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Positive and negative aspects of sending Missionary children to Woodstock School Indiastarted at the Third Standard and continued through Tenth Standard. Parents who were able came to Landour for various lengths of time during the school year, rented hillside houses and took their children out of boarding for the time they were there. Naturally, students who started out in KG or First Standard and moved up together as classmates through high school established bonds like those of a “second family.” I knew my boarding school classmates better than I knew my brother, John. As we grew older we preferred to be with our friends in the dormitory rather than to be out-of-touch living with parents and attending school as day scholars. This was true even though the food at home was better and restrictions less onerous than in the Boys Hostel! Sending us to Woodstock meant that Dad and Mother had to accept some negative consequences. One was the distance from Bengal, about nine hundred miles from Calcutta (two nights and a day by train). Another was the March-to-November school year. These created long family separations, and the probable loss of an academic year during the family home furlough, which took about fifteen months to complete, India-to-India. Furloughs overlapped with two school years in India, while allowing time for only one in America. We got to Landour in “school parties” made up of students and an adult escort traveling from various outlying points in India and abroad, such as Rangoon and Singapore, to the Mussoorie/Landour railhead at Dehra Doon (alt. sp. Dun). From Dehra the climb to Mussoorie was accomplished by bus over a remarkable Photo: The Musoorie motor road famous for its hairpin turns. |
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