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April 8, 2008 11:08 AM
HELEN'S HEROINES: Pandora Braithwaite
Helen Redfern's weekly column on the fictional females she loves...
On Wednesday January 14th in 1981 Adrian Mole (aged thirteen and three quarters) wrote in his secret diary that a new girl now sat next to him in Geography. Her hair was the "colour of treacle" being "long like a girl’s hair should be". He was entranced and stated "I might fall in love with her." It is on this date that Adrian’s love for Pandora Braithwaite begins, reciprocated through their teenage years, but as they grow up Pandora moves onto bigger and better things leaving Adrian trailing after her.
Adrian and Pandora appear in the following books, written by Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years, Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years and finally Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Obviously the books are written from Adrian’s point of view – being his secret diaries after all – so we have to read between the lines to get some sort of a picture of Pandora’s life.
She is the daughter of Tania and Ivan, both of whom are middle class, politically active labour party members who attempt to embrace the working class. Pandora is also politically aware from an incredibly young age. I suspect part of the initial attraction to Adrian was his working class background plus, of course, his act of rebellion by wearing red socks to school. So Pandora set up the Red Sock Committee and in the process she and Adrian fell into each others arms.
Despite her so called attraction to the working class she is a snob. When Adrian asked her to come on holiday with his family to Skegness she says, "Darling I would follow you into hell, but I draw the line at Skegness."
As Pandora gets older, Adrian becomes a bit of a pain. She goes to Oxford, to study Mandarin, Russian and Serbo-Croat, but he follows her, ending up living in her box room. He slips suggestive poems under her door, riffles through her underwear drawer and snoops through her desk.
She laughs at him behind his back, although to be fair she did recommend he went to see a counsellor friend of hers, which he did. She chooses quite unsuitable men, handsome and intelligent yes, but one a serial philanderer and her husband who is openly gay.
Pandora is ruthless, callous, manipulative and at times not very nice to Adrian, who is, after all, the hero of the books. So why am I using her as this weeks heroine? She is intelligent, an achiever, someone that works incredibly hard. She is ambitious. She has been since she could walk and talk. On reading the secret diary as a teenager myself I was impressed with her knowledge, her confidence in herself and her beliefs.
She has never wanted to settle for marrying Adrian at 16, having lots of children and waiting for him to come home. On reminiscing with Adrian about this in Weapons of Mass Destruction they both started weeping. Later Pandora sends him a text. "Thanks, Aidy. I do love you." Would she really have wanted to marry him at 16 and become a housewife? I doubt that very much, but maybe part of her wonders what if. If you look hard enough, there is someone with a little bit of softness, of vulnerability underneath. Something that isn’t first apparent on first read of the books.
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Posted by Aigua Media on April 8, 2008 in Helen's Heroines | Permalink
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