A Special Sort of Day

MOST OF THE boys in my class were chewing their pens and gazing out of the window with a dreamy look in their eyes. We had been told to write an essay on Independence. I started straight off without much thought, just putting down the first thing which came into my mind. "I'm lucky, I was there" I thought. I live in Dar es Salaam, most of the other boys come from Kenya. I described the decorations, the lights at night and our visit to a battleship in the harbour, but I'm not much good at that sort of thing and when I read it through afterwards it seemed pretty rotten. My mother says I'm a slap-dash sort of chap and I suppose she is right, because when I looked round the classroom no-one else seemed to have finished.