The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (15 page)

I have nearly got used to the old ladies in the home now. I call in every afternoon on my way home from school. They seem pleased to see me. One of them is knitting me a balaclava for my survival weekend. She is called Queenie.

Did thirty-six and a half press-ups tonight.

Went to the youth club to try yukky, lousy old walking boots for size. Rick Lemon has hired them from a mountaineering shop. To make mine fit I have to wear three pairs of socks. Six of us are going. Rick is leading us.

He is unqualified but experienced in surviving bad conditions. He was born and brought up in Kirby New Town. I went to Sainsbury’s and bought my survival food. We have got to carry our food and equipment in our rucksacks, so weight is an important factor. I bought:

• 1 box cornflakes
  

• 2 pints milk
  

• box tea-bags
  

• tin rhubarb
  

• 5 lb spuds
  

• ½ lb lard
  

• ½ lb butter
  

• 2 loaves bread
  

• 1 lb cheese
  

• 2 packets biscuits
  

• 2 lb sugar
  

• toilet roll
  

• washing-up liquid
  

• 2 tins tuna
  

• 1 tin stewed steak
  

• 1 tin carrots
  

I could hardly carry my survival food home from Salisbury’s, so how I will manage it on a march across the hills I don’t know! My father suggested leaving something out. So I have not packed the toilet roll or cornflakes.

Have decided not to take my diary to Derbyshire. I cannot guarantee that it will not be read by hostile eyes. Besides it won’t fit into my rucksack.

Must finish now, the mini-bus is outside papping its hooter.

Eighteenth after Trinity

8 PM
. It is wonderful to be back in civilization!

I have lived like an ignoble savage for the past two days! Sleeping on rough ground with only a sleeping-bag between me and the elements! Trying to cook chips over a tiny primus stove! Trudging through streams in my torturous boots! Having to perform my natural functions out in the open! Wiping my bum on leaves! Not being able to have a bath or clean my teeth! No television or radio or anything! Rick Lemon wouldn’t even let us sit in the mini-bus when it started to rain! He said we ought to make a shelter out of nature’s bounty! Pandora found a plastic animal-food sack so we took it in turns sitting under it.

How I survived I don’t know. My eggs broke, my bread got saturated, my biscuits got crushed and nobody had a tin-opener. I nearly starved. Thank God cheese doesn’t leak, break, soak up water or come in a tin. I was glad when we were found and taken to the Mountain Rescue headquarters. Rick Lemon was told off for not having a map or compass. Rick said he knew the hills like the back of his hand. The chief mountain rescuer said that Rick must have been wearing gloves because we were seven miles from our mini-bus and heading in the wrong direction!

I shall now sleep in a bed for the first time in two days. No school tomorrow because of blisters.

I have got to rest my feet for two days. Doctor Gray was very unpleasant: he said that he resented being called out for a few foot blisters.

I was very surprised at his attitude. It is a well-known fact that mountaineers get gangrene of the toes.

Moon’s Last Quarter

Here I am lying in bed unable to walk because of excruciating pain and my father carries out his parental responsibilities by throwing a few bacon sandwiches at me three times a day!

If my mother doesn’t come home soon I will end up deprived and maladjusted. I am already neglected.

Hobbled to school. All the teachers were wearing their best clothes because it is Parents’ Evening tonight. My father got cleaned up and put his best suit on. He looked OK, thank God! Nobody could tell he was unemployed. My teachers all told him that I was a credit to the school.

Barry Kent’s father was looking as sick as a pig. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Limped half-way to school. Dog followed me. Limped back home. Shut dog in coal shed. Limped all the way to school. Fifteen minutes late. Mr Scruton said it was not setting a good example for the late prefect to be late. It is all right for him to talk! He can ride to schoolin a Ford Cortina and then all he has to do is be in charge of a school. I have got a lot of problems and no car.

I have had a letter from the hospital to say that I have got to have my tonsils out on Tuesday the twenty-seventh. This has come as a complete shock to me! My father says I have been on the waiting list since I was five years old! So I have had to endure an annual bout of tonsillitis for nine years just because the National Health Service is starved of finance!

Why can’t midwives remove babies’ tonsils at birth? It would save a lot of trouble, pain and money.

United Nations’ Day

Went shopping for new dressing gown, slippers, pyjamas, and toiletries. My father was moaning as usual. He said he didn’t see why I couldn’t just wear my old night-clothes in hospital. I told him that I would look ridiculous in my Peter Pan dressing gown and Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. Apart from the yukky design they are too small and covered in patches. He said that when he was a lad he slept in a nightshirt made out of two coal sacks stitched together. I phoned my grandma to check this suspicious statement and myfather was forced to repeat it down the phone. My grandma said that they were not coal sacks but flour sacks, so I now know that my father is a pathological liar!

My hospital rig came to fifty-four pounds nineteen; this is before fruit, chocolates and Lucozade. Pandora said I looked like Noel Coward in my new bri-nylon dressing gown. I said, ‘Thanks, Pandora’, although to be honest I don’t know who Noel Coward is or was. I hope he’s not a mass murderer or anything.

Nineteenth after Trinity. British Summer Time ends

Phoned my mother to tell her about my coming surgical ordeal. No reply. This is typical. She would sooner be out having fun with creep Lucas than comforting her only child!

Grandma rang and said that she knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who had their tonsils out and bled to death on the operating theatre table. She ended up by saying, ‘Don’t worry Adrian, I’m sure everything will be all right for you’.

Thanks a million, grandma!

