Runaway

us are in. She is not in any clubs and can’t take part in any sports and she does not have any normal social life. She does have a sort of life involving people and there is nothing wrong with it, but I wouldn’t know how to talk about it and maybe neither would she.
    Mr. McWilliams was there helping Mrs. McWilliams out in the store because the clerks had not been able to get in. He is a dreadful tease and he started teasing Tessa, asking her if she didn’t get word of this storm coming and why she couldn’t have let the rest of us know about it, etc. and Mrs. McWilliams told him to stop it. Tessa just looked as if she never heard and asked for a can of sardines. It made me feel suddenly awful, to think of her sitting down for supper to a can of sardines. Which is hardly likely, I don’t know any reason she can’t cook a meal like anybody else.
    The big news I heard at the store was that the roof of the Knights of Pythias Hall has caved in. There goes our stage for The Gondoliers, which was supposed to go on at the end of March. The Town Hall stage is not big enough and the old Opera House is now being used to store coffins from Hay’s Furniture. So tonight we are supposed to have a rehearsal but I don’t know who will get there or what will be the outcome.
    Mar. 16. Decision to shelve The Gondoliers for this year, only six of us out to rehearsal in the Sunday School Hall so we gave up and went over to Wilf’s house for coffee. Wilf also announced that he had meant this to be his last performance because his practice was getting too busy, and we would have to find another tenor. That will be a blow because he is the best.
    I still feel funny calling a doctor by his first name even if he is only around thirty. His house used to be Dr. Coggan’s and a lot of people still call it that. It was built specially to be a doctor’s house with the office wing out to one side. But Wilf has had it all done over, some partitions knocked down altogether so that it is very roomy and bright and Sid Ralston was kidding him about getting it all ready for a wife. That was rather a touchy subject with Ginny right there but probably Sid did not know. (Ginny has had three proposals. First one from Wilf Rubstone, then Tommy Shuttles, then Euan McKay. A doctor, then an optometrist, then a minister. She is eight months older than I am but I don’t suppose I have a hope of catching up. I think she does lead them on a bit, though she always says she can’t understand it and that every time they asked her to marry them it came like a bolt out of the blue. What I think is that there are ways you can turn everything into a joke and let them know you wouldn’t welcome a proposal, before you let them go and make a fool of themselves.)
    If ever I am seriously ill I hope I am able to destroy this diary or go through and stroke out any mean things in it, in case I die.
    We all got talking in a rather serious way, I don’t know why, and the conversation got on to the things we learned at school and how much we had already forgotten. Somebody mentioned the Debating Club that used to be in town and how that all got scrapped after the War when everybody got cars to run around in and the movies to go to and started playing golf. What serious subjects they used to talk about. “Is Science or Literature more important in forming Human Character?” Can anybody imagine getting people out nowadays to listen to that? We’d feel silly even sitting around in an unorganized way and talking about it. Then Ginny said we should at least form a Reading Club and that got us on to the important books we always meant to read but never got down to it. The Harvard Classics that just sit there on the shelf behind glass doors in the living room year after year. Why not War and Peace, I said, but Ginny claimed she had already read it. So it came down to a vote between Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy and the Divine Comedy won out. All we know about it is that it is not much of a comedy and written in Italian, though we will naturally be reading it in English. Sid thought it was in Latin and said he had read enough of that in Miss Hurt’s class to last him all his life and we all roared at him, then he pretended he knew all along. Anyway now that The Gondoliers is on hold we should be able to find some time and will meet every couple of weeks to encourage each other.
    Wilf showed us all over the house. The dining room is on one side of the hall and living