From 1966 until 1978 my family lived on Tilley Road, off Mira Grove. Our house straddled old and new Paekākāriki—the old streets from Ocean Road to the end of Ames Street and the new subdivision built in the late 1950s, stretching from Mira Grove all the way to QEII Park.
I now live in Porter Place, a cul-de-sac built in the fifties. As a child, I longed to live in one of these newer, tidier streets with their well-mown lawns, dollhouse letterboxes and topiary trees.
I wonder what those old residents would think of the street now. Would they hate the riot of house colours, flora growing as it pleases, and vegetables and fruit trees sprouting on the berms? The houses have individuated; some have gone a bit crazy.
My family ran the concession at QEII Park. It was like an amusement park, with a shop, a boating pond, a chair-o-plane, a miniature train, trampolines, and mini golf. The place teemed with people on weekends—busloads, carloads, huge picnics, and workplace outings. It was hectic and invigorating. Mum kept a golf club behind the shop’s counter, swinging it around to break up brawls, mainly involving women. I witnessed one woman attack another and pull her earring clean out of her ear.
Unlike my older siblings, I didn’t have a job— you had to be at least ten to work in the shop. I begged Dad to let me wear a money belt and manage the other activities. I knew how to time the minutes allotted for jumping on the trampoline or paddling in the boats. I could wade into the pond and use the long hook to pull in the naughty boats that wouldn’t listen when their time was up. I would make sure not to drive the train too fast like the big boys did, so no one would fall off when it derailed.
The chair-o-plane was scary; you had to carefully time your dodge under it to turn the lever and stop the loud motor that sounded like ten lawnmowers. Dad was nearly killed when he timed it incorrectly—his face was badly gashed.
Instead of working like the older kids, I wandered about. I visited the urupā under the Norfolk pine and had a one-sided conversation with what was then unmarked ground. I walked through the sandhills by myself and often came across a naked man or two bobbing about like meerkats in the dunes. I didn’t feel fearful — they always looked more scared of me. I sensed it wasn’t predatory behaviour, just some ritual I didn’t understand. I didn’t expect to understand adults.
Yet I knew way too much about the lives of the adults around me, like the fact Mrs. Harris’s* baby wasn’t her husband’s, but some other man’s. Miss Eame’s* had a baby by herself—no man. How could this be possible we discussed at school. The park shop was often broken into. Dad would get phoned in the middle of the night. ‘Kids!’ he’d sigh. I felt betrayed when I saw the culprits handing out bottles of fizzy drink and lolly bags at school. Dad made us pay for everything —there was no free ice cream like my friends imagined.
Dad owned a lot of village businesses. More than anything, he wanted to be stinking rich. My grandparents thought that wealth had a stench. Our Nana (Connie Birchfield) and grandfather, whom we called Birchie, lived in an unpretentious house on Wellington Road, adjoining the Sand Track.
They were communists. They believed there were two classes of people: the working class and the owning class, and what benefits one class harms the other. Nana would say, ‘Either you are for the capitalists or for the workers; you can’t be for both. The workers do all the work, and the bosses reap the rewards. They’re only interested in making profits, not meeting needs.’
Nana often said she’d line up and shoot people she deemed a danger to humanity. She could knit without looking, and when our jumpers were too small, she’d simply add enough rows to make them fit again. ‘I’d hang, draw, and quarter them,’ she’d say, jabbing the puzzled air with one of her knitting needles.
The coming revolution, she believed, would have to be violent because the owning class wouldn’t give up their position willingly. One day, she said, wealth would be concentrated in the hands of a few—so few you’d be able to count them on one hand. (She called them multinationals or robber barons) and when the time came, we could chop off their heads. Nana would steeple her hands in front of her, then make a sharp karate chop motion. She believed Rupert Murdoch had corrupted the media and the silicon chip would be the greatest danger to civilization. This was before I’d even heard of computers. And when the time came to fight, we must not be shocked into apathy; we would have to be brave and courageous. Yes, Nana, I think the time has come.
Surprisingly, Nana and Dad got on well. They seemed relaxed in each other’s company. But what did my grandparents really think of their daughter marrying a capitalist entrepreneur? And Dad wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill capitalist, but more of a crooked mogul, leaning into capitalism’s shady side.
Dad often used expressions like backhander, tax dodge, pocketing the extra profit, and rolling back the mileage. He once told me his watch had “fallen off the back of a truck.” I was surprised it wasn’t scratched. My brother Brent remembers the police calling Dad to warn him if there was going to be a raid on the 1906 restaurant, which Dad owned on the main highway and operated without a liquor license. This gave Dad enough time to go down and clear out all the booze.
I expect my grandparents believed Dad would have to wait for the revolution. The masses and the proletariat would sort him out. If he refused to give up his private property, it would be confiscated.
I remember longing for the day when there would be no need for money, when we’d all share and work together in self-sufficient harmony. ‘Chairman Mao says there will be no flies. Won’t that be good, Dad?’ I’d say.
Dad taught Nana how to bet on the horses. There was room for such ironies in Paekākāriki. He owned a racehorse, and every Saturday morning, they’d go to the TAB in a building Dad owned on Beach Road. According to Dad, Nana had great intuition and knew how to back a winner. Nana bet on a horse based on the quality of its jockey. She studied the form book, considered how far the horse had travelled, and carefully thought through each bet.
Nana got huge joy from her late-in-life horse betting. Coming from horse people, she liked horses. Her father had been a horseman—until his father drank the farm away. I imagined a whole farm being impossibly slurped up through a straw.
I went to Paekākāriki School. After lunch, pairs of girls, never boys, were rostered on staffroom duty to wash and dry dishes. We’d sneak a cigarette or two off the table to smoke later.
