Summers at Terrigal. I don’t have a clue how old I was here.
Some of my most treasured childhood memories are of summertime stays at my Nanna and Poppa’s. They lived at Terrigal, on the Central Coast of NSW. In the 70’s, it was a tiny, quiet beach-side village with houses made of fibro. Now, of course, it is a much larger tourist mecca. Gone is the village feel. Now it houses multi-storey resort-style accommodations (sigh). Ain’t progress great?
Nanna and Poppa lived on a little street that ran off the main beach road. It was a steep street – a very hilly area. The land fell away from street level on Nanna and Poppa’s side so steeply that you had to go down cement steps to get to the front door. The back of the house was held up by tall stilts. That block of land was quite big, and to me as a child, it felt lush and rainforesty. Covered with trees and vines and morning glory and lantana. Even inside the house, it felt cool and shady because of all the greenery enveloping the building.
Music was always playing, either on the stereo or on the piano. My beautiful Nanna – a well bred lady who was the gentlest soul you could hope to meet – loved to play the piano. It was she who introduced me to great childhood stories – she gave me her copies of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The Borrowers series 
But the best of all … she introduced me to the legend of King Arthur through TH White’s “The Once and Future King” (especially at that age the first story “The Sword and the Stone”). Fond, fond memories.
I loved sleeping at the house – it was like camping out. My sisters and I slept out the back of the house in the sleepout, on mattresses lined up on the floor. Mosquito coils burning. Possums pounding on the roof, scaring the wits out of this sensitive little girl because they sounded like elephants up there. Stories of pythons (I would lay awake for hours waiting to hear one slithering on the roof). Lots of night creatures calling and rustling in the bush outside. Of a night time you could look out the side windows and see the Christmas-lit Norfolk Pines down at the beach, strung with big, colourful lights. I used to spend ages marvelling at how those lights got up in those big big trees. And bed-pots – because there was no inside toilet. Which I abhored and wouldn’t use.
Ah, the outside dunny. A source of disgust and absolute fear, believe it or not. The disgust was from the smell. Everyone knows the smell of an outside dunny – I had a very sensitive gag reflex as a kid and I could barely stand it. The fear was in the thought of the big deep hole and what was in it, and the openness of the ‘seat’. But mostly that old Australian song “there was a redback on the toilet seat, when I went there last night” (a redback being a poisonous spider). It scared the crap out of me, that dunny 
The best memories are of mornings at the beach. We’d grab our towels and buckets and spades, and we’d walk down the hill to the beach. The warm sun, the cool water, the smell of the salt … all makes me smile when I remember it to this day. We’d come home for lunch happy, salty, and covered in sand. Nanna made us ‘have a bath’ before we were allowed any further in the house. It was ritual. They didn’t have a bath, but a big tiled square that they’d fill with six inches of water which we’d sit in and rinse ourselves off in. Sparking memories.
One room in particular in the house intrigued me – my Uncle Peter’s. He didn’t live there anymore, but he still had a room there, that looked like it hadn’t changed from the 60’s. It was the coolest room. I used to love to sneak in there and just soak up the feeling of the room. Uncle Peter, Uncle Chris and my Dad all looked like hangovers from the late-Beatles era. I think they all took a long time to leave it No wonder I have a fondness for things from the 60s/70s (I think we had one remaining psychedelic poster of Dad’s in the house even up until the 80s ).
Christmas at Terrigal was extra special, but I had one memory of a defining moment in growing up … it was there I learned there was no Santa Clause. I stayed awake all one Christmas Eve to try and see whether it was Santa or not, but I wimped out when I heard the footsteps and squinched my eyes up tight. I didn’t really want to know. But I knew anyway … in my heart of hearts I knew.
Nanna and Poppa aren’t here anymore, and I would assume that the little fibro house and lush green block have been ripped down and ripped out to make way for some huge modern concrete monstrosity. I have no desire to go visit Ena St, Terrigal, to find out either. It would be too sad – I haven’t visited the place since it went “turned touristy” and I doubt I will ever want to.
Terrigal Beach – I don’t think the promenade was there when I was a child.
