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PHOTO: Gregor Richardson

I have a confession to make: I used to find Caversham depressing. As depressing as the music to Coronation St, writes Talia Marshall.

Talia Marshall

As depressing as the music to Coronation St. The plaintive northern cornet started playing in my head as soon as my Grandad’s blue Datsun would edge over the hill at Lookout Point and down into Caversham. It was the brick terraced houses near the dairy that did it, they were the grim whare which reminded me of Coronation St, a TV show my grandparents loved and I loathed. I was 7 and loved The Love Boat, the swooning opening theme with its promise of um, love, and making another run.

The thing is it wasn’t Caversham’s fault it looked so grey, drab and depressing. It was the fatal juxtaposition. We had just come over the hill from a long drive after our annual caravan holiday at Glendhu Bay, at Wanaka. Comparing Caversham with Wanaka is like comparing Rihanna with Vera Lynn, the WW2 singer Nana named her cat after.

The only attempt at tourism Caversham has made, apart from restoring the Tiger Tea sign on the side of the physiotherapist’s is the now defunct Rovers Return pub, which opened in the ’90s. I mean, someone else had decided Caversham was also like Coronation St and that this was a positive comparison. Sister suburbs!

Although Coronation St didn’t have a gang pad next to the Chinese grocer’s like Caversham.

I had started voluntarily watching Coronation St by then and I found the credits melancholic rather than depressing. I was almost an adult. And I brought my baby home to Mum’s place in Peter St and fell in love with Caversham, pushing my ancient pram past Betty in the grocer’s and the fish and chip shop where Mum used to work after I was born.

Really, Caversham is best seen through the eyes of two people. One of them is my Nana. Technically, my Nana is Caversham. A tomboy formerly known as Tom who used to fly down South Rd during the Depression to get to school and then dawdle home past the shops and up the slow winding curves of the hill. She still lives in Caversham and can hear the children laughing over the fence. Her conservatory is so hot it is worse than a sauna and I complain I am dying in it when I visit her and she tells me to open a window. It takes her an hour to read this paper.

At school Nana was protective of her middle sister Lorraine, who was teased for smelling like the sulphur she was given as a treatment for tuberculosis. Lorraine taught the piano as an adult, had perfect taste in vases, roses and bowls and the thickest dark hair. My mother always thought Christina in Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting was her Aunty Lorraine.

When I stared at Christina’s World above the mantelpiece in my grandparents’ house I thought Christina was my mother. I drop hair everywhere too, clog drains and leave a tangled web in the dish brush. Lorraine died too young and I never got to meet her. But there she is suspended in a plain shell-coloured dress in the forever of the tall grass. She is still too far from the barn.

Nana’s oldest sister Joan was too fancy for Caversham and sort of looked like a movie star, she kept her own cutlery set for at the table, but she still calls it Cavvy as she minces around Waikanae in her nineties, rising above time wearing a headscarf and sunglasses. She roasts a chicken on its side, believing it looks better that way.

Alice, their mother, put oats on the coal range overnight for porridge in the morning. Their father, Claude, was a meat worker with wavy hair who would bake potatoes in the burn off in the back garden. My nana is attached to the potato, on our caravan holidays she would fry last night’s potatoes in butter on a stone fire by the Motatapu River. She said that it reminded her of her father in South Rd, to cook outside like that.

She likes them mashed with even more butter or parboiled and crisscrossed in dripping in the enamel mutton pan. She recommends them as a plain baked curative for dysentery, one of her most beloved words.

Nana is why I love new potatoes with mint in the pot because it reminds me of the fogged windows of the caravan at Christmas.

But I need to remember another Joan, my other pair of eyes. I’m referring of course to the recently departed wild heroine and Caversham fixture, Joan Butcher. I have run into Joan so many times in Caversham over the years. I have teased her with a friend at the bus stop when I was 12 and we thought she was 80 and I have bought one of her hand drawn cards, celebrating Anzac Day and Easter. I have witnessed other people give Joan smack and her give it back to them better. I wonder if Joan cared that she was loved.

I was surprised to hear how young she really was when she died.

My favourite Joan memory is one where we didn’t even talk. She was sitting on the public toilet in Caversham, opposite Mitchells. The door was open, of course, and she was singing her heart out like a debauched Santa on the loo. It is a gift to be that antisocial.

I wonder what she used to do on Christmas Day. Caversham is not quite the same without her.