This Sweet Home Joan Cardno
And Kindness Lay All About
Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes
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Glenn Busch
Joan Cardno
I think perhaps it’s my age, that thing we do as we get older, the way
we start to look at the rest of our life. I don’t think I did that when I was fifty. I don’t think I did… no. I certainly didn’t do it in my twenties
or thirties, but when you are older you’ve had a lot more experiences, life has revealed itself a little more and perhaps you think on things a little differently.
I’ve had both a brother and a sister die. My sister was six years
younger than me. When something like that happens you are suddenly confronted with the fragility of life. After a time you find yourself
contemplating the things you want to do – how you want to spend the rest of your time—before your own existence comes to an end.
Before any earthquake arrived I had decided very firmly I would be
staying here in this home, in Avonside. I had no intention whatsoever
of leaving. I’d thought quite carefully about things; okay, the section is big, I’ll get gardeners to help me with it. When it needs painting I’ll bring in someone to do it. I was determined to stay where I wanted to be and suddenly that’s all not going to happen.
I didn’t go round saying poor me or how stupid I was to have settled
here, but there were times when I wished it wasn’t all so horrible. It
got so I hated telling people where I lived because you knew what they
were going to say, ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ And sometimes I felt people—
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not exactly loved the fact—but that it was a juicy topic to talk about. Here was this poor person who’s got to leave her house. ‘Now Joan, tell me about your house.’ It happened once at a Christmas party, we were
all chatting away and no one else was very affected by the earthquake but then somebody remembered that I had been. ‘Joan,’ she said, ‘tell us about your house.’ ‘Oh please!’ I said, ‘Not at a party!’
I realised afterwards how extraordinarily rude and horrible I had
been. I suppose it just showed how anxious I was. That certainly wasn’t my typical behaviour, to talk so rudely to people. My father had been
a minister, so I had been frightfully well bought up. A few days later
I was able to apologise to her and she accepted it very graciously, she understood.
Not that there aren’t still times when I think, I’ve got to tell this
person my address and they are going to say something. There have
been times when I’ve actually said to people, I’m not going to talk
about my house today. Once I went out with a group for lunch and we said we are not going to talk about the E topic and that was great, I was
really pleased that we did that. I know you can’t do it all the time but just for that one day it was good to say we won’t speak of it.
Don’t misunderstand me. I know it’s important that these stories
are told and it’s important that future generations get to hear them, I just don’t know if on my grave I’ll say I’m glad I went through an earthquake, that it made me a better person. In truth I don’t think
I’m very proud of how I’ve coped, I don’t actually think I’ve managed
terribly well. There have been a lot of tears and pain, all of that, just
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to get through it—but at least I think now I have, got through it. I
admire people like my next-door neighbour, Rose, who goes to lots of
meetings, puts out letters and just generally contributes a lot. I didn’t do any of that and yet she graciously said to me once, you’ve helped me
Joan. I thought what did I do? No, I don’t think I have done anything sterling for the earthquake effort but I have at least come through it
and I can now see that life still has a few good things in store for me. In the last couple of weeks I’ve thought, I am happy, I know I want more
of this life, more years to live, whereas before I simply felt very sad. I will always be sad about leaving this house but I will remember it with
huge fondness, really it’s been… I used to call it my sweet home, and to me, that is exactly what it has been.
And the river, I did love that river. I remember when the lawyer
told me how much money I could spend, how he’d said, ‘Joan, when
you buy your house, don’t go above this amount,’ and me then realising
I would able to buy this place. This home beside the stream. I could hardly believe my luck. Later it did become highly sought after. I
would forever be getting little messages in my letterbox, please ring
such and such a land agent; we have people who would love to look at your house. No, I don’t think so. I want to stay here. Ha! I used to tell people on the phone, people who were coming to see me—I had
this poncy voice I think—‘Just drive round the river,’ I’d say, ‘it’s good for the soul.’ Silly, but I did adore it so. That walk by the river and the light always different, and then of course to get my little boat and take the view from the river, that was sublime. I just never realised how
wonderful such a view was. I say a boat, it’s just a kayak and I don’t
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know how much more kayaking is left in my life—I own a tent as well, I don’t think I’ll ever go camping again—but yes, when I do leave, the boat will be coming with me.
