that tells you something about literary culture. Anywhere outside London risked being seen as parochial if it includes the local references for a region.”

Her life was blighted by ill health, and it became worse as she got older. She was diagnosed with TB peritonitis at age 23, suffered from Charcot joint degenerative arthritis, and experienced a heart attack in her thirties. She was also diagnosed with diabetes early in life and spent a significant sum adapting her home to accommodate her wheelchair. In 2001 she was registered blind and dictated her later books to her son, Sean. In 2007 she suffered kidney failure; Sean donated a kidney to his mother in 2009. She died at home on 10 April 2014 following a stroke. She left behind £1.1 million, divided between her family and the anti-torture charity Freedom From Torture.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole: Background

Adrian Mole began as a stage play in a drawer, famously inspired by a chance remark from one of Townsend’s children. “He came into my head when my eldest son said, ‘Why don’t we go to safari parks like other families do?’ That’s the only real line of dialogue from my family that’s in any of the Mole books. It’s in because it triggered it. I remembered that kind of whiny, adolescent self-pity, that ‘surely these are not my parents’.” In an interview with The Guardian in 2009, Townsend remembered that she “heard [Mole] first, and then saw him, but I only saw him from the head down; I didn’t see his face, didn’t know what he looked like – well, not until I saw John Major on the telly [who has] a lovely face when he takes his glasses off.”

Initially, Townsend explained that she wrote what would become The Secret Diary as a stage play. When Nigel Bennett – whom she met through her work with the Phoenix Arts Theatre – needed a monologue for a Huckleberry Finn audition, she shared some excerpts. Bennett, in turn, sent it to the BBC’s deputy head of radio drama, John Tydeman.

After much debate, Adrian’s age was settled at 13¾ due to Tydeman’s concerns that placing him any older risked discounting the “considerable physical changes” which can occur at the entrance to teenage boyhood.

The show was popular when transmitted for the first time on radio in 1982, and Tydeman commissioned six episodes, which were broadcast at 8.45am. It became something of a phenomenon. There were newspaper stories about people staying in their cars to listen before going into work, including a High Court judge who was late for court because he had been sitting in the car park catching the end of the episode.

“When the first book was published I received a £500 advance, but didn’t think it would sell. I worried that most of the first print run of 5,000 would end up being remaindered,” Townsend later said. For her first meeting with Tydeman, she could not afford the train ticket back to Leicester, so Tydeman took her to the accounts department and arranged for her to be paid the fare.

Commissioned as a novel by Methuen shortly after its first broadcast, the hardback was published in the autumn of 1982. It was helped by a memorable jacket illustration from Caroline Holden: “With its Noddy toothbrush to one side, razor and shaving-brush to the other,” wrote Alex Clark, “the book captured the painful drama of adolescence, of feeling caught between two worlds and belonging to neither, down to the last detail.”

Townsend and her agent had both raised the possibility of including comic illustrations in the finished script, which her editor Geoffrey Strachan encouraged: “I believe Mole's surname came from a much-loved teacher of Sue’s who had thrilled her at school by reading aloud to his class. I had suggested changing his Christian name, to avoid any possible confusion with Geoffrey Williams’ Nigel Molesworth books (a very different schoolboy hero), and she simply, neatly swapped the names of her hero and his best friend, Nigel and Adrian. Janet Fillingham had suggested illustrations, and I thought pictures would lighten the page and draw readers in. But I wanted to avoid any attempt at a likeness of Adrian – or Molesworth-like ink blots on the cover. The reader (like the listener to the radio) must see the world through Adrian’s eyes and take him seriously.”

The Secret Diary quickly sold its first 7,000 hardbacks and became the No 1 Sunday Times bestseller of 1982, with sales numbering seven million by the end of the decade alone. (It should be noted that Townsend gives varying figures in different interviews with respect to the first print run.) In a 1989 interview, when Townsend was asked about the popularity of her creation, she replied, “People have tried to supply the answer by saying that there is something universal about Mole because we have all gone through adolescence; it is a shared experience.” This statement is borne out by the novel’s translation into nearly 50 languages as of 2024. Townsend later added that she felt readers identified with Adrian on account of his good nature. In an early interview, Townsend clarified that she intended her books to illuminate only “what it’s like for one particular class of people in one particular town.”

The Secret Diary became the bestselling book of the 1980s, with over twenty million copies sold to date and translations into nearly fifty languages. What is interesting is that its cover designs through the ages might appear to position it within a children’s or YA market; however, the bulk of Townsend’s fan-mail indicates that Adrian Mole captured the nostalgia of an adult generation reminded of their own youth, whose children were a similar age to Adrian. She herself said that she would prefer “an adult reading.”

