i.      O.G. Special (Oak Grove School)

The Oak Grove Schools are railway schools located between Dehra Dun in the Plains and Mussoorie, a Hill Station. The schools are more like a community: a Senior Girls' School, a Senior Boys' School, a Junior School (mixed girls and boys), a school Hospital, a number of separate buildings to accommodate teaching and other staff, servants' quarters, a picturesque valley where all three schools could congregate, and large  playgrounds for the individual schools. The student body was comprised mostly of children whose parents worked for the East Indian Railway, and a small batch from the North Western Railway (N.W.R.). E.I.R. students went to Oak Grove on special trains, one for boys and one for girls, which started at Howrah Station (Calcutta) and went all the way to Dehra Dun, picking up students at every main station, and reaching this terminus after two days and two nights of travelling.  These were the OG Specials.

Thousands of Anglo-Indian girls and boys attended schools in the hills in India every year, thereby escaping the heat and sickness-prone conditions of the plains, where their parents worked. To my knowledge, only the OG students had their own special trains. My first ride on the OG Special at age seven was unforgettable. As the boys in my compartment prepared for a meal stop, a bigger boy threw my boots to me as a pair. I managed to catch one; the other sailed through an open window, making a neat arc to land beyond the ballast at the side of the railway track. It must have been a lucky find for some one-legged person with just my size of foot. At that meal and at meals along the line, and at Dehra Dun upon de-training, I had one stocking foot and hopped on the other. In apprehension, the boy who had thrown the boots kept well away from me. Where are friends when you need them? I arrived at the Junior School carried in a dandy (a scaled- down sort of palanquin).

On the first regular school day, now wearing two boots, because another pair had been among the articles in my school trunk, which had been stored in a separate baggage area on the train journey, my embarrassment continued. I was identified by a teacher as "the boy with the curly hair, and told sternly to get into line. The boys looked closely at the mop of twisted wire I had for hair and one wit called me "crow's nest", a nickname that stuck with me for years. Well, I was out of the nest and learning it's a hard world. I rode the OG Special for several years and those journeys of 65 -70 years ago have merged into one. Draw down the wooden shutters to darken the compartment. A boy is blindfolded, turned round three times and he sets off to catch someone - no moving around allowed - whom he must identify by touch. If the identification is correct, the boy caught is placed in the blindfold and the game goes on. Feats of strength were attempted on the carriage metal fittings. Fans were turned in every possible direction. Jumping competitions were held. Outside, the shadow of the train rippled across fields and smoothly hurdled bushes and trees.

With the coming of evening boastful tales were told by the senior school boys of the prowess of some of the masters, as known from the canings they meted out. Shikar tales (hunting tales)  followed, such as the Bathgate-Lewis story, in which these two railway employees shared a machan (platform in a tree) over a tethered goat. The tiger was shot and the two men descended to inspect their kill. When they reached the tiger, the animal rose and attacked Bathgate. He raised his hand to save his throat and face and had three fingers chewed off. He was known as Tiger Bathgate ever after. Lewis could not shoot the tiger because the animal and Bathgate were embroiled together. He tried to pull the animal off, but it then turned on him and killed him. Bathgate got away while the tiger was attacking Lewis. A cement square seen from the train on the Gurpa-Gujundi section of railway track marks the spot where Lewis died. My father pointed it out to me on a train journey we were making in that area.

The other tale was one I told and had come to me from my Uncle John, my mother's eldest brother. On his annual shikar he would hire a tracker who had been carried off by a tiger and had the teeth marks in his side to prove it. The man had been revelling at a wedding, to which he had taken some kind of horn as a noise maker. He must have got very drunk and dawdled on the way home and become separated from the group he was with. It seems the fellow didn't know he was in a tiger's mouth; he blew his horn and startled the tiger, and lived.