AFVOA Newsletter of Year 2021

Section 7 – Panorama CV 2 No. 01 / 2021 Page 98 of 123 forever. Whenever anyone is renting/buying/building a house, my single input is: make sure you have running water. Whether it was damp walls or sudden posting orders, setting up homes in garages or huge colonial bungalows, Air Force life made us take the bad with a pinch of salt, the good with humility. Nothing prepared me for the support of senior wives when the husband was on TD and the child was ill. The lack of privacy in Camp meant everyone knew when something went wrong in someone’s house. Loads of food and helping hands came from caring folk. This ethos, am sure, has survived the many changes seen by the Services over the years. Some things don’t change. The resilience, adjustments, readiness for any unforeseen circumstance played their role when I took my first full time job—at the brink of middle-age—in a corporate office. The nili-vardi-kaaley-socks community had prepared me to treat all colleagues justly, to do a job with attention to detail, to take in my stride changes of environment… after my husband took PR, I worked first in a hotel, then a hospital, and now in a school. It was possible because there was no ‘poor me’ syndrome, and a ‘will-do-can-do’ attitude that I absorbed through osmosis in the Stations I lived in. In the teatime of my life, as I write this, I bring to mind: • families who lost their men’s life/limb in the service of the nation, • those who are spending horridly bitter winters at the borders, • those who have not experienced ‘bouncing’, the Ladies’ Club or AFWWA meetings (in pre-You-Tube days, that’s how we learnt survival skills); I imagine that today’s young have their own pleasant memories building up to which I have no access. • living in tents and using DTLs in Avantipur. • a lifestyle forever changed well before 2020. That a transfer to a place where connectivity is weak is a hardship posting is now a ‘fact’. What matters is how the young ones in blue are keeping our skies safe. Viva!!