COAST MEMORY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23330, 23 October 1937, Page 4

COAST MEMORY

By Gwendolyn M. McLaren There is a stretch of coast a bare 26 miles from the city that holds a' charm and magic all its own. From the island-barred river mouth to where, some miles farther south, a smaller stream meanders past ratas to the sea, every chain is crowded with happy memories for several generations of children. Our holidays were spent in a low, white farm house overlooking the island and the river mouth. The day we first saw it, we discovered that the kitchen windows were framed by honeysuckle, and as we sat on the old colonial sofa, the bush rug pleasantly prickling our little bare legs, we positively prayed in our small souls that our elders would choose this delightful place for a holiday house. Our prayer was heard, and wave music sent us to sleep on our chaff mattresses, and we watched the sun rise out of the sea on fresh summer mornings.

Every beach and rock and cove in that stretch of coast soon had its name—the Big Beach, where at the point a spring gushed into a huge iron trypot, sole relic of old whaling days; the Beach, where we found the jellyfish (hundreds of them, large as soup plates, after a terrific storm); and the fishing rocks, where we once caught a greenbone and two "Maori chiefs." These were black fish with little body but large and most artistically ugly heads. Then there was the Mosquito Cave, a slit in the rocks cut by some giant cheese knife. That was a good haunt for a wet day. We could sit in the opening fronting on to the weed-fringed rocks and the sea, and even build a little fire if it were not too windy, build it on the sand and pile it up with dried kelp. The kelp made alarming crackles as it burned, quite as good as any crackers town children could buy. You had to be very quiet though even if you were marooned pirates, and not venture into the recesses of the cave where nurseries of mosquitoes clung to the roof. Down the grey rocks above the cave trailed the pink flowers of the ice plant, mesembryanthemum australis, and the leaves had a satisfying, salty taste if chewed when we were too hungry to wait till tea time. It never mattered how wet it was if we had a couple of broken kitchen knives and £ few slabs of bull kelp to make into moccasins and Indian belts. There is a delightful feeling about slipping one's bare feet into the soft, spongy honeycomb of the kelp, almost comparable to the sensuous spat-spat of thick road dust, of clay between one's toes. Then there were the rock pools. Each one held its own treasures. Little matter if we got soaking wet. We stood for hours fishing out wonders. One deep pool yielded a tremendous sea urchin, which had to be patiently pried out from under a ledge—that was a major thrill, and we always had hopes of finding another there, but all we found was great, black, velvety sea snails and little blue hermit crabs with outsize clsws* There was the pawa shell channel where we waded deep at low tide to get the great iridescent shells. They had to be knocked off suddenly; any touch and their inhabitants would clamp themselves so tightly to the rocks that there was no hope of removal. We used to think the Maoris must have been very hungry to have eaten the leathery black fish inside the shells. In that channel we found orange sea slugs, brown spotted, sometimes baby sea urchins and quaint sucker fish, flat on one side, that were great game to hunt as they darted between the rocks. Cockabullies we caught in every variety—tiny fellows that had to be cautiously inveigled into a corner and scooped out suddenly. One day we were down on the beach with children from a neighbouring farm. Not wanting to be encumbered with the two-year-old, we left him high and dry on the sandhills with our catch spread out beside him. When we came up with further spoils we were horror-stricken to find he had cheerfully chewed off the heads of the first six, getting his iodine ration. We took strings of them home, a dozen or so two-inch-long fellows with a wisp of flax threaded through their gills in professional manner, and the powers-that-be were patient enough to let us fry them, although there was only a teaspoonful between us. One beach had a line of low sandhills covered with pingao grass. Behind them a deep watercourse was scoured out in the sandy soil. This was the trench, and we spent a week-end roofing over one part and thatching it with the grass laid on flax koraris. That also made the walls, and behold—our home and our castle, even though .we entered it on all fours and it just held two at a time. , , ~, There were little bush gullies leading down to the sea; we helped the farm children to take the cows home by the track alongside one of them, where mistletoe hung from the coprosma bushes. After rain, in those little gullies, we were first conscious of chuckling baby talk that a bush stream croons to itself.