When it eventually came, that final decision, I was a long way away.
Ellen had died first and then George. I called them my American parents and had gone there to speak at a ceremony to celebrate their lives. I’d met them many years before, in Asia. I’d been teaching in
Hong Kong for a year and during that time my father had died. At the
end of the year I decided I wanted to come home and grieve with my
family. At Thomas Cook’s in Hong Kong I made plans to travel back to New Zealand via Cambodia and a short time later found myself
ensconced in a hotel room close to the famous ruins at Angkor Wat. I had always wanted to come to Cambodia but sitting there in my room I found I was feeling rather miserable. I hate eating on my own, for me
it’s the worst aspect of living alone, but I thought I’d better go down to
dinner. They seated me at a very long thin table with two Frenchman at the other end; they didn’t even seem to notice me. I mean I was
twenty-five years old, you might have thought they’d at least say hello. So I sat there eating my meal thinking this was a dopey idea and just wishing I could climb on a plane.
I left the dining room thinking I would just moulder away in my
room for the night but on the way out I passed a couple sitting at a table and the man spoke to me. He was about my father’s age and possessed of a great kindness. They could see I was on my own and asked if I
would join them for the evening. ‘We have a daughter about your age,’ they said, ‘will you join us. We are going to watch the dancing and then
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we are going to view the ruins at night. You’d be most welcome.’ So
that was just utterly wonderful. Ellen and I wrote faithfully for years
and years after that and then as the phones became cheaper and easier we used them. Anyway, that’s how I spent that June, saying goodbye to two very kind and special people, my American parents.
I did have an email from a niece of mine to tell me there had
been more earthquakes but that was the last thing I wanted to hear. I just tried to put it out of my head. My poor brother and my lovely neighbours were the ones to clean it all up. For me it was lovely to be somewhere else, where I could pretend it wasn’t happening.
The night before flying back home from New York I phoned a friend
of mine. ‘Oh Joan,’ she said, ‘they are making announcements about the
red zone and what’s going to happen to the houses.’ When I looked, I found my home was going to be demolished. I didn’t sleep very well
that night. And I remember how strange it seemed to learn of it when I was so far away. Suddenly it was not going to be there anymore and
you almost… I mean it’s silly, but I found myself thinking I didn’t care
enough for this house because it’s going to be pulled down. Now with my head I know that’s irrational, but with my heart I was just so very sad it would no longer be there.
I suppose… I suppose I had thought for a long time this might be
the outcome, but the reality was hugely painful. The realisation that a house is not just bricks and mortar. To me it was a home; a place that had meaning, and that with it will go the loss of dreams.
Perhaps at a certain age the world looks different. I know I’ve
gone to meetings about the earthquake and looked at the faces of the
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older people. Some of them are extremely brave, I might be sitting
there weeping away and they are sitting clear eyed and listening intelligently. Others have faces that are quite tortured. Many are
in this awful dilemma of what do we do now. One person I spoke with said she didn’t want to move into an old peoples home but to
suddenly build or buy another house and then have to leave it in five years time, all seemed a little bit crazy. For me it was the end of a
dream and I think… I think I found it very painful coming to terms with that. Sometimes I have found myself wishing desperately that the earthquakes had not happened and I think that’s quite… I don’t
think that’s a good aspect of me. I was talking to a friend in Dunedin
a while ago and she said, ‘Joan, it’s a reality. You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.’ But I know sometimes I have almost allowed myself to think that it didn’t. Perhaps it’s the need for a place to keep all those
memories. Without my home they will be so much more difficult to grasp, to hang on to.
