THE SUN ON ST. CLAIR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21538, 9 January 1932, Page 14

THE SUN ON ST. CLAIR

By D. R. W.

Written for the Otago Daily Times

On a Sunday afternoon that is provocative in its appeal the thoughts of many turn to the “salt estranging sea,” and the glistening sands of St. Clair. We await, in the heat of the meridian, at Frederick street for the passing of a tram car that will carry us to our destination, but our vigil becomes protracted, and our party increased by the casual addition of friends with their offspring. We then decide it will be as satisfactory to save our patience and exhaust our pence in chartering a taxicab, and a few minutes spent in a contiguous telephone bureau results in a bargain gratifying to all concerned. An early postprandial arrival at the beach is thus assured.

There are very few people either in or out of the sea, and we decide to bestow our patronage on the baths in lieu of essaying the unplumhed depths of the St. Clair surf.

Swimming contentedly by means of an old-fashioned sidestroke that is gazed at in critical amusement by the modern exponents of over-arm measures and feeling somewhat of an aquatic Rip Van Winkle, I bethink me of the baths and their patrons of over three decades ago. Fortified with crimson buckets and wooden spades, children would sally forth under the guidance of their elders, board the douhledecker horse cars with their perforated wooden seats and enjoy from their lofty altitude the summer breezes fanning their cheeks. Ogg’s corner would be duly circumnavigated, and thereafter its far-away neighbour of Forbury, and the horses would set off on the long,, last stretch and come to a halt where the Metropole House now stands. There would then ensue- a helter-skelter rush to be first to sight the sea tumbling beneath the long line of sandhills and savour the tang or the seaweed and general sea smells. There was no esplanade or formed walks in those days, but long alps of sand filled the foreground, with intervening valleys where children wandered forlorn for aeons of time until retrieved by their chaperones. The surface of these towering ramparts was thickly covered with a stiff, prickly grass that lent them a darksome hirsute appearance and repressed in part the extravagant escapades of the youngsters Around the baths themselves there was no lordly turreted pavilion, but a homely series of dressing boxes. The hours of the day were meted out to the respective sexes in strict order. When the sun was at its most brilliant and the water at its most alluring, then, “place aux dames”; but under the tutelage of aunts and maids we were permitted within the sacred circle, clad only in what was then designated as a pair of “trunks”—no doubt because of their truncated proportions. The waters seemed a microcosm of the outer ocean, trenscendingly deep, and we hugged the shallow end and attached ourselves to the rope that then, as now, swung across the near end of the, baths, where already many of our same, size and age depended like so many sessile invertebrates; reversing the familiar process, enjoyed by the ascidian or sea squirt, of a free-swimming larval stage, as a precursor to a stay-at-home existence among the rocks. The fair denizenaof the baths loomed before us, enswathed in heavy and decorous draperies, of a dowager amplitude of shape. • The beach proper and the league-long rollers was the playground of children alone, surf bathing being unknown. After our enforced ablutions within the baths, we youngsters built sand castles and paddled amid the mild aftermath of the waves. Here our sisters and fair cousins unblushingly tucked short skirts within their subjacent garments —what lay , m normal times under ellipse, thus emerging in full-orbed eclat —and we wondered at the novelty of this backward effrontery. To-day, the surf presents altogether different features. A numerous band of young folk —a perfect kaleidoscope of colour—disports among the waves — and a bronze colossus of striking physique moves in and out of the patticoloured multitude, his deeply lobed bathing suit exposing the symmetry of his build., He no doubt could form a fitting associate for the cyclops in their labours at the forge and the,volcanic fires of Etna. On the Esplanade a long line of motor cars has nosed its way into, the kerbing and their owners, reclining in state, eye the mere pedestrians with the same aloof condescension with which the Hounslow Heath highwayman must have regarded his humbler brother, the footpad. Motor cyclists pass along, their riders exhibiting that prognathous aspect of lineament derived from the aggressive nature of their locomotion. Along the boulevard itself an incessant stream of people flows and eddies—old age with stooping figure, pleased at the gladdening sight of youth, and youth’s lissome gait pleased only with itself, the girls dressed in gay diaphanous frockings,; smaller fry rush about sporadically, intent on some microscopic errand. The band in the rotunda, determined not to be outdone by Nature’s Movements, sets up a rhythm of its own. Two regular habitues of the beach stride out of the throng, recognisable by the intensity of their sunbrowning and their easy nonchalance amid the Sunday perfection of the visitors, the up-to-dateness of their swimming costumes, relieved by an indefinable trait of the primeval in themselves —the genuine aristocracy of the seaside.

But it is the same old beach, the same tumbling expanse of blue waters to the horizon, the same old White Island, basking in the sun. Nature calls to young and old to rejoice in the healthy recreations afforded by her sea, the warmth of her sun and in the society of their fellows. She evokes in them the insistent desire to keep healthy and to rejoice in their health. She herself is in riant and smiling mood, but this, after all, is her metier, and there must be one smile at it all which she reserves for herself.