Wet days held no boredom for us; if the beach were vetoed there were other pleasures. By the back door were two huts. One was the woodshed, where we hung a rope swing from the middle rafter and discovered that singing and swinging both at once were eminently satisfying. Another shed was christened the chaffhouse, for there the farmer stored his spare chaff. It was lined and papered with a gallery of Witness pictures and Times shipping news which, perhaps gave us ideas, for we would turn nautical. For whole mornings aboard the good ship Endeavour we were a'swing over tropic seas—the windows were portholes and the sea song that beat for ever in the air lent a touch of reality. Across the road from the house l was a disused smithy, and it was a i perennial happy hunting ground. There we found nails, horseshoes, rusty tools, a great mallet and anvil, even the old brick fireplace and a tremendous pair of bellows that could still be worked by united effort. We shoed each other, we were rival blacksmiths. We even found an old ledger the smith had left with transactions of a past gen- I eration laboriously entered therein. : One day we discovered a bumble bees' nest in a hole under the clay floor and we were fascinated by the grape-like cluster of yellow bags. We envisioned ourselves making a fortune as honey dealers, but we were disgusted to find nothing but embryo bees in the bags. j Down behind the smithy was a I gully where much manuka and sweet briar grew. It lay to the west and was a refuge from the off-sea easterlies. There were innumerable winding tracks and we found spider orchids there, dark wine colour, trailing among their silvery leaves, i We used to stalk the rabbits in an old quarry, but our feet would slip on the shale just at the critical moment, and the grass would be , flecked with bobbing white tails. I Nights of autumn full moons were never to be forgotten. We would play with the boys of the farm in the old barn. At that season it was piled almost to the roof with sacks j of chaff and oats and the moonlight J dripped through cracks and knot holes. Hide and seek in the enchanted barn of those moon-lit evenings was a thrilling experience nothing in later years could ■ out-do. Tlien we would all sit on the steps and munch cold juice-filled apples stolen from the tree by the duckpond. I wonder what, variety of apple they were. Never in any orchard since have we tasted anything so delicious. But an end would come even to those wonderful nights. We would hear the scrape of the back door from the house on the hill and the insistent "Cooee" that meant the ritual of washing and bed. We would stay as long as we dared, then trail reluctantly uphill to the house.

Mornings were delicious times, a bellbird or two would chime in the trees and the sea below the paddocks would be pure silver. There was a long plantation up the road from the house, and. our ambition, almost achieved, was to climb every tree in it. We were bested by the tall, smooth-trunked bluegums. Perhaps none of us, however "grown up," can quite forget the exultation of swaying perilously, as near the top Of the tallest pine as one dared to climb. , Sometimes we would wander along the hilltop road of clay, past manuka blossoming in the sun and down A long hill to Akatore, where the rata hung over the stream that wound a lazy way to the sea. At low tide we would follow it the mile or so to its mouth, climbing round rocks smothered with red stamens dropped from the trees above. Sometimes we could catch baby flounders in the shallows by the mouth of the creek. You could stand on them if you were quickenough and stood firmly enough, and then in a complicated acrobatic feat of balancing, slip your hand under your foot and lift the flapping creature into your tin or basket, then stretch out on the hot grey sand in your bathing suit till you were sunshine soaked. That seemed a long day and a long way for small legs, but it was a rare treat, a picnic to be looked forward to for days. The low, white house was sweet to return to at nightfall, with its 'big open fireplace aflame with manuka logs and the lamplight shining on treasures of shells and dried seaweed, rata branches and gum nuts. From the windows we could see the city lights twinkling far across the bay, but we never envied any of the dwellers under them, for our days were blue and green and gold in sea and bush and sunshine, abrim with laughter \ and full of thrilling discoveries and the long, long thoughts of happy childhood.