Just after the first earthquake I went away on holiday with a friend.
When we returned I said to her, ‘I’m okay now, I can cope with all
this now.’ Two days later my nephew rang to tell me my brother had
suddenly died. I began to think of him in my house, and my mother, my sister, the people you care about, the man who was once the love
of my life… and, you know… they were once all here in this place, my home. If I no longer have it, there is no context, and if there is no context it makes it that much harder to remember them, to hold on
to them. Anybody who has had this experience will know what I’m talking about.
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I know I have focused a lot on my home, perhaps more than some
people of my age do, and maybe that’s because I don’t have a partner, didn’t have children, didn’t have grandchildren, and while I have lots of
very good friends, that’s something quite different. I did at one point think, Joan, you care almost too much about your home, and certainly
I feel the cruel irony of it being taken away. And then a while ago I
was telling a friend about how much I wanted to stay and she said perhaps the way to deal with it was to flip it. To say to myself I’ve had all these wonderful years by the river—to make it a positive instead of
a negative. Yes, well, it’s probably a good suggestion but one I would find very hard to accept.
Sadly, I suppose, I was in denial mode. I have lived here a long time
you see, it will be almost twenty-nine years when I leave. I want to stay in this house, whereas I think some other people have managed to take that next step more easily.
The only step I managed easily was to step on the broken glass of my
mother’s washboard. That was after the first one. The huge shaking woke me and instead of leaping out of bed and standing in doorways, which now I would think a good idea, I just stayed in bed contemplating what
had happened. I don’t remember so much the horror as the amazement really. My neighbour came to the door and called out was I all right?
I said, yes, I was, and I actually felt quite calm about it all. I realised I had no electricity and so I thought I won’t get up until it’s light. That
is what I thought. What I did, like an idiot, was to go walking through
the house in bare feet with no torch. One of the few things that were broken was my mother’s washing board. She had washed our nappies
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on it when we were children and of course it’s got that very special
glass. It meant a lot to me having that board and all the memories it held. Sadly it had fallen and in the dark I managed to find the broken glass with my foot. After I’d patched that up I did what I should have done in the first place, stayed in bed until it was light.
Later the neighbours gathered outside, all of us looked very shell-
shocked and I remember Richard next door saying, ‘Well, our house is stuffed and when we rebuild it we are going to turn it round.’ I thought my goodness, there he is, making plans like that and I’m only
at the beginning of appreciating what’s happened, trying to come to grips with my battered house. Later in the morning I drove over
to see that my brother was all right, being very careful round the river which was in such a mess. Ross could still use his phone, so we phoned our brother in Te Anau to tell him we were okay. Murray was a carpenter and he said, ‘Joan, I’ll come up straight away,’ which
was a very lovely gesture on his part but I told him not to worry yet, we’d wait until we sorted out what was happening. Later Ross came around and we looked at my house together. I suppose that was when
I really came to realise how bad it all was. That the house had moved and there were big cracks and whole list of other things that had happened.
Then of course the earthquake people came, the loss adjustor, a
very pleasant architect who I suppose was in his late forties, early
fifties, coming to see my home. When he arrived I said to him, ‘Look, I might as well tell you now, I’m going cry. I will shed a lot of tears through this meeting.’
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He was at my house for about two hours, measuring the levels and
all those things they do and he seemed not to mind that I snuffled my way through this terrible interview or that I stood there saying—more than once—‘I hope my house is green, not red. Please not red.’
Finally he said, ‘Yes, yes it is. You can stop worrying; your house is
very salvageable. What they will do it is lift it up, repair the foundations
and put it down again.’ I thought, how ghastly, but at the same time I had been looking at the loss of the next ten years and so I felt very
relieved that I was still going to be living by the river. I was very pleased about that but then my neighbour next door, their house had gone
orange and after the next earthquake came along, they no longer said, ‘Your house is very salvageable,’ they said, ‘your house is very salvageable but we are going to treat Avonside as a whole.’ I felt a chill when I
heard that. One day it was going to be all right then suddenly it was all turned around again. From that terrible day in February, things looked much more gloomy than they had before.
