Orange is my everything
A holiday series on that most Kiwi of habits: heading Talia Marshall remembers the artificial makeshift paradise of ‘‘Glendhu Heights’’.
Maybe it’s embarrassing to admit I had the time of my life with four old Mormons in a caravan. I was an only child and my grandparents’ only grandchild until I was 10 so Gwen and Jim spoiled me silly, something I still suffer from today, as a lazy lost princess who expects everyone to treasure me as much as they did.
Every year around Christmas they would drive me up from Dunedin to the orange and white caravan that was permanently parked at Glendhu Bay Motor Camp, and we would holiday for two weeks in this artificial makeshift paradise. I hated being in the car, so they would play me The Limeliters’ album for children, John Denver and Anne Murray measuring the marigold on the blue Datsun’s tape deck all the way to Wanaka.
We’d stop in Roxburgh to have a break because I was usually carsick from the Manuka Gorge. Before we left Dunedin they’d kneel and say a travelling prayer which is something I still do before a long drive, if I remember. Although the gods I’m praying to are less distinct than their breathy Heavenly Father.
I was a water baby and spent most of my time baking in the sun on my lilo, under the sky’s hot blue lid. The limey-coloured mountains hugging the edge of the lake were my world. I didn’t have friends my own age at the camp, my attempts to make some were haphazard and too intense. I still don’t really know how to play with the other kids.
There was a pretty, skinny, blonde girl who looked my age that I was desperate to know probably because I wanted to be her. She kept her distance as I stalked her around the lake on my lilo… she always managed to drift out of reach as she hung out with her equally blonde older sisters.
Nana was not a swimmer but Grandad would take off his roman sandals, short- sleeved shirt and abandon his book to join me if I begged – the lake was freezing to an adult. In the water he would pretend to be a shark and tip me off my lilo, a shocking thing that I loved as much as his trick of taking out his teeth.
Sunscreen was not really a thing then. You could still buy that Tahitian coconut oil which fries you browner than mince and Nana would call out ‘‘ Tali Tali’’ from the shore while I hung on to the buoy, diving down to investigate the rope that went to a teal nowhere.
Nana called out my name to coax me out of the water and feed me up, she called me her brown berry. I used to come home to Wellington, and Mum, after the holiday twice the size because the caravan was filled with Nana’s tins. She slightly under baked her giant yoyos and chocolate chip biscuits which were extra rich with butter. She also used to make a chewier biscuit out of golden syrup and currants that she called a dougal, a particularly Dunedin biscuit with Scottish roots I’ve never had anywhere else.
My grandparents were both readers and after I’d finished all the age-appropriate books Mum had got me for Christmas I would start on Nana’s Catherine Cooksons and their Reader’s Digest Condensed novels with gold embossed spines which had been dumbed down enough to make me feel smart for reading them. I still remember the one about Catherine of Aragon, and how Henry VIII was an attentive lover before he got it bad for Anne Boleyn.
The Andersons, their best friends from church in Dunedin, camped right beside us in their caravan which seemed humbler than ours. It intrigued me that they slept together in its double bed because Nana and Grandad stuck to their chaste unconverted single beds. We camped in the same spot year after year which was on a slight rise under the massive pines that dominated the camp and Grandad would call it Glendhu Heights as a joke. Really, they weren’t so old, Gwen, Jim and the Andersons, they were only in their 50s then and their adult kids were just starting to get married. I had missed out on all the collective fun of their nine kids before my later arrival. One of them became a solo mum with a Ma¯ori baby but my existence never felt shameful to me even after Mum admitted being a lesbian to Nana.
At night the Andersons would come over to play cards. It was the 80s so someone had given Nana and Grandad a Trivial Pursuit set for Christmas and I loved this game. The old people preferred cards and Nana would often get the giggles. She would descend into a private hilarity, which remains fascinating to me because she achieved this without alcohol and drugs. We would have Milo, the Mormon version of tea and coffee.
I loved Trivial Pursuit because I love useless facts but also, I was a cheat. For a while they decided I was some kind of child prodigy, but I could see the answers on the back of the cards reflected in the dark window glass, which admittedly took some effort. Grandad didn’t pull down the roller blinds until it was time to sleep because there was nothing about this idyll to hide. The sound of the blinds snapping up in the morning and the blackbirds hopping over the awning in forked feet accompanied by the sound of outboard motors destroying the dawn form my memory symphony.
Even the sound of trapped buzzing flies is holy to me because it reminds me of lolling in the caravan. As holy as the smell of mint in the pot for Nana’s new potatoes, the orange pillowcases with white daisies, the orange seats, the orange plastic cups, the orange everything. The only thing I was denied was a net to catch cockabullies from the camp’s creek. Nana would only give me one of those orange cups to catch the baby fish in. It only occurred to me as an adult that Nana was on the side of the fish, that she didn’t want them to die in a bucket.
A few years ago, the council chopped down most of the trees at the camp and Nana still isn’t over this. The branches of our tree would brush the roof of the caravan and Grandad would barbecue toast and pop the tree’s little cones into the red Thermette to boil water for the Milo. He would have sweetener in his Milo which was pointless because we had chipolata sausages with piccalilli almost every morning. For someone who barely eats, Nana loves fattening people up.
I kept on going to Glendhu with my grandparents a little late into my teenage years. I wasn’t ready to admit there was a world outside them and it became awkward when I adopted notions of cool. One year Grandad was singing along to I am ... I said by Neil Diamond at full throttle behind the heavy electric blue windbreak Nana had ruined her sewing machine with. I felt embarrassed by the naffness of Neil Diamond and probably sneered at him because my face can’t hide my feelings. This memory tortures me now; I should have let him enjoy his song about the frog king.
At his funeral, Colin, one half of the Andersons, talked in a wobbly voice about his friend Jim. Then Colin died in a dementia unit. I had worked in this unit before he was a resident there and I knew it as a horrible place. This year Dawn, his wife, died in another home and now Nana is the only one left. She said she would rather get hit by a car than be put in a home, but then she got hit by a car in 2016 and her tiny indomitable frame survived it instead of being reunited with Jim in that strange pastel kingdom which passes for the Mormon afterlife.
I suppose it’s just life but this fracturing of my grandparents and the Andersons is tragic to me. I would like to take Nana back to Glendhu but they sold the caravan once driving there and setting up its awning became a chore not a pleasure. If I saw the caravan on Trade Me or in a sales yard I wouldn’t want it because it would be bereft of their stuff. I had their screaming kettle, the heavy fry pan and the 60s plates for a while, but I am not as good at holding onto things as them.
I ended up giving away half the boxed questions of their Trivial Pursuit set to another rest home I worked in so this manipulative resident I didn’t like much could run a better daily quiz at morning tea. I tried to keep my mouth shut and not know the answers. Because I hope the truest answer to the question of what persists past the finite is love.