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole on TV and in the theatre

The Adrian Mole series was adapted for television three times: The Secret Diary on ITV by Thames Television in 1985, starring Julie Walters as Pauline and a purpose-written theme song by Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Profoundly in Love with Pandora; Townsend herself wrote the screenplay. The second was based on The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole in 1987, and The Cappuccino Years, starring Stephen Mangan as Adrian and Alison Steadman as Pauline, aired in 2001.

The first book was also adapted for the stage in 1984, again by Townsend, featuring music and lyrics by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley. The script was later published by Methuen. It was first performed at the Phoenix Arts Theatre in Leicester, where Townsend joined her first writers’ group, before travelling to Wyndham’s Theatre in London. Together with Pippa Cleary and Jake Brunger, Townsend worked on another musical adaptation before her death, with the finished production staged at Leicester’s Curve Theatre in 2015. The musical debuted in Southwark in 2017, joined the West End in 2019 at the Ambassadors Theatre, and moved to Hornchurch in 2022.

Both The Secret Diary and The Growing Pains were adapted into computer adventure games in the 1980s by Level 9 Computing. According to a user review, “The player reads passages of text (many of them from the book) and is given three choices as to what to do, which lead to other events unfolding. You can also use a help option which displays information about characters featured in the diary. Your aim throughout all of this is to make Adrian as popular as possible. The player’s score and ranking is displayed at particular times during the game. The percentage achieved relates to the rank, with 26% being ‘a spotty creep’ and 38% ‘a middling thicko.’”

Adrian Mole himself featured in regular character appearances on the BBC Radio 4 programme Pirate Radio Four.

Comedy and social class in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole

The fictional diary form has its origins in some of the earliest surviving literature. In 935, the Japanese writer Ki no Tsurayuki composed Tosa Nikki, an account of his journey from Shikoku to Kyoto in the form of diary entries allegedly authored by his (non-existent) female companion. This was the first known departure from earlier examples of the diary genre, which were written exclusively in Chinese to detail governmental affairs. The adoption of a female narrator allowed Ki no Tsurayuki to inhabit a more aesthetic perspective, including the use of Japanese kana characters.

The diary form was highly exclusionary, privileging the perspective of those who had the time, materials and ability to write. Indeed, Adrian’s obsession with being (or becoming) an intellectual is framed through the diary form paratext, as a historically highbrow activity. However, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards – with George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody (1892), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925) and Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield (1930), to name but a few – the development of the diary form shifted into the mode of wry societal critique, which deliberately captured marginalised points of view.

In late twentieth-century Britain, the diary form underwent a further transformation. The political diary, historically published as propaganda to increase the popular appeal of a particular candidate, became a staple of the publishing landscape with such offerings as The Benn Diaries (first published in 1989) and Alan Clark’s diaries, published in three volumes from 1993. The Secret Diary – and, indeed, all the Adrian Mole books – riffs off these examples, bridging political wit and comic timing to effect a wry portrait of working-class life under Thatcher.

Townsend’s creation also crested a wave of comic fiction diaries which dominated the bestseller lists in the late twentieth century, notably Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones(1996) and Posy Simmonds’s Mrs Weber’s Diary (1979). These two titles, however, are distinctly (and, in the case of the first, often obliviously) middle class; Adrian Mole, by contrast, is explicitly class conscious, perhaps more so in The Growing Pains than The Secret Diary. A more relevant comparison might be Louise Rennison’s stratospherically successful Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, published as a YA fictional diary in 1999 and rebranded as Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging for the 2008 film; a key plot point revolves around the protagonist’s father emigrating to New Zealand to look for work amidst mass unemployment in England. (Interestingly, the film adaptation altered this detail, with the father emigrating to pursue a prestigious promotion within his industry instead.)

Teenage diaries in and of themselves appear to have become widespread in the nineteenth century, when literacy rates increased and the cost of paper production decreased. Several fascinating examples of historical diary entries – both girls’ and boys’ – have been digitised by the Diary File project. In 2010, the Dear Diary: Secrets and Struggles from Kenya to the UK exhibition was curated by experimental youth initiative Ctrl.Alt.Shift to accompany the publication of Cringe, a selection of teenage diaries from the late 1980s and 1990s, edited by Sarah Brown.

Townsend’s departure from screenwriting in favour of a fictional diary through the eyes of a pubescent boy both makes sense, then, and is a striking choice. Adrian certainly yearns for the masculine intellectualism of Pepys, while producing an unwittingly captivating portrait of the dramatic socioeconomic changes engulfing Leicester in the early 1980s – a period much in common with the dramatic biological changes engulfing poor Adrian himself.

