Hills, Seals, Snow and Stuff!

At the age of eight, I was the perfect child. I never argued with my mother, I never got into any trouble and life seemed trouble free.

Until the day when five jam drop biscuits went missing. Yes, exactly five. Biscuits in our house were allocated tighter than my theatre schedules! If one went missing, mum knew about it, and five, well that was the start of world war three!

Paul didn’t like jam drops, so it was assumed I must have taken them.

No amount of pleading and tears would convince mum it wasn’t me.

I got the biggest hiding with the wooden spoon, and, to my horror, mum fetched a bar of soap from the bathroom and proceeded to wash my mouth out for lying.

It is a memory that has stayed with me all my life.

When I was twenty-two, gathered around a family BBQ, the subject of the missing jam drops came up again. My brother laughingly admitted taking the biscuits. No remorse was shown. In fact, I think he was proud of the fact that he got away with his misdemeanour for 14 years! Mum was mortified. It was the worst punishment she had ever dished out to me and as much as it hurt me at the time, I suspect it hurt her even more. I don’t think she ever forgave herself.

The impact that event had on me (especially when I became a mother) was significant.

To this day I have never, ever punished my children unless I was 100% sure they did the crime. Even when my teenage son took a hard earned $50.00 from his sisters room I didn’t punish him – because even though we all knew he took it, I never found it, so I couldn’t be 100% sure. The decision not to punish him was not a popular one at the time.

Soon after the jam drop episode, Mum married John. He had spent five years bribing Paul and I with chocolate mint biscuits…and it worked. He was to become the father we never had, and three became four (well seven if you include the dog, cat and owl Paul had brought home!) I remember the wedding like it was yesterday. I had begged mum for years to make me a long dress (mum made all our clothes) and finally, for the wedding, my wish came true. Forget the modern day Elsa or Anna. I was THE princess! Paul and I were a part of the wedding party, and we were even allowed to go out to tea with all the adults. But not the honeymoon. I stayed at Auntie Cherie’s while Mum and John went away without me.

I determined after they returned, that I would call John, Dad. But it never seemed right. He had been John for five years and John he would remain. But, regardless of what I called him, he was my father in every way that mattered. It is never easy to come into a ready-made family with children and back then it was somewhat unusual. John was an amazing, grounding father figure who always put us first. While we may not have realised it at the time, Paul and I were so lucky mum chose someone like John. There were many families in our area that didn’t have gentle, caring fathers like us.

I recall visiting ‘Ally’ who lived further down Elizabeth Street, not long before Christmas, and was quite horrified to hear that Santa didn’t visit their house at Christmas. There were eleven children living there and Santa didn’t even stop at their house? There were only two kids at our house, and he always stopped to deliver a banana, a small box of chocolates and a book.
Maybe it was because they didn’t have a big fire with a chimney like our house had. Maybe Santa was scared of her dad as he did yell a lot and sometimes he got so angry he punched the wall. There were lots of holes in the walls of that house in Elizabeth Street.
Whatever it was, I felt real sad for ‘Ally’ .

It wasn’t long before Mum and John had saved enough money to move out of housing commission into a middle suburban area. ‘Sandy’ and ‘Janie’ lived across the road. Their parents had lots and lots of money. They always got the most amazing Christmas presents and the biggest Easter egg I had ever seen! It was the size of a football. They had an in-ground pool and (horror) their mother bathed topless – even when I was visiting! She had the darkest tan I ever did see. How I admired  ‘Sandy’ and ‘Janie’ . They had it all. While we had moved into a respectable area, in my 11-year-old mind, we still didn’t measure up to the ‘Sandy’ and ‘Janie’s’  of the world.

When I returned to New Zealand many years later as an adult, I tried to find ‘Sandy’ and ‘Janie’ only to discover their lives had not turned out so great. Their mum had passed away from skin cancer and one of the girls was incarcerated for a serious crime. Guess my little smarties-filled easter eggs were not so bad after all.

Mum and John were both working and finally getting on their feet financially. They started going out for tea on some Friday nights, leaving me home with my babysitter – Paul!
What a great idea that was!
Not long after our parents left, Paul would seat me on the handlebars of his pushbike and off we would ride in the dark of night, to his girlfriend’s place across the other side of town. I’m not sure where her parents were so late at night, but we always seemed to be alone in the lounge room watching television. Well, I would be watching television… Paul and his girlfriend on the other hand, had better things to do. Paul was always sure to be home by 10.30pm before Mum got home. I was sworn to secrecy about our little night adventures.

One holiday break, alone at home (Paul was supposed to be babysitting me but as usual was off visiting his girlfriend), I was bored and thought it might be entertaining to call the fire brigade and send them to a ‘fire’ at my friend Philippas house. I giggled to myself, imagining the look on Philippas mothers face when the fire brigade turned up, sirens blaring. But my smile soon faded when a voice came through the phone “hello, are you there. Stay on the line please”. I slammed the phone down on the hook. “Hello, please stay on the line”.
I picked up the phone and slammed it down again. “Hello, will you please stay on the line”. No matter how many times I picked up the phone and slammed it down on the hook, the women wouldn’t stop talking to me! What was with her? Didn’t she have other fires to fix?

Even back then, phone calls were tracked, and I got in HUGE trouble.

It was at this point that I went off the rails somewhat. There had been so many changes in my life, new home, new school, new friends. I wanted so much for my new friends to like me, and so, it was at that time that I entered into my kleptomania phase (this is my deepest, darkest secret – about to be revealed to the world!)

