Beryl Sharp remembers singing around the piano and days at the beach during the 1950s when her family lived in what is now the little red house on Rocks Rd.
Red stickered and abandoned since the 2022 storm triggered a landslide into the back of the house, vandals have now defaced the 1940s bungalow with tagging and left it in an even sadder state. But at 86, Beryl recalls happy days in a much-loved house.
“Mum bought the house because she dreamed of living by the sea. In summer, we used to get up in the morning and put our togs on to go swimming and leave our togs on all day. We’d just go over the road and dive into the water.”
She was one of the youngest twins in a family of nine children including another set of twins, and her mother had raised them by herself after Beryl’s father died suddenly when she was just 18 months old.
“I had ‘five’ fathers because my brothers took over the role of father for us 18-month-old twins!”
By the time they moved into the Rocks Rd house, there were four kids still at home and they were “squashed in like sardines” in the little two-bedroom house. One sister slept in a bedroom with her mother and a brother slept in the garage beside the road.
They were a large, close family “joined at the hip” and get-togethers in the little house became special memories.
“Mum played the piano and the family used to come around and we all sang around the piano. It was great. I lived there until 1961 when I got married.”
Photos show her in her wedding dress in front of the house before she headed off to the cathedral for her wedding. Another photo shows her twin sister in her wedding dress in much the same spot on her own wedding day.
When the house was painted red in 2016 by its owner Caleb Harcus it turned heads, and Beryl loved it.
“Loved the red! Wished we’d had it. Perhaps I could paint my house!”
Then the slip red-stickered the house and vandals have attacked it which “breaks” Beryl’s heart. By the time Caleb bought the bungalow, it had been through a period of neglect and he says it was marketed as the “worst house on the best street and the back door was swinging in the breeze”.
He says negotiations are continuing with the Nelson City Council following the 2022 storm damage.
