Larry Emdur - Happy As: Stories of summer, childhood and the magic of family

(Map by Emily ONeill)

Contents

1970s1980s

I love you,

Im so proud of you!

Faye Emdur

1972

I ts 2022. Im standing on the promenade at North Bondi overlooking the iconic kiddies pool. Im wearing drop-crotch denim shorts, Birkenstocks and a linen shirt, and Im sipping a double-shot skim macchiato that I just bought at Speedos Caf across the road for $4.40... and Im thinking, What happened to me? When did my life become this wanky?? Because when I was growing up and swimming in this pool, life was incredibly simple and so, so much fun.

It was half a century ago...

WAIT! STOP THE BOOK!!! Thats how an old man would start his first chapter. Has my life been going on for so long I need a half a century reference in there? Oh, deary, deary me...

Oh, SHIT!!! Theres another thing an old man would say. This book was a stupid idea all its doing is proving that Ive accidentally become an old man.

Going off on a tangent is also something an old man would do, so maybe I should get on with the story before this old man gets so far off course he forgets what this story is about.

Back in the day, the beach was our backyard and the North Bondi kiddies pool was our favourite hang. My sisters, Nicki and Martine, and I were all under ten, and we would splash around in this pool all day.

Would I get out and run the two hundred metres to the public toilet to go for a wee? As if. Back then we thought the water temperature was increasing naturally as the sun got higher and the air warmed up, but now that I know more about science and stuff, I think I can safely say that the more kids weed in there during the day, the more it heated up.

Its a tidal pool, and at high tide you could jump off the pool wall into the deeper end not so deep, really, maybe a metre. On days when there was a big surf, the waves would smash against the wall and spray up and over, and wed hang on to the railing, which was just a rusty chain, and swing back and forth as the waves smashed into us. At low tide, the pool would get one big flush that exposed a large patch of sand, where we would spend hours building sandcastles and just messing around.

All I remember from these days was laughter and happiness and sunburn, and ouchies when peeling the red sunburnt skin off our noses and shoulders.

Weekend breakfasts were my favourite. My mum, Faye, would make her speciality, which she called Bunny in a Hole.

She would heat the frying pan up to high but not just any old frying pan. My dad, Dave, was a travelling salesman, and at the time he sold fancy pots and pans, so naturally Mum got a brand-new set.

A mere description of Mums awesome Bunny in a Hole recipe from the 1970s would cause any nutritionist of today with a completely healthy heart to have a heart attack, maybe multiple.

Once the frying pan was heated up to high, Mum would put in more butter than any health institute around the world would recommend, then get a couple of slices of white bread fresh or past its use-by date, didnt matter.

(Actually, according to my best writing companion Wikipedia, use-by dates for food in Australia didnt really kick in until 1978, which means before that wed just keep eating the white bread until it went a little bit mouldy, then you could just kind of cut or tear the mouldy bits off and keep going. Those there were dangerous times.)

Mum would use a cup to press a hole in the middle of the slice of bread then throw the bread into the sizzling butter and let it fry. Once it crisped up a bit, shed crack an egg into the hole wait, wait, I almost forgot: first shed put another tablespoon of butter into the hole, more sizzling and spattering, then put the egg in and cook it good, cook it real good.

Now the egg is perfectly set and the toast perfectly fried. Thank you, butter.

In writing this, Im trying to remember the scene exactly and all I can think about is how much wrong stuff, by todays standards, was happening in our house at that particular time. We just didnt know.

Mums cooking our breakfast with half a tub of butter, Dads walking around chain-smoking, including at the brekky table, were all unwittingly filling up on butter and passive smoke and were about to go to the beach all day in the middle of summer with no shirts, hats or sunscreen in fact, there might even have been some coconut oil applied to get a deeper tan and fry the skin, in a similar fashion to how the butter had fried the egg an hour earlier at home. If only wed known then what we know now.

On other very special days, if Mum thought maybe we should have a break from the butter and white bread, we would have fruit, because apparently fruit was good for you. But instead of real fruit wed have froot, in the form of a very awesome breakfast cereal called Froot Loops. I never questioned why they spelt fruit differently on the box. I knew this awesome cereal was from America and I thought that was how you spelt it in American.

Now, Id seen lots of those food charts and I knew I had to eat froot, so I loaded up that bowl with as many Froot Loops as I could. Toucan Sam was on the box and he looked like a happy, healthy toucan. Surely if Froot Loops were bad for you then hed be fat and sad, but NO, he had bright eyes and shiny feathers.

I shouldve known when Toucan Sam said, Start your day with a good breakfast including Kelloggs Froot Loops that he meant have a healthy breakfast first and then you can have a handful of Froot Loops. But when he said that Froot Loops were full of niacin, vitamin B6 and riboflavin, he made them sound great, like when Eva Longoria says hya-lu-ronic in the LOral commercial and you go, Wow, that sounds really good for you and a whole lot of fun to say. I believe it and I want it, and Im going out to buy it right now.

Back then, the kiddies pool was the centre of our universe. On really hot days, the whole family would head off early and walk barefoot in our cozzies down the hill from our house at 161 Hastings Parade, Ben Buckler, North Bondi.

We just took our towels; we didnt need anything else. We never took any supplies; bottled water wasnt a thing, but we wouldnt have taken it anyway, because there was a bubbler. Why would we carry our own water when we could easily go and put our mouths on a bubbler that ten thousand other beachgoers had slobbered all over?

Sometimes it had good pressure and you could keep your mouth a safe distance from the layers of cold sores, gum disease, influenza, E. coli and giardia. At other times, when the pressure was low, youd have to bring your cracked, sunburnt lips close to the water hole and keep them there long enough to get a mouthful of water and quite possibly legionella.