I started pinching blocks of chocolate from the local supermarket to give to my ‘friends’ at school. To this day I do not know how I wasn’t caught. What 5 foot nothing, 35 kilo girl gets out of a supermarket with 10 or more mega blocks of chocolate stuffed down her jacket, in the middle of summer, twice a week, without someone getting sus! Eventually, my next door neighbour caught me. My mother marched me to the supermarket to confess and that was the end of my pocket money for a year!

It didn’t end there. I started taking money out of mums purse. This continued for probably a year until one day, I returned home after school to find mum sitting on her bed crying. I had taken a $20.00 note that morning to spend at the canteen and the school had called to query why she gave me such a large amount of money.

In all the tough years we had been through in our lives, I had never, ever seen mum cry. The effect it had on me was profound. I never stole another thing again.

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We bid farewell to our impressive Christchurch apartment and hit the road.

Kaikoura was a ‘must stop’. I recall on childhood trips eagerly scanning the coastal rocks in search of the elusive Fur Seals that live in colonies there.

The weather was glorious (for NZ), 18 degrees out of the wind and as we pulled into the Kaikoura lookout the view took my breath away. Snowcapped hills (don’t ever call them mountains in NZ) stretched as far as the eye could see on the Western side, glistening blue/green ocean on the East. The quaint township of Kaikoura was nestled in the valley below. This is the magic of New Zealand. These are the scenes that feature on postcards that travel the world.
After a few wind-blown ‘selfies’ and typical holiday scenic shots we hit the road again in search of the traditional oceanside fish and chip shop.

Unfortunately for us, this appeared to be one tradition that has sadly faded with time…I fear it will be one of many that I will discover over the next week.

Forty odd years ago it seemed to take us forever to get anywhere (probably due to the fact we had to stop every five minutes so Paul could regurgitate his last meal on the side of the road!)
Christchurch to Kaikoura would have been at least a half day trip. The roads were winding, and the edges seemed to drop thousands of metres into oblivion. I had nightmares about our old Anglia careering over the edge to the sharp rocks below, search and rescue boats skimming the ocean for our floating, lifeless bodies, reminiscent of the Titanic. (Yes, even then I had a very vivid imagination!)

Forty years on and this has improved. The roads are smooth, wider than I remember, and we seemed to get to our destinations in less time than it takes to eat a bag full of pineapple lumps! (Well when Pauls eating them at least!)

We even discovered Kaikoura is home to an abundance of beautiful Lily’s which pleased Gracie no end, since Lily is her middle name.

Armed with ‘inside information’ that came from a very reliable source we went in search of the pup seals that apparently play in the rock pools near Ohau Point. It took a few false alarm stops but eventually we found them. Pup seals and hundreds of grown seals lazily sunning themselves on the rocks below our perfect viewing point. The pups kept us amused for half an hour or so as they played in the rock pools.

New Zealand seems to have these little coffee shop/bar type places in the middle of nowhere. I am not sure how they survive, perhaps by tourists like us passing by (I can’t believe I just called myself a tourist in NZ!) or perhaps by the farmers who travel some distance to partake in a game of pool or an “ale” after a long day in the hills.

I made possibly the biggest faux pas of the day, ordering a Muggacino, and ended up with a large hot chocolate. The woman’s confused look should have given me the hint she had no idea what I was ordering. What I should have asked for, was a ‘bowl’ of cappuccino.

We continued the final stretch of our road trip, and on entering Marlborough, there were vineyards as far as the eye could see, set out in the tidiest rows, strangely resembling some kind of OCD infliction!

It soon became evident that the Blenheim I remembered had changed. Commercial enterprises now formed most part of the landscape, mainly due to the flourishing wine producing industry that Marlborough is now famous for. When we left in 1982 you could count the vineyards on one hand. Blenheim mostly produced fruit, berries, vegetables, lamb and beef, and had a few ‘rag trade’ industries (my mother worked for one of these – hence our knowledge of all things sewn).
At 12, I had earned Christmas money picking berries at a local berry farm, though I may, or may not have eaten more than I picked!

Riverlands School, where my mother went as a child, hasn’t changed much. As we drove past, I swore I saw her sitting on the step of the schoolhouse, dressed in school uniform and those infamous gumboots (exactly like her school photo). There was no sign of the rose bush gardens that Mum always lamented about having to weed, after being caught misbehaving in school! The fact that she appeared to have spent time in that Rose garden nearly every day, I deduced she perhaps wasn’t the teachers pet.

She always blamed the rose gardens for her lack of education.

Blenheim School (where I spent infants and some ‘Primar’ years) also has not changed. The veranda out the front of my old classroom still proudly stands…where I perfected rattling off my seven times table in 7.6 seconds… the fastest in my class (I wonder if I still hold this record?) This, however, was the only thing I did best – I was never a scholarly child by any stretch of the imagination!

As it was getting too dark to adequately see any more familiar landmarks, we found a lovely Chinese restaurant – with the worst interior décor I had ever seen.
The owner had recently redecorated the restaurant and proudly boasted about his painting talent, luminous yellow walls with fluorescent yellow table clothes! We smiled brightly (not as brightly as the iridescent walls!) not having the heart to tell him that interior decorating was clearly not his forte! Thankfully his cooking skills were far superior to his decorating and tea was enjoyed by all before heading ‘home’ to Lybster Street, our rental home for the next few days.

The traditional nightly game of Eucha (Gracie and I won) and it was time for bed. We have a few big days coming up.

Good night Elizabeth

Day four, coming soon….