The Taste Of Summer
Revisits summers past — and wonders where all the boysenberries have gone
It was hot the summer I turned 15. The kind of blue-sky Hawke’s Bay heat where the road shimmered and melting tar stuck to the soles of your feet. Each morning, I’d be up before anyone else was awake to see how many lengths of our Para pool I could swim underwater before taking a breath (my record was eight), then bake, facedown on the concrete in a steaming puddle of chlorine fumes.
I got my first after-school job working in a dairy, rolling hokey-pokey icecreams and making up lolly bags from bulk containers under the counter. Aniseed balls, milk bottles, jet planes, glo hearts, Snifters — all two for a cent. Milk came in crates of glass bottles that sometimes, thrillingly, would smash all over the floor.
The youngest of four kids, an unexpected epilogue at best, I grew up in a household where food was fast and functional. Mum was well over cooking by then. I’d help out in the kitchen by browning frozen mince in a stockpot, using a wooden spoon to chip away at the block.
It was the late-70s and provincial tastes were unsophisticated then. I’d never eaten an olive or an avocado. We might all be into pesto and poké bowls now but some things are slow to change.
In the early 2000s, I stayed overnight at a high-country station in Canterbury as part of an off-road 4WD trip. Roast lamb and pav for dinner — delicious. The hostess told me her son was running a farm of his own and his wife had him eating pasta and salad. She was genuinely astonished: “I said to her, ‘How did you do it?”’ In the heartland, this was pretty radical stuff.
It never rained the summer I turned 16. The hills crisped to a golden brown and the clay soil in our garden cracked like the parched skin on a farmer’s forearms. I got a holiday job picking strawberries. We were paid per punnet so the faster you went, the more you earned. There was no minimum youth wage but the slippage from on-site consumption must have been enormous. The heat was relentless and I don’t know how hard we worked. When a friend’s co-workers discovered she was squeamish, they hid a dead bird in her row.
I took it for granted, back then, but Hastings — where I was born — really was the fruit bowl of New Zealand. No one bought fresh produce from the supermarket but we all had our favourite orchard stalls.
My mum bottled golden queen peaches and black doris plums and struck up a lifelong friendship with the Wongs, who ran Sang Lee & Co, a fruit shop on the outskirts of Hastings. Joe took over the business from his father, who’d arrived in New Zealand alone from China at the age of 10. When he and Sue retired in 1985, closing the doors after more than 50 years, it made the local newspaper. Their daughter sent me the clipping and when I look at the photo of Joe standing outside the shop, it’s like stepping back into my childhood.
It was the beginning and the end of something the summer I turned 17. The air was bone-dry and ceiling fans whirred through the night. I got a holiday job picking boysenberries (I don’t remember there ever being blueberries). The work was less back-breaking than crouching over strawberry plants but the prickles were vicious and the purple juice stained my fingers. Strange how you can hardly find boysenberries anywhere today.
In my last year at school, I worked Friday and Saturday nights at a flash new restaurant in Havelock North village. Sam Hunt came in one night with his dog Minstrel and kissed a waitress’ hand. New girls were sent home to practise their silver service and balancing plates. I never really got the hang of it and haven’t waited tables since.
Deep-fried camembert with plum sauce was the height of sophistication — it was 1981, by then — and New Zealand’s first winery restaurant had opened in Hastings at Vidal Estate. Now, there are more than 70 wineries and you can dine at a dozen of them.
But some things haven’t changed. Rush Munro’s (New Zealand’s oldest icecreamery) is still where I left it, on Heretaunga St, with its old-fashioned rose garden and wrought-iron furniture, if not the same goldfish circling the lily pond.
And last year, a family about to have their first Christmas in Hawke’s Bay arrived at Scott’s Strawberry Farm just before opening time to find half the world had got there before them. The wait was one and a half hours. “It was so worth it,” they reported. “The best strawberries EVER!”
I bet they couldn’t have tasted better if I’d picked them myself.
No one bought fresh produce from the supermarket but we all had our favourite orchard stalls.