Sue Townsend remembered by Nicci Gerrard

2 April 1946–10 April 2014

Nicci Gerrard, who conducted the Adrian Mole author’s funeral, on ‘a radical and a partygoer, a grandmother, a woman of the people, a writer, a dreamer’

• See the Observer’s obituaries of 2014 in full

• Louise Wilson remembered by Jonathan Saunders

Until I met Sue Townsend, I hadn’t realised it was possible to be hilarious, angry, scathing, sad, kind, self-mocking, solitary, gregarious and loveable all at the same time, in one breath gathering up a tumult of emotions and ideas. When she went blind, she talked to me about it with extraordinary humour (how she chatted to the coat hanging on the back of the door, mistaking it for her husband, Colin, threw gloves onto the compost heap instead of potato peelings, made a fine debut with her white stick) and yet managed to convey her loss and horror. Life had always bashed her about and she had always refused to be defeated by it. She was one of the most generous-hearted women I’d ever encountered, living life full-throttle, and yet somehow she remained mysterious, protecting her secret self, the self that wrote and dreamed.

I visited her a couple of times in her Leicester home – a house crammed with objects, paintings on every wall, flowers in jugs, plants in pots, bowls and cups and knick-knacks and pieces of bric-a-brac everywhere, photographs of her family whose faces she could no longer see and messages she couldn’t read pinned onto the noticeboards, books she could no longer read on shelves and in piles on the floor. After she died, I went back to the house to talk to her family (I’m trained as a humanist celebrant and I conducted her funeral). It was very strange to be in her home – the house that Sue built – without her in it, sitting at the table, exuberant, life-filled, at the heart of things. The place was still full of objects (she was no minimalist) and full of people too, passionately bereft. Her husband, Colin, was there, and her four children and their partners, and also most of her grandchildren – her notion of family was broad and inclusive; home was always a place of welcome. They talked over each other, interrupted and added to each other, all wanting to share their versions of the many-sided Sue Townsend.

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