Nov 3, 1999
Picnics as I think of them are a kids’ thing and mainly a family thing, though of course there are school picnics, and Sunday school picnics, and staff picnics. I suppose young lovers, and old lovers too, may go on picnics to get away from the cruel world, btu picnics are really for kids.
Family picnics were so much a part of summer in the thirties and forties that they all get bundled together in my mind, in a sort of jumble rather than a story. There were always egg sandwiches, and since it was summer, tomato sandwiches too. Sandwiches were so essential that my younger brother always referred to them as “sandwich picnics” as if it was all one word, and my sister, when asked at the age of three what “picnic” meant said it meant “sandwich”. Were we unusual in this? Did the kids who always took their cut lunch to school perhaps not have the same association of sandwiches with wellbeing? We always lived near the school and went home for lunch.
Anyway, sandwiches it had to be, and mind you eat your crusts. (Except when the picnic was at Virginia Lake in Wanganui, and you were allowed to feed the crusts to the ducks)
There were swans too at Virginia Lake, white one and black ones. And the lake was supposed to be bottomless, which it may well have been, being an old volcanic crater. It also had no proper outlet, simply leaking out through the gravel so that young eels who could get into the lake through the gravel, could never get back to the sea again when they grew up, and just stayed and got bigger and bigger. Some were six feet long, they said, and as big round as a man’s leg. A pretty spooky place at night I should think, Virginia Lake, but a great place for a picnic on a sunny day. There were trees and lawns and flowers, and a little fireplace where you could boil the black billy for the grown-ups to have tea. And we got fizzy drink!
As well as sandwiches there was usually sand at picnics. Black sand at Castlecliffe, where the rusty remains of the “Sirena” was embedded offshore near the breakwater, and you mustn’t go there for fear you cut your feet on rusty something. (After the war it was the “Port Bowen”, a rather more spectacular wreck, which had also mistaken the light on the breakwater for the light on the river mouth, Alan said, and had run into the beach in a fog, believing it was going up the Wanganui River to the wharf.). Yellow sand at Kai-iwi, where the water was so warm when the tide came in over the hot sand. But don’t go near the cliffs because they might fall on you, as they had done on someone, (or was that the Chinaman with the load of cabbages during the Napier earthquake?). Sand in your swimming togs, sand in the sandwiches even, and sand between your toes. Sand in the mouth of a dead gurnard washed up among the Neptune’s necklaces. Sand where you could make sand castles with moats, or just dig a hole and watch it fill with water, and Alan made himself a bath to sit in. What a dag! Sand under your fingernails and on the floor of the car and sand stuck in the soap when you got home.
There were picnics by the river too, where the mud from some long past winter flood had dried and cracked and warped into a great mosaic of dished polygons that crunched when you walked on them. And where we tried to get old willow logs to float so we could ride on them, but they always turned over and tipped you in the water. Once there was a dead cow caught among the willows. Alan said water will purify itself if it flows over stones for fifty yards. We gave the billy a good boiling anyway to boil out the germs; the black billy, hanging above the fire on a green willow stick thrust into the ground and supported against a log or a big boulder.
And there was sunburn. No proper picnic without sunburn. Wear your sunhat because of the infantile paralysis that Jackie Green got, but sunburn on back and shoulders was all part of the day. Sometimes it blistered on your shoulders, and Uncle Albert put shaving soap lather on it to ease the pain. Otherwise there was Q-tol, pink and stinging and smelling of phenol. Never heard of sun block. Afterwards the itching as the skin peeled, and the interesting experience of removing great sheets of skin from one another’s backs, like a lizard moulting. Brand new skin underneath, and no itch.
Those were the days. It was always summer then.
There were Sunday school picnics too. I don’t remember them with the same affection, though they had their moments, with lolly scrambles, and sometimes a treasure hunt, and races of course. “Someone has to come last”. And biscuits and cakes and ice cream served from a can stood in a copper full of ice. Once some slices of cold Christmas pudding. And once pretty Anne Henderson with the blue eyes drove us home in an almost new Buick. She didn’t have to. It was worth being a Christian for.