When summer felt like forever
Marty Sharpe has spent summers all over the world but nothing beats test cricket and a walk up Te Mata Peak.
Asoft stream of sand flowing through my small chunky fingers on Paraparaumu beach. That’s my earliest memory of summer.
There was what felt like a Saharan expanse between me and the sparkling sea.
The summers of my childhood and youth seemed as broad and boundless as that beach.
My next summer memory comes from a black and white photograph taken a few years later. I’m dressed as a cowboy, pointing a plastic pistol at the photographer.
I was a portly child and I look like a cross between Winston Churchill and Clint Eastwood. Mum called these my ‘‘Benny Hill days’’.
I loved that cowboy outfit. I had a hat, a vest, a holster at my side and a badge on my chest. They complimented a low-hanging nappy between my knees as I spent that summer strolling the high plains of our cul de sac collecting dried grass and sticky tarmac between my toes.
Later childhood summers involved long spells on the beaches of Pourerere in Hawke’s Bay and Cable Bay in Northland. Body surfing, night swims and bonfires bracketed by long road trips on hot vinyl seats in the back of the family car. Hours of gazing at blurred white lines and flashing trees were broken few years when I was a kid. They had a different take on summer over there; more orderly, more militaristic. Swimming was done at a complex where poolside plots were demarcated with a precision and fervour only employed by surgeons and bomb disposal units in the Antipodes. My siblings and I got used to being stared at in public when going barefoot or, Gott in Himmel, without T-shirts. We missed the Kiwi summer way of life.
School was wasted on me, never more so than in summer. It may have had something to do with the heat and a desire to be elsewhere, but I suspect it had a lot more to do with the dire lack of enthusiasm with which the priests delivered their lessons. Their monotony was unwavering, regardless of the season.
Summers as an early teen were marked by the proliferation of pastel coloured zinc sunblock, BMX bikes and, oddly, Eddie Rabbitt’s I Love A Rainy Night. Not because I’m fond of it, but because I have an enduring memory of it drifting in and out of earshot as it was carried by a light northerly from the direction of the local skating rink.
Late teen summers will always be associated with my first vehicle, a 1964 orange VW kombi van. It was one part rust to three parts metal and getting a warrant of fitness required a long drive to a backwater mechanic who overlooked its flaws in return for a dozen Rheinecks (for the blissfully uninitiated, this was a dreadful alcoholic liquid once sold as lager).
On Friday afternoons the van would carry nine of us over the Remutakas to Castlepoint, where we’d split our days between sand and