I was at a craft group in a rumpty old hall in Papanui when it
arrived. As the building began to shake I sat there transfixed, horrified. My reflexes are not what you’d call great; I don’t do intelligent things like leaping under tables or standing somewhere safe. I’d actually taken
a friend to this group that day and she was utterly spooked by it all. Perhaps more than I was. She ran out of the door and was most upset; so all my energies were towards helping her.
Out on the street we were suddenly aware that hey, this was huge,
worse than before. St Giles Church was badly damaged and we were
hearing sirens and also there were the dust clouds. My friend didn’t live
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too far away and I drove her home, even so it took an age. And then I stayed with her for some time, all the while thinking to myself, my
place will be all right. My place will be fine. Eventually I set off to drive home, a five or ten minute journey which that day took me about two hours. As I got closer I realised it would not be wise to try and drive all
the way, so I parked my car and walked. There was flooding all over the river and the road and I was trying to work out how deep it was when I fell into a hole. By the time I’d got out of it I was trudging home with mud all over me.
Since September I’d never been able to get in my door. It was
jammed solid and an engineer had said we would never get that door
open. But with the February earthquake this door had shaken itself
free and I could, with some help from Richard next door, get back in. There were more bookcases tossed over and some breakages…. I’m
quite sentimental about things that my parents have given me, things that have been passed down through the family. There were other pieces that I’d bought back from overseas too, so I found the whole thing quite upsetting.
I had no sewerage, no power, no water, no telephone. In September
I’d stayed with a friend until the water came on. This time I decided
I would stay here. I used to wake up in the morning and think right, today I might do…. then I’d think, no, the first thing, Joan, is to get some water. There was water available from a well nearby and off I
would walk with my buckets along the road and get what I needed. I got used to using it sparingly, you become aware very quickly of how much water we waste.
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So that was the water and then we had portaloos of course and I
also, with friends, dug a long-drop down the back, which I was quite fond of. When my friends Tony and Ann had to move out of their
place they loaned me a little gas cooker and I also bought a lamp for myself which sadly wasn’t really bright enough for me to read by in the evening so I would just sit in the dark and listen to the radio instead.
At Christmas we had a big family gathering in Waitaki. My brother
Ross and I set off on the twenty-third to drive down. We got as far as Palmerston where we got out to walk around and stretch our legs and straight away we heard people talking about the earthquake. When we asked we found there had been another one. I did ring Rose and ask if
my house was still standing up and she said she’d look and if there was
anything I needed to know she would ring me. Otherwise, she said, don’t worry. After that I just tried to blot it out. I didn’t mind that I was away for those December quakes, and I didn’t allow it to ruin that
family time. Perhaps by then I was feeling a bit more philosophical about houses.
At one time the most disappointing thing was that they were
going to take away my home and that just seemed horrendous… for
a long time I just couldn’t get over it. It’s definitely been a process
and I suppose what I am consciously trying to do now is to check
on myself, to make sure that these days I am moving forward and
not stuck somewhere. There have been times I have become jammed, unable to move, but I think—finally—I have got to the point where I can now say I don’t want to stay here. What was once beautiful has
now become ugly. Certainly it is no longer the place I bought into, no
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longer the place I loved so much. As the days go on and I grind along
that terrible road and wonder if my car is going to fall apart I think, yes, it’s time, I want to leave.
