Summers in Maketu
Paula Penfold remembers the road trip, the burning embers, her sister’s undies, and an injustice.
Dad would spend hours packing the mustard-yellow Renault 12TL. It was a meticulous feat of planning, every available centimetre of boot space filled. There was a plastic lever on the headlights which meant they could be tilted downwards when the car was back-heavy. He’d remember to do that.
My memory is that as the youngest of three I always got the unwanted middle position in the back seat, but my eldest sister recalls it differently: she claims it was always her in the middle to stop me and my other sister fighting.
And so we would set out every summer from Hamilton to Maketu, over the daunting Kaimai Ranges, my middle sister vomiting at the same turn in the road, every year. On the flats two thirds of the way there Dad would wind down the window for the one cigarette he’d allow himself.
Other people thought it strange that we would always go back to the same place, and we would do it at the same time, the last two weeks of January. But there was a comfortable familiarity. The same families were there every year, too. Some, friends from Hamilton. Another family who always travelled up from Taranaki. Several from Rotorua.
We always had the same red caravan, two down from the campground dairy, right on the beach. The Halls, from Rotorua, always had the same cabin. Kuini Hall would become my friend, and we would write letters to each other throughout the year until we saw each other again those last two weeks of January. Her brother would be my first kiss. I don’t know why but I often wonder about Kuini Hall.
There was the mother with two daughters; their father had died. I remember being told he was killed riding a motorbike head-on into a car at night, and that he thought the oncoming headlights were two motorbikes, and he would play a stunt by riding between them. I always wondered how they knew that, or if it was just what they hoped. We would play cards on the bunks in the canvas awning with the window flaps cracking in the wind.
I was probably four when my parents were walking me on the beach, holding a hand each until they lifted and swung me and dipped me in the sea, drenching the green dress with white flowers I loved. In that moment I felt betrayed.
I think I was six the year I had to pack for my sister and forgot her undies. She never let me forget.
I was also six the year I jumped over a log on the beach and folded my legs sideways beneath me to feel an instant searing pain and simultaneous realisation that I’d landed on the burning embers of someone’s abandoned beach fire. I ran straight into the sea. Someone gave me chocolate. I screamed in the back of the Renault 12TL all the way to the doctor’s in Te Puke as my mother bathed my burnt hand and leg in a bowl of water and my father drove with a look of determination and fear. He didn’t break the speed limit.
Maketu beach remains forever etched in the scar on my leg.
Maybe I was eight the year the campground owner, Peggy, cracked an egg on my mum’s head as they were laughing like crazy, drinking beer and sherry on the beach. They seemed so unworried and happy.
At 13 I got beaten up outside the surf club by two girls who accused me of having two boyfriends. I got a black eye which I thought wasn’t obvious so didn’t say anything to the adults, until Peggy asked what happened to my face. I was embarrassed and also angry at the injustice of it all since I didn’t have two boyfriends, at all.
The sand would stick to the Johnsons baby oil us kids slathered on ourselves to try to make our Pa¯keha¯ skin brown. Ten years ago my dad died of melanoma, and I regret that baby oil and its sickly smell.
In my older teens I would go back to Maketu during other school holidays. In the mornings a van would arrive to pick us up to take us to the orchards of Te Puke where we would pick and pack kiwifruit. I was embarrassed by my shyness in the smoko room and had nothing to say.
The summer I left school a friend and I went to work at the camp store, by then a dairy and fish and chip shop. One Saturday the boss left us to run the place by ourselves. We were hopelessly out of our depths and quickly overwhelmed, yet we somehow found the lengthening queue hilarious and laughed so hard we fell about the floor, giggling endlessly and uncontrollably in full view of a shop full of perplexed customers. That day still makes us laugh.
Mark, I forget his last name, was in the Mongrel Mob, patched and tattooed and gentle. He would call in on us in the coming weeks to make sure we were OK.
I got a boyfriend at Maketu that year: James, a surfer with curly hair, fern-green eyes and a smile that would make his eyes squint. Many years later I received a handwritten letter; return address Waikeria Prison. He didn’t say what he was in there for.
Last year I went back to Maketu. Erosion had swallowed the beach and the white sand had gone. Most of the caravans had been replaced by small cabins. There’d been a fire at the dairy and it had been rebuilt.
It was August, grey and cold. There was nobody about.
I went back up Ngaroma Lane to the cliff top overlooking the Bay of Plenty with Motiti Island in the distance, and thought about how lucky I was that every summer, for the last two weeks of January, I was here.
Maketu beach remains forever etched in the scar on my leg.