The role of puberty in the novel also adheres to a broader literary tradition of young (if not always teenage) masculinity, such as the Molesworth series, which originally influenced Townsend; Roddy Doyle’s 1993 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha; and David Mitchell’s 2006 Black Swan Green. However, Townsend’s choice to narrate the perspective of a teenage boy as a woman in her thirties – albeit one in close proximity to teenage boyhood via her young sons – seems to be a singular one. (Strikingly, the construct of “girlhood” is prevalent on social media sites now – was this era the “boyhood” equivalent?) She also worked at youth clubs and trained as a social worker for boys with behavioural difficulties, affording her a unique insight into the teenage mind and cultivating her understanding of it as an ingenuous space for social reflection. The diary form, then, was distinct from other modes of fiction, which might demand such political critique in less nuanced ways.

Mole is also a comic novel, a rarer thing today than then. Comic novelist Alexander Larman writes that “the reason why it is so difficult for comic novels to be published, despite their enormous popularity with readers, is that most editors and publishers are cautious of its potential difficulty as a genre.” Certainly, in the UK market, comic novels are classed as commercial publishing; those authored by women especially fall under the umbrella of “chick lit,” with the most successful (such as Nina Stibbe and Sophie Kinsella) garnering upwards of six-figure sales and supermarket distribution deals which, nevertheless, diminish their perceived “literariness.”

Book awards honouring this kind of fiction are few and far between in comparison with the wealth of prizes for “literary” fiction, with only the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and Comedy Women in Print, founded in 2018, widely known and respected. The Bollinger in particular, which has run for twenty-four years, has been criticised for its overwhelmingly white, male, middle-class winners; as Larman puts it, “The award didn’t take place at all in 2018 because the judges failed to find anything worth shortlisting, let alone winning. One looks at some of the award winners over the past two decades – Ian McEwan’s Solar? Arguably Edward St Aubyn’s weakest book, Lost for Words? Will Self’s The Butt? – and wonders how miserably unfunny most of the books submitted must have been.”

The working-class comedy novel is a rarer thing still, although working-class comedy on television has been a staple since the 1950s.

Working-class domestic humour – i.e., comedy both for and about working-class families – is a knowledge gap in scholarly literature, with such discussion as there is tending to be limited to the anecdotal.

“The working classes are best suited to making people laugh because their lives are more ‘extreme’, they’ve got more experiences to call upon,” runs one typical sentence from a postgraduate paper on the subject that I shall leave nameless. “Working-class people are definitely livelier. They’re not afraid to express themselves. Let’s just say they’ve hung out their dirty washing in public (laughs). So, there’s nothing to hide… middle-class people, I just think the defences are up.”

Hardly serious language, and not something that would be accepted in discussions of bourgeois literature.

What needs more serious study is the way British sitcoms tackled class distinctions in the second half of the twentieth century, as TV ownership became more widespread. Reflecting on this era, Tim Strangleman has noted that “the working-class characters who populated primetime television schedules were presented as intelligent, thoughtful individuals who were part of a wider mass culture. [British comedy from the 1960s and 1970s] enjoyed puncturing the pomposity and pretensions of the middle classes, but it did this while reflecting on the poverty of cultural aspiration and the sense of blinkered horizons and geographical immobility.”

This theme is undoubtedly visible in Adrian Mole, if not via Adrian’s own visions for his future, then via proximal figures such as his parents. The representation of “upward mobility” in such cultural works from the 1990s and early 2000s, Mike Wayne suggests, may be an import from American narratives, especially the model of the working-class gifted artiste who manages to “break out” of class structures through talent, hard work, and a big break. This narrative is certainly one which Townsend satirises in Adrian Mole. However, her novel simultaneously adheres to the idea of the safe, comfortable working-class home.

Nicola Wilson’s book Home in British Working-Class Fiction is an extensive meditation on this subject, investigating “home” and “family” as key emotional sites for class feeling and identity. They are “hard-wrought and precarious […] a place that needs cleaning and slaving, where the weekly wage packet is crucial to make ends meet.” Crucially, the working-class home has historically been figured through a voyeuristic literary lens in the vein of the Christmas Day neighbours in Little Women, an encounter designed to further middle-class character development; by contrast, texts written “from below”, as Wilson states, embrace a sentimentality and an emotional security epitomised by the language of Lancashire writer and social activist Ethel Carnie: “You aristocrats […] will never know the delight with which the toiler looks around his home on Sunday afternoon […] You take all the shine and cleanliness for granted – servants have done it and the labour of others has made you rich enough to obtain this lovely thing and that – but we know the price of our belongings.”

Adrian’s interactions with “the dog” (it is never named) seem interesting in this context. The dog remains consistently nameless, goes missing more than once, and is frequently “locked in the coal shed” – but is also the last family member to have its rations cut in challenging times, and is rushed to the vet on many occasions. “It was nice to see its happy face,” Adrian reflects, upon bumping into one another out and about. This affectionate dynamic is at once obscured by tortured, intellectual Adrian. Simultaneously, his love for his dog is so obvious as to be not worth stating in his precious diary pages.

