Time out

Believe it or not, there are still places in the developed world where you might as well not bother bringing your laptop or whatever gizmo you connect with. That's where we've been, one of those places. I’m not complaining. The day when we get good enough internet reception at our beach house in New Zealand will be a day to regret.

The house sits on the edge of a grey sandy beach, looking out towards Kawau Island. People don’t come to this benign sweep of coastline for the beach action per se. Occasionally (and this summer, when the weather systems seem to have lost all self-control, saw two such occasions) we get stung by the tail of a tropical cyclone which stirs up the sea and shifts about loose chunks of sandstone and mud. But mostly, when the barometer is steady, you can’t find a better place for boating or letting young children loose to play in the water or around the rocks.

My parents starting coming here with me, my sister and two brothers in 1965. Since then the trees they planted have grown huge and there’s a “new” bunkhouse, built 20 years ago when more babies demanded more beds. But not much else has changed. Photos from one decade are interchangeable with those taken in any other, if you discount the growing/aging cycle of the human players. See there the tanned bodies sprawled across the veranda, books in hand; the sailing dinghies and kayaks ready to roll down the ramp into the high tide; the fringing pohutakawas and agapanthus, and hydrangeas in bluest of bloom; the kids squashed together on divans, playing cards, or batting a shuttlecock and wearing out the grass in the same old places; the boys (usually) feeding wood into the barbecue and downing cold beers; the girls (usually) slicing and chopping, stripping husks off sweetcorn…memories which bind three generations now.

 

We’ve never had a television at the beach and there’s still no dishwasher because we’re on tank water (which is why until very recently there wasn’t a decent shower in the place). The dish-washing roster and narrowness of the kitchen manufacture family closeness - the kitchen is so ridiculously small that to be in it with one other person is an intimate act. My mother won't tolerate any loose talk of alterations (“over my dead body”, she says, and my architect brother-in-law bites his tongue, biding his time). Hence, by default, the house has become fashionably retro. A couple of years ago some slick creative boys came through, salivating, and said it was exactly the location they were looking for to shoot a television ad. They went ahead with the ad (for a car – eh?) and apparently it’s a big hit, but living in Australia as we do, I’ve never seen it.  

A friend whose family holidayed with us over several summers when our parents were young and shiny popped by at the end of January. He hadn’t been inside our beach house since his father died when he was a boy. After that happened, everything to do with his parents and mine seemed frozen in time, like Camelot. I walked Mike through the rooms (it didn’t take a minute) and watched his mouth drop. “It’s so small,” he said, quietly. Could it be that all we both remembered about those golden years had really happened in such a tiny place? I’ve often wondered about that myself. Yet the evidence suggests that legend-making is still strong at the beach house – in inverse proportion, perhaps, to the availability of mod cons.