Holidays in my childhood

Orua Bay

I can still feel the shock I got when the fragile glass I was trying to drink from shattered in my mouth, my mother jumped up and both parents spent the next few minutes trying to retrieve tiny shards of glass from my mouth.

We were staying in a boarding-house at Orua Bay, on the tip of the Awhitu Peninsula, at Manukau Heads, opposite Cornwallis. We were having a weekend holiday, and I was young enough to be just learning to drink from a glass. I can still hear my parents muttering to each other about how stupid the boarding-house people were to give me such a fragile glass at my age!

Thinking back, I wonder if this was at the beginning of December, 1935. Was it a celebration of my mother's thirtieth birthday, or Dad pampering her because she was newly pregnant with Olwyn? Anyway I would have been two and a bit.

Muriwai?

Another seaside weekend is in my memory for a different reason: the continual roar of the west coast surf, at night when everything else was still.

We were staying at one of the beaches just north of Auckland, I think, possibly Muriwai, again for a couple of nights, and all I remember is that background roar.

Mullet Point

The other seaside holiday I remember specially, apart from the regular times at Milford, was a Summer camping for several days at Scandrett's Beach at Christmas 1944.

Scandrett's then was at the end of a long, dusty road that turned off from the main northern highway at Warkworth.  It was fun living in a tent, cooking on an open fire, spending time right by the beach for swimming and playing in the sand. I also had the opportunity of going for a sail with a sailor on leave from the navy who was also staying there. And Dad took us fishing, and I caught my first fish, a gurnard; I still choose gurnard when we buy fish and chips. To my mind they taste better than snapper!

South Island

But the No 1 holiday of those early years was a trip to the South Island at Christmas 1941 to meet our cousins who lived in Ashburton. It involved the train trip overnight on the express to Wellington, and the next night on the ferry to Lyttelton in those days. And as it was wartime and there were rumoured to be submarines about, the ferry was darkened.

So we boarded the Rangatira at Wellington, and my parents spent a nervous night in darkness while the old boat chugged across the Strait and down the coast to Lyttelton. I was 8 at this stage, and Olwyn was 5, while Stuart was only a couple of months.


Our uncle Doug Bird was waiting there for us in his big car, and drove us to Ashburton, where he was a teacher at the High School, to meet Auntie Win, Mum's younger sister, and our cousins: Don, Derry, and Jennifer.  Don and Derry were big boys, but Jennifer was about my age.

After a few days in Ashburton, we retraced our trip to Christchurch: I remember driving through smoke from forest fires along the main road across the plains.

While we were in Christchurch, my mother got a message from Auntie Win to say she had had a baby, Barbara. So Mum travelled back to Ashburton with Stuart for another few days, while Dad showed Olwyn and me the sights of Christchurch. The Sumner tram was by then electric, but looked much like the one in the photo.

My memories of that trip are hazy; ten years later we all toured the South Island again, and memories of the second visit have taken over!