Likewise, Adrian’s relationship with his parents is largely positive despite their respective infidelities, mental health struggles, and affectionate dismissal of his literary aspirations (although one might wonder who it was that gifted Adrian his diary to begin with). Indeed, it appears that Pauline does not read Adrian’s diary during his tonsil surgery, having promised “on the dog’s life” not to. While the electricity is cut on more than one occasion and Social Services frequently fail to deliver Pauline’s giro, Adrian’s distinctive narrative voice reinforces that this is a domestic space in which he feels safe and sufficiently loved to be himself.

You have to wonder whether novels that might have been packaged as working-class “comedy” in the late twentieth century are today rebranded as literary fiction to avoid being pigeonholed as two-dimensional (and, perhaps, to give them a better stab at prizes). Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams, for example, is hailed as “brilliant, timely, funny, heartbreaking,” and follows a working-class British-Jamaican woman as she navigates early adulthood in London. The novel won British Book of the Year at the Nibbies, as well as a runner-up place for the Comedy Women in Print Prize. Similarly, Paul Murray won the Bollinger prize in 2016 for The Mark and the Void and was later shortlisted for the prestigious Booker in 2023 for The Bee Sting. It is almost as though a comedy novel pitched as a comedy novel is delegitimised in its capacity to engage serious themes like racism and misogyny/misogynoir.

How might Townsend’s genre of observational humour now have been published today? The YA market’s pockets are colossal, as it is the demographic most reachable through social media. Would we be seeing The Secret Diary on BookTok if it were published today, despite Townsend’s preference for parents, and not children, to read her work?

Why was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 so successful?  The book’s popularity was rooted specifically in its historical and national setting, whose references to popular culture and current affairs tap into a very British kind of framework. Adrian’s reaction to Thatcherism is both politically astute and an insight into the thorny, often distressing, events of the Eighties for working-class people. The intimacy of the diary mode is also a further appeal for this readership, as is Townsend’s accessible style. What is clear is that Townsend was able to attract a demographic that was not typically targeted by the publishing industry, with immensely lucrative results. She allegedly once bumped into a woman in a bookstore purchasing The Growing Pains, who said that it was “‘the first hard-book I’ve ever bought’ – she didn’t know the right expression for it.”

The diary form also allowed for a reading experience characterised by brief dips into a text, suitable for those without much time or ability to read uninterrupted. Townsend herself, at the Brussels launch of her novel The Queen and I, admitted that she did not feel capable of writing long descriptive passages without boring her readers. H. Porter Abbott writes that the diary form “invokes an intensity of privacy, cloistering, isolation” that other literary forms do not; Townsend thus ushers her audience into a reading experience in an inclusive and intimate way. Adrian Mole also did not exclude readers from other demographics that were more popularly catered to, however; as David Nicholls identifies, “Adrian was entirely average; a middle-achieving Everyboy from the Midlands, not as posh as Pandora or Nigel, posher than the terrifying Barry Kent […] smartly written, stuffed full of in-jokes and references to Orwell and Flaubert and Simone de Beauvoir, but it made sense to people who weren’t quite sure what a campus looked like, and there was also a compassion so much other comedy seemed to lack […] Boys and girls read Adrian Mole, adults and teenagers, all of us wondering the same thing: “How does Sue Townsend know?’”

This wholesome kinship chimed with other popular cultural landmarks of the Seventies into the Eighties – the Victoria Woods and Alan Bennetts of the age, alongside more sanitary comedies such as Blackadder, Morse, Brideshead Revisited, Yes Minister, Red Dwarf, ’Allo ’Allo, and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, and soap dramas like EastEnders. Channel 4 was launched in 1982, the first real competitor to the BBC and ITV, and became known for its risk-taking broadcasts aimed at working-class audiences (despite, unfortunately, a reputation among staff as being “Britain’s poshest broadcaster”). Townsend may not have initiated this moment, but she was certainly a part of it, and “enriched the tradition of British comic writing”.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how she knew, but if there was a secret, it was probably as predictable and familiar as writing what she knew. Undoubtedly, her perceptions of the workings of an ordinary human heart touched readers from all classes and backgrounds, but as a working-class writer, Townsend was also reaching a working-class audience that, once reached, showed itself to be huge. She herself was little changed by the experience. She was vocal about the fact that Adrian Mole brought her financial stability, up until which point she had been living “a hand-to-mouth existence in a council house with no phone or car”. Nonetheless, in the Observer in 2005, she wrote: “I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.”

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