Outing Sundays

While we boarders spent most of the year in house, we did have visiting Sundays and outing Sundays. The former was to allow relatives to visit their wards, and the latter was to allow the wards to be taken out for a day. On visiting Sundays I would watch with some envy the boys who had visitors and received food stuffs and pocket money. No one visited me, so you can understand. But I was engrossed with disgning and building a Dakota Airliner from icecream sticks, match boxes, cigarette packets cellopane and foil.

It was to have moving parts, but would never fly. My outing Sunday would consist of visiting an imagined aunt or uncle, but in reality I was off to the Parel railway yard to watch the locomotives being serviced, or I would go off to the Santacruz airport and stand at the fence for a close up of the airplanes. Then one day a kindly man took notice and asked if I would like to see inside the airplane. Wow, I went inside the Dakota which was parked near these semicircular hangars. He let me sit in the pilot’s seat.

I just went wild with excitement. That day when I returned to the boarding, my friends were ga ga over my story and that day we all decided to join the Airforce. My excercise books were filled with drawings and plans of my next project, the World War II Liberator. Well I had more fun than those sentimental visits from relatives, and felt more adult than some.