There was even a time there when I had this very romantic idea
that I should go back and live in Dunedin—go back to my roots. It was a fairly hair-brained idea. I had no friends there, just some distant cousins. Even so, last year, or was it early January… really crazy when I think of it now… but I did, I went down to Dunedin in a
great rush. Packed my bag and off I scampered for three or four days,
conscientiously looking at houses and talking to real estate agents. In one way I’m pleased I did, it taught me a lesson. The houses I
looked at were somewhat disappointing and the truth was I didn’t
even actually know how much available money I was going to have. By the time I was driving back home I was already beginning to think
it was not a good idea. I knew I was still feeling pretty fragile and I began to realise that if I went down there feeling like that I would not
be getting out and meeting people, I’d more likely just sit and moulder away on my own. I thought I’m actually at a point in my life when I
need my friends. People who love and understand me and know that I’m not always like this, and so I actually came back saying I’m going
to stay in Christchurch. Even though Christchurch is so battered. I think by then I’d realised cities are actually about people. I’d been living in Christchurch for fifty years, and this was not the time to be launching off on some new adventure.
Going to Dunedin, however, did get me thinking and eventually it
also got me moving. I started to look for houses here and only just the
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other day I put down a deposit on a house in Rose Street. It still hasn’t quite gone through yet so I’m crossing my fingers, but yes, I did it.
It was only a few months ago I was talking to a friend and she
was telling me of her own plans and she said, ‘What are you looking forward to Joan.’.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Actually, nothing.’
I could only think of things in terms of the past. But now this has
happened and suddenly I feel filled with hope for the first time in a
long time. I’m looking forward, not backward. After it happened I
went to this cake shop in Cranford Street. I said, ‘Do you have cakes for people who just suddenly get an urge to buy a cake.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘here they all are, take your pick. We can even write
something on them if you’d like us to.’
So on Friday, I’m going to buy another cake and take it along to
a group I go to that makes mosaics. I’m going to get them to write House Deposit on it, along with a great big tick.
A couple of other lovely things have come about with this move
to Rose Street. The loss adjustor, the man that came to see me all
that time ago with the first earthquake, came back to do a few other checks on the house and we got to talking. He told me more about his family and about what they were doing with the quakes and all the rest of it and he said, ‘Joan, I actually work from home, I live in
Rose Street, so if you are ever over that way do make sure you pop in for a coffee won’t you.’ I looked at his card the other day and would
you believe it he’s only about five houses away from what I hope will be my new home.
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There’s another lovely thing I’ve been thinking about too and that is
getting a piano. My father was a brilliant pianist, and I’ve got all his old music and I would love to play again. When I looked at the new house
it had very little furniture in it but it did have a piano. Now I’m sure Mr
Chang, the owner, is going to take his piano away but I thought why don’t I just buy one and start playing again. Why not, I’ve got room for
it and I’ve got all this music, I actually feel quite excited by it. So, those are my little dreams for now.
You know, when I first arrived in this city, the first thing I was
asked, the first thing people would say to me was what school did you
go to? I was just gob-smacked. I thought it was such snobbery. Fifty
years later I’m not so unkind. I understand more about the world than I did then. For instance, I could never have conceived the pain of an
earthquake if I hadn’t gone through it. I think if someone had said
to me before, so and so has been in an earthquake, I’d think, well, that’s nothing really compared to a death of a spouse or loved one, but actually, I now know it to be the death of so many things. So I will be
much more… much more aware I suppose. And on a positive note, I
think I’m little more in awe of the human spirit than I was before. The
way the community developed and cared for each other was stunning. The spirit of ordinary people doing amazing things, the workmen who
came and worked huge hours to get things going for us again, the people who offered help in so many ways. Perhaps the Council could have been better with their communication but I was hugely impressed
with MPs like Lianne Dalziel and Brendon Burns, here were people who’d probably been slogging all day and then made the effort to come
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out to some meeting with grumpy people sitting there growling away at them—and deal with it all. That was so impressive. Roger Sutton
with his roll of butcher paper telling us why there was no power and
what he would do about it. So yeah, while I’m hugely sad about what
Christchurch has lost, I think the human spirit has proved amazing. I also think Christchurch has changed, become a kinder place, a nicer
place to be. Certainly no one has asked me recently what school I went to.
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