Among Others

Deirdre nearly got caught copying my Virgil today. There are two verbs, “progredior” and “proficiscor” and they’re both weirdly in the passive all the time, and they both start “pro” and one means “advance” and the other “set out” and I always confuse them, and I did in my prep, which Deirdre had copied. Miss Martin, who’s very sharp, gave us both a stern look when Deirdre read that bit aloud, and she said that mistakes with passive verbs seem to be catching, and then she had Deirdre come up to the front and do the next bit, the bit we hadn’t been set to prepare. She didn’t make too bad a muck of it, so I thought we’d got away with it. Then she made me construe the next part, again unseen. After class, while the bell was ringing and everyone was charging off down the corridor for physics, she stopped me and said “Did you and Deirdre co-operate a little on that piece of Virgil, Morwenna?”

“She was a bit stuck,” I said, which was the truth, and sounded much better than saying she copied all of mine.

“She’ll never learn if she doesn’t learn to learn on her own,” Miss Martin said, which sounds like an aphorism, and maybe is one in Latin, where it would be about three words, no six, maybe seven.

Letter from Daniel saying he’ll collect me on Friday and it’s fine to go to Aberdare on Sunday, also saying I might get a surprise before that. I wonder what he means? Maybe he’s sent books separately?

Book club tonight, talking about Pavane.

Wednesday 13th February 1980

Hussein led the meeting, and we didn’t just talk about Pavane, but also Brunner’s brilliant Times Without Number and Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (which I haven’t read) and Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee and the whole idea of having para-history. We also mentioned Up the Line and Guardians of Time and Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex (must order!) which Wim says is brill. There was a question of whether they were really SF, which they obviously are, and whether there was a difference between the kind of “paratime” thing, like Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and a book like Pavane which is all in one universe where things went differently.

We kept coming back to Pavane and the way Pavane covers such a span of time, which, Greg says, is what makes it SF, the perspective. Then Brian mentioned the Lord Darcy books (I adore Randall Garrett!) and asked whether they were SF, which was a cheat, as they’re obviously fantasy, except that they’re not at all like fantasy, and they are exactly like SF. Harriet said she felt they belonged rather with things like Dunsany’s club stories and tall tales, they were whimsical. I disagreed (probably talking too much and too vehemently) because I think the way in which they’re like SF is the opposite of whimsy, they’re taking magic and treating it as another bit of science, especially in Too Many Magicians.

Janine doesn’t seem to be speaking to me, or Pete either. They’ll get over it, Wim says. I hope so.

Hugh looked a bit confused. Greg thinks—he said in the car—that Hugh thought he and I would automatically become an item, because we were the same age. I never heard anything so stupid in my life, and said so, because while I like Hugh I never thought of him in that way for two seconds. Greg just laughed and said these things sort themselves out, and had I read McCaffrey? I don’t know what that has to do with anything, but we talked about Impressing dragons all the rest of the way back.

Wim’s meeting me in Gobowen again tomorrow. He seems to think this isn’t very often to see each other, but I think it’s loads. I need time in between to think—and to write it all down! I don’t suppose he does that.

It has just belatedly occurred to me that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. I don’t suppose he’ll take any notice of it—or will he? I don’t have the foggiest. Miss Carroll thinks he might, and that I should have something ready to produce if he does. The problem with that is that I don’t have anything. She suggested a book—well, she would!—and that would be a terrific idea if there was time to go to a bookshop. I could make him a card. Well, except that nobody would want a card I’d made. I could write him a poem, or more to the point, write out neatly one of the poems I have already written about him. But what if he didn’t like it? I’ve never talked to him about poetry, I have no idea whether he likes it or not. If he didn’t hate Heinlein I could give him The Number of the Beast, but he does, so I can’t. I don’t have anything else new, and he probably has everything I have here.

If I leave school a little bit early, I can go to the bookshop on the way to the station, I suppose.

Thursday 14th February 1980

Well, that was awkward.