Assemblies were held outside; We stood in all-weather while the headmaster Mr Graves bounced back and forth heel to toe. I worried he’d topple over. He talked a lot about Lord Cardigan. One assembly he warned us that a man in a green car was offering lollies to children. My friends and I envied the kids who bragged about being approached and spent our afternoons searching for the car. Sometimes after school we went down to the post office to tap the phones so we could make anonymous phone calls, or we broke into the housie venue on Wellington road (above where the Pātaka Kai is now). It had a stash of soft drinks, and we could smoke the cigarettes we’d stolen from the staffroom there.
We had more material possessions than other families, and I fantasised about being poor. Once, I found a pumpkin growing down the bank on Tilley Road (where the log house is now). If only we lived a subsistent, simple life, my parents would be happy.
Dad gave me 50 cents pocket money for chores. Every week, 20 cents went toward Brownies, which I hated, but wasn’t allowed to quit. Dad checked my pocket money book, questioning me about my spending before approving it. Mum complained bitterly about Dad not giving her enough money. She dreamed of opening her own bank account. When Mum (writer Frances Cherry) had her first short stories published, she bought herself a leather coat. Dad hid it.
Because money was always an issue, I didn’t equate the excessive size of our house or our toys—like a speedboat—with happiness. Dad didn’t like taking me out on the boat because I couldn’t piss over the side. Mum once crashed the boat on Pāuatahanui Inlet, grinding from one sandbar to the next. Dad once sped around a buoy so fast he tangled the propeller in someone’s fishing net.
With five cents of my pocket money, I was allowed to buy a small bag of lollies from Turnbull’s superette on the corner of Cecil and Tilley Road, or save up to buy bath salts, pretty envelopes, Holly Hobbie writing paper, and scented erasers from the bookshop and stationers further down Tilley.
We always had a lot of vehicles. I don’t remember the names and makes, but my brothers do—a blue Rover TC 2000, a Vauxhall Velox, a Princess Vanden Plas, a 90cc bike with wide tyres, and a Honda Hundred. Mum and Dad’s fights often ended in a car chase—like the time Dean Ropata,* speeding in his flamed Holden Monaro, saw Mum race past him in her pink Marina two-door coupe with twin carbs, racing stripes, and sheepskin seat covers, pursued by Dad in his British Racing Green Holden Premier station wagon with a two-speed automatic transmission.
The most horrifying event of my childhood was the murder of Gail McFadyen. My brother Craig saw Gail at 12:30 pm, sunbathing in her pale blue bikini by the surf club. By 2:30 pm, when he passed the same spot, she was gone. “I remember seeing it on TV, then realizing that I had seen her at the beach, and then everything changed,” Craig told me. “Mum called the police, and the world changed.”
It was March 1976. Gail was 23, I was 12, and Craig was 14. I still think of her when I walk over the sand dunes near the new surf club. She would be 72 now. She loved sunbathing, listening to her transistor radio, and reading. Witnesses saw her lying on her front, knees bent, feet in the air.
Gail and her husband, Graham, had moved to the Kapiti Coast—it was called the Golden Coast back then. They were staying in the motor camp while they looked for a house.
They never found Gail’s orange towelling sunhat, or orange jandals, or her blue bikinis, or mustard-coloured beach squab. They did find her body six days later, buried in a shallow grave just off the walking track, her head covered with masking tape and flax binding her hands.
We knew all the details—the playground rumours turned out to be mostly true and very graphic. The only detail we got wrong was that she had been strangled, grabbed from behind. We had thought she’d been buried alive.
I remember my school class walking down to the Memorial Hall to be interviewed by the police—each of us, one at a time. The hall was lined with police officers sitting at desks. This was the same place where I played table tennis, the place where we held our school concerts. The village was overrun with police, army, search and rescue teams, and community volunteers.
A groundsman at the park was eventually convicted of the crime. My grandfather had been a groundsman at QEII Park. Before the murderer was arrested, suspicion swirled around the village. My father had both a similar name and appearance to a local pervert—or ‘perv,’ as we called them back then—the kind of men who stared too long at our young bodies, watching us swim. They were never discreet but openly gawked – a greedy, wet-lipped leer with their big bellies spilling over their shorts.
Dad did have a big belly spilling over his shorts, but he never leered. Still, the police came knocking at our door one day, mistaking my father for that other man.
Mike Bungay and Brian Edwards’ book entitled Bungay on Murder was an eye opener about the treatment of female victims at the time. Gail is described as slim, attractive, nice figure, girl next door, happily married, timorous, “…not the sort of girl who would invite a sexual approach on the beach. Neither tease nor exhibitionist.”
Bungay continues, “Had Gail McFayden been fat and ugly, had she been coloured or a member of a gang, had she been middle-aged or a slut, John James Murphy might have stood a very much better chance of acquittal. But in the climate of outrage that had grown since her disappearance and the discovery of her body in that ‘grave of sand’, against the background of often sensational press publicity in the four months that preceded his trial, the 24-year-old groundsman was effectively judged guilty before he entered the court.”
We left Paekākāriki in 1978. Dad moved to Australia. I saw him one more time before he died in 1981. Nana helped out as much as she could with her pension. I missed the stability that the Paekākāriki community offered our family, especially Mum—steadied by sharing matching complaints with her women friends about ‘their men’ and snuffing out each other’s attempts to escape their ’70s marriages. In our small community, she had a collective self—in sync, congruent. She knew who she was in relation to other people.
We didn’t see our old friends from Paekākāriki for at least a decade. Mum wanted a clean break after her messy divorce, but it was a painful loss for us kids. We still think of Paekākāriki as our home.
*Names have been changed.
Bungay, M., & Edwards, B. (1983). Bungay on murder. Christchurch, New Zealand: Whitcoulls.
