TRAVEL: My crib, my castle

Roy Colbert writes in praise of the 1960s crib and explains its unexpected legacy.

 

 

In the mumbo-jumbo world of self-cure, "the need to have your own space" is a relatively recent term. But the phrase surely has its origins in the cribs of the 1960s.

After all, the baby boomers you see now with a coffee in each hand and wild eyes the ones needing space are those same children who were crushed into a tiny all-rooms-in-one holiday crib 40 years ago.

Of course, the argument then was that you only slept in a crib as there was always a beach or river nearby, and that was where you'd be spending all your time.

But it always rains on a summer holiday and there you always were, sitting bunched up around a table playing cards.

Statistics New Zealand gives a pretty liberal definition of crib. A holiday dwelling, basically, which could be anything from a multimillion-dollar Queenstown retreat with seven toilets to an old station-wagon.

To me, a crib is the holiday home I stayed in as a child very small, shoddily built, walls made of fibrolite and mattresses made of kapok. There was never an inside toilet.

Toilets. Now there's a thing. Cribs introduced me to the arresting concept of the long drop. And worse, something that may also have an idiomatic name, which we just called a tin in the ground. If you were very young and during my summer holidays I was very often that a long drop was exceedingly scary.

My friend Murray, the same one who told me monkeys lived in our roof just through the small door of my upstairs attic bedroom, said long drops went down as far as China.

If you fell in while perched on the rickety wooden seat, it wouldn't just be centuries of rancid defecation you'd be threshing in, it would also be a horrendously long Lewis Carroll descent into a strange and foreign land.

But, like I say, the tin in the ground was worse. Because the tin in the ground had to be emptied. Being very young, our family's three children were too little to carry this humungously heavy sloshing thing, so my father enlisted our help in other ways. We would receive the lowest currency of the day a halfpenny for number ones, a penny for the bigger stuff every time we chose to go elsewhere.

He suggested the neighbour's tin in the ground. A young boy with a silvery tongue could get very rich on a system like this how would our father know? And by hokey, I tried. "Dad, I'm tuckered out, I've been 27 times since breakfast, where's the cash?"

But using that weird edge parents have, he always seemed to know. And within a year or two, as the eldest, it was my job to dig the very deep hole in the garden, which was difficult but not impossible, and empty the leaden sloshing tin into the very deep hole without falling in with it, which was impossible.

We were told back then that a crib was a regional word, used mainly south of Christchurch. Other places used the word bach. On the west coast, a crib is a miner's lunch. To crib means to cheat, and maybe a crib, smaller and more cheaply made, is a cheat's way of building a house.

And then there's cribbage, a card game. Cribs and cards go hand in hand. In fact I have only ever played cards in a crib, rain pounding on the cheap tin roof, everyone arguing, the oldies always forgetting what suit is trumps.

A wise woman once told me you can tell someone's personality by their attitude towards money. I reckon you can tell someone's personality by the way they play cards in a crib with rain pounding on the cheap tin roof.

"Who's for a game of cards?" is such an awful cluster of words. "No thanks, not for me. I'll just go outside and stand in the rain."

In a small crib, there are no options.

Cribs, the ones that were ever-so-slightly bigger, had radiograms. With a big woomfy 12-inch speaker. Those 60s singles sounded so much better on those old sets than they did anywhere else.

Consequently, in the 1980s, fully grown and steeped in nostalgia, I chose to put a 60s radiogram into our seven-bedroomed former Central Otago hotel our Statistics New Zealand crib. It broke down after a week.

But there usually wasn't room for a radiogram. There wasn't even room for us. And being town people, we would take far too many just-in-case things to stuff into every nook. So once we had invited a friend or two to stay there'll be plenty of room, just bring a sleeping bag tempers around the card table would get really frayed.

And then there were the bunks. When you are very young, the top bunk is a frightening thing. You could just roll off there like a marble off a glass table. Once, in Hanmer Springs, with a skylight directly above me, I stared up into the eyes of a possum. He or she wouldn't move. And neither would I. We remained mutually frozen until dawn, one of us with a very small brain, the other fixated by fear.

You could, of course, sleep on the bottom bunk, which could leave you vulnerable if the child above was extremely young. But as Dolly Parton had not been invented in the 1960s, her and her vivid tales of water running freely in the child-chocker cabin bunks of North Carolina... oh yes, Dolly knew what poor was. This never happened to me.

But cribs in the 1960s were fun. Baby boomers, to a man, to a woman, speak fondly of cribs. After all, so many of us have bought so many of them. Our infamous disease, property acquisition, the need for more space, put that all down to the crib.

Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer and reviewer.

 

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