The summer of 82/83

In the summer of 1982/83, when I was six years old, my family moved from the mountains to Austinmer. We moved in my father’s blue van – my mother, my father, my younger brother, me, and our cattle dog Daisy. Sometime later that summer my father traded in the blue van for a mustard campervan. Supposedly the family was going to travel around Australia, me and my brother being home-schooled by my father.

The place at Austinmer was my grandmother’s – a weatherboard miner’s cottage on a cliff high above a rocky beach and the ocean. It was meant to be a temporary stopping point.

It was warm, that summer. Every day was bright sunshine. The miner’s cottage only had one real bedroom – a dark, scary bedroom next to the highway, decorated in maroon décor. My grandmother claimed it was inhabited by a ghost called Emily. Nobody wanted to sleep in it.

That was the summer I became a beach bum. I went to the beach every day, I turned brown and my hair turned even whiter than it already was.

It was a summer of visits from family friends, and lots of kids. My older half-brother and half-sisters, my cousins, the Binns’ and their kids, and others. The Woods’ were there a long time, they were wealthy, their son, who was my age, often scared me – he could turn in an instant from friendly to psychotic. He had a lot of game n’ watches, I had a lot of game n’ watches, we decided to set up a stall on the front lawn selling turns at our game n’ watches for ten cents a go. Nobody paid for a go.

We had these freezable mug things you would put in the freezer, then pour softdrink into, and keep stirring until you had a slushy. We discovered that if you left your slushy in the freezer for a while, you could make a super-slushy. But we’d always forget about them, and find our slushy mugs days later, frozen solid.

My older half-brother came down and was always fixing his car in the driveway, there were parts all over the place.

I tried to learn to ride a bicycle – the training wheels came off my bike, my older brother took them off – somehow he got the chain off at the same time, so when I would try to peddle I’d go nowhere, and would fall off. This was, as you can imagine, unbelievably frustrating. I thought I was doing something wrong. (To my brother’s credit, he also fixed it when he discovered what had happened.)

I still had this plastic, blue injection molded tricycle with bright yellow wheels, though, and I’d ride it down the hill to the beach, because I could lift up my feet and just fly. Then I’d hang around on the beach until somebody with a car – my older brother or my father – would take it back for me. Pushing it back up the hill was no fun at all.

So many kids were staying there that at one point they were sleeping crosswise in this long, thin laundry at the back of the house.

I had a clown with a clown hat that you could hook up to a hose. A jet of water would shoot out of the clown’s head and the hat would balance atop the jet of water, if you got the water speed right. I would sit under it on the lawn, overlooking the ocean. I also had one of those bouncy ball creatures whose horns were handles that you could bounce around on.

We saw dolphins, a rescue at sea, and a man dragging ashore a shark he had spearfished, from the window in the kitchen.

At the beach I had a bucket and a small net, and my pastime was catching the tiny fish that lived in the rockpools, and putting them in the bucket. At the end of the day I would let them go. I got good at this – the fish were fleet, but I learned how to create a disturbance and rush them into my net. I also caught little crabs and put them into my bucket.

One day I was trying to coax a crab from a crevice with a paddle-pop stick. Some older boys came along and asked me what I was doing, and I explained. They took the paddle-pop stick from me and shoved it violently into the hole, spearing the crab. They pulled the crab from the hole, impaled on the paddle-pop stick, and dropped it on the rocks. I can still remember the way its claws closed around the paddle-pop stick as it died.

My father made one attempt to home-school me, he gave me an encyclopedia entry on Captain Cook and told me to copy it out. It was, I think, the single most boring school lesson I have ever endured. I sat in the kitchen, doodling, and looked at the ocean.

My cousin and I dug pools for ourselves on the beach, down by the water, and sat in them. I came up with this idea – our pools would have a control panel that controlled the temperature. We drew control panels in the sand, and pressed imaginary buttons to make the water warmer. The water… got… warmer. It freaked us out. It was the first time I’d encountered the power of suggestion.

At one point, I want to say it was at the end of summer, I got sad. It was the first time I’d ever gotten sad for no obvious reason, it confused me. Something chemical in me was changing.

My parents decided to stay, not to travel. It had been such a romantic summer, it had affected all of us. Of course, it was never the same again – sometime later we moved out of my grandmother’s cottage, I had to go to school, my parents seperated, and everything changed, as it does. Still, I remember that summer a lot. When my grandmother died, my father bought the cottage, rebuilt the house, and that’s where I go to, when I go to Austinmer.

posted by Nicholas @ 8:52 PM