A word of warning!! Be cautious not to cut your fingers when whittling the cork and, secondly, when sitting on the ground and driving the cork into the charged bottle, don’t keep the bottle’s neck between your thighs because it might crack and some stray shard would cut your skin just where the shorts end, as it was in my case…
It only remains to wait until the carbide, after getting in contact with the water in the bottle, has issued too much gas for the bottle walls to hold the pressure and it explodes with a loud pop, sending sand and glass splinters in all directions.
Being a book-addict, I often failed to follow the mainstream developments in ever-changing public life…
When tired of reading, I spread the book next to a big sofa’s armrest, covers up for the seat to keep it open at the right page and ready to be read on by my return from the Courtyard. Then down I went and stepped out of the entrance door—surprise! A caravan of differently aged boys were crossing the Courtyard hauling pieces of boards, planks, beams… I ran up to ask: what’s up? how? where?
They told me to run to the construction site of the five-story building, where another group of boys still collected useful timber that a blackstrapper soldier-guard allowed to lift off. And I arrived there just in time to grab the end of a long plank, chiseled from the guard by elder boys. The soldier only said to be quick, before any one saw us.
Like a string of diligent ants, we dragged the pillage across the Courtyard and down the Gorka, then into the forest at the foot of the steep slope made of the earth chuted down by the bulldozer when leveling the ground for the skating rink.
There, between the trees, sounded hand-saws and hammers clapped in eager heat of enthusiastic labor. The bigger boys were sawing boards and nailing them to the pillars piled into the ground.
With the trained eye of a Construction Modeling Designer, I at a glance saw that it was a shed without any windows and with one, already hinged up, door. Inside, there stood a wooden ladder leaned on the wall beneath the square hatch in the ceiling of long boards. Up I climbed and out onto the flat roof and, at the same time, ceiling of the structure.
A couple of bigger boys were there discussing whether the roof was strong enough and reassuring one another that the shed would serve the headquarters for boys from our Block and not from the twin one.
I asked for a chance to work with a handsaw or hammer, but neither of them gave me his, and they even ordered me to go down and not strain the yielding roof by my additional weight.