Bank Holiday in the Rep. of Ireland

11 AM
. I did my packing, then went to see Bert. He is sinking fast so it could be the last time we see each other. Bert also knows somebody who bled to death after a tonsils’ extraction. I hope it’s the same person.

Said goodbye to Pandora: she wept very touchingly. She brought me one of Blossom’s old horseshoes to take into hospital. She said a friend of her father had a cyst removed and didn’t come out of the anaesthetic. I’m being admitted to Ivy Swallow Ward at 2 PM Greenwich Mean Time.

6 PM
. My father has just left my bedside after four hours of waiting around for permission to leave. I have had every part of my body examined. Liquid substances have been taken from me, I have been weighed and bathed, measured and prodded and poked, but nobody has looked in my throat!

I have put our family medical dictionary on my bedside table so that the doctors see it and are impressed. I can’t tell what the rest of the ward is like yet because the nurses have forgotten to remove the screens. A notice has been hung over my bed; it says ‘Liquids Only’. I am dead scared.

10 PM
. I am starving! A black nurse has taken all my food and drink away. I am supposed to go to sleep but it is like bedlam in here. Old men keep falling out of bed.

Midnight
. There is a new notice over my bed; it says ‘Nil by Mouth’. I am dying of thirst! I would give my right arm for a can of Low Cal.

New Moon

4 AM
. I am dehydrated!

6 AM
. Just been woken up! Operation is not until 10 AM. So why couldn’t they let me sleep? I have got to have another bath. I told them that it is the inside of my body that is being operated on, but they don’t listen.

7 AM
. A Chinese nurse stayed in the bathroom to make sure I didn’t drink any water. She kept staring so I had to put a hospital sponge over my thing.

7.30 AM
. I am dressed like a lunatic, ready for the operation. I have had an injection, it is supposed to make you sleepy but I’m wide awake listening to a row about a patient’s lost notes.

8 AM
. My mouth is completely dry, I shall go mad from thirst, I haven’t had a drink since nine forty-five last night. I feel very floaty, the cracks in the ceiling are very interesting. I have got to find somewhere to hide my diary. I don’t want prying Nosy Parkers reading it.

8.30 AM
. My mother is at my bedside! She is going to put my diary in her organizer-handbag. She has promised (on the dog’s life) not to read it.

8.45 AM
. My mother is in the hospital grounds smoking a cigarette. She is looking old and haggard. All the debauchery is catching up with her.

9 AM
. The operating trolley keeps coming into the ward and dumping unconscious men into beds. The trolley-pushers are wearing green overalls and Wellingtons. There must be loads of blood on the floor of the theatre!

9.15 AM
. The trolley is coming in my direction!

Midnight
. I am devoid of tonsils. I am in a torrent of pain. It took my mother thirteen minutes to find my diary. She doesn’t know her way round her organizer-handbag yet. It has got seventeen compartments.

I am unable to speak. Even groaning causes agony.

I have been moved to a side ward. My suffering is too much for the other patients to bear. Had a ‘get well’ card from Bert and Sabre.

I was able to sip a little of grandma’s broth today. She brought it in her Thermos flask. My father broughtme a family pack of crisps; he might just as well have brought me razor blades!

Pandora came at visiting time, I had little to whisper to her. Conversation palls when one is hovering between life and death.

Hallowe’en

3 AM
. I have been forced to complain about the noise coming from the nurses’ home. I am sick of listening to (and watching) drunken nurses and off-duty policemen cavorting around the grounds dressed as witches and wizards. Nurse Boldry was doing something particularly unpleasant with a pumpkin. I am joining
BUPA
as soon as they’ll have me.

Twentieth after Trinity

The nurses have been very cold towards me. They say that I am taking up a bed that could be used by an ill person! I have got to eat a bowl of cornflakes before they let me out. So far I have refused: I cannot bear the pain.

Nurse Boldry forced a spoon of cornflakes down my damaged throat, then, before I could digest it, she started stripping my bed. She offered to pay for a taxi, but I told her that I would wait for my father to come and carry me out to the car.

Election Day, USA

I am in my own bed. Pandora is a tower of strength. She and I communicate without words. My voice has been damaged by the operation.

Today I croaked my first words for a week. I said, ‘Dad, phone mum and tell her that I am over the worst’. My father was overcome with relief and emotion. His laughter was close to hysteria.

Moon’s First Quarter

Dr Gray says my malfunctioning voice is ‘only adolescent wobble’. He is always in a bad mood!

He expected me to stagger to his surgery and queue in a germ-filled waiting room! He said I ought to be outside with other lads of my age building a bonfire. I told him that I was too old for such paganistic rituals. He said he was forty-seven and he still enjoyed a good burn-up.

Forty-seven! It explains a lot, he should be pensioned off.

My father is taking me to an organized bonfire party tomorrow (providing I am up to it, of course). It is being held to raise funds for Marriage Guidance Councillors’ expenses.

Pandora’s mother is cooking the food and Pandora’s father is in charge of the fireworks. My father is going to be in charge of lighting the bonfire so I’m going to stand at least a hundred metres away. I have seen him singe his eyebrows many times.

Last night some irresponsible people down our street had bonfire parties in their own back gardens!

Yes!

In spite of being warned of all the dangers by the radio, television,
Blue Peter
and the media they went selfishly ahead. There were no accidents, but surely this was only luck.

The Marriage Guidance Council bonfire was massive. It was a good community effort. Mr Cherry donated hundreds of copies of a magazine called
. Now!
He said they had been cluttering up the back room of his shop for over a year.

Pandora burnt her collection of
Jackie
comics, she said that they ‘don’t bear feminist analysis’ and she ‘wouldn’t like them to get into young girls’ hands’.