All We Had Was Each Other, The Car, And Some Nappies – Rebekah McLeod

All We Had Was Each Other, The Car, And Some Nappies Rebekah McLeod

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

Š

Glenn Busch

Rebekah McLeod

The house really scared me, it did. There was a moment when I didn’t think we were going to survive it, truly. For the time we were under

that doorway it was mayhem, and in that moment, I thought maybe this was it. It didn’t help when Jay goes, ‘Fucken hell!’ I mean he doesn’t

normally show his emotions and I thought, if he’s panicking, this has got to be really bad. No, it was just pure fear really. The house was just

moving and moving and moving and I was yelling ‘This is not going

to hold, we’ve got to get under the table.’ I was about eight months

pregnant at the time and here’s us running half naked to the dining

room, to get under the table. I had this thought in the back of my head, this is what we’ve all been waiting for, they’ve been telling us for years

the alpine fault is going to go and now it’s happened, gone completely.

That’s what I thought at the time; this is definitely what’s going on.

Then it stopped and Jay is such a geography freak that he

immediately puts on his headlamp and goes outside. ‘Oh my goodness, look at the liquefaction.’ Inside I’m breaking out, screaming for him to

come inside and at the same time I’m on the phone to my brother in Auckland. It must have been about five in the morning.

‘There’s been a really bad earthquake, I can’t get hold of mum!’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It’s back, it’s back!’

1

It felt like it just kept going. The aftershocks seemed so severe and

I guess now we are so used to them, but back then it was something

else. Every time an aftershock hit, that adrenalin kicked in and kept right on happening. Those seconds… those moments when you

could see the walls moving and things seemed to be flying off in every direction. Then things begin to settle down and as I started

to look around my next thought is ha! look at me, I’m under a table in my underwear, if something happens I’m going to be found half naked and pregnant by some policeman or fire-fighter underneath our dining room table. Awesome!

After a little while I was getting texts from friends. We had such

a great wee crew in Avonside, friends all around us within walking distance and people started checking in, making sure we were okay, and I’m going, ‘Yeah, but what about all the sand dunes!’

And they all said, ‘What are you talking about.’

At first light we were out looking at the house and I found it

quite sickening. I’m not a handy person, so something happens to the house—like in winter we had a leak in the roof—and I completely freak

out. So, you can imagine how I felt with like big cracks everywhere and the foundations in bad shape. How can this be happening to us? I did

feel a little bit of—I don’t know if comfort is the right word—solace maybe, that we weren’t the only ones. That the rest of the people in the

street were in similar circumstances somehow made it more bearable.

Because that’s what it was like, the whole of Retreat Road was in absolute chaos. To me it felt like a war zone. Everyone was out on the

street and the sirens were blaring away. We just felt… well, looking at

2

the amount of damage around us I truly thought Christchurch must have been destroyed.

Then we went to check on friends just around the corner, on the

other side of Linwood Avenue, before going on to Jay’s Grandparents.

As soon as we hit Linwood Ave everything looked fine. You’ve got to be joking, how can this be? Surely, it’s not just Avonside. And suddenly you felt isolated, like it was only happening to us, that somehow we’d

been very unlucky. It didn’t seem fair, especially when we had a baby on the way.

If anything, Jay was the one who was more emotional about it.

About the house. I was more practical; we have put money into this

house and are we going to be able to get our money out. Who’s going

to want to live in the one area that’s been hit by an earthquake while everyone else was fine? How unlucky are we to have invested in this area? That’s what I felt at the time.

We had a shower at Jay’s grandparents’ house and then I didn’t want

to go back to the house that night. I couldn’t even be in a room by

myself, I was really scared. I felt safer in a group and I felt safer in someone else’s house, somewhere where I hadn’t actually experienced

the earthquake. We went and stayed around at our friends that night

and they had everything working, no problems. We stayed there for a

couple of nights actually, and experienced some really bad aftershocks but again I didn’t feel as scared because there were a few of us there. I didn’t want to go back to the house until we had power back.

It took about four—possibly five days. It was a lot longer before

we got the water back on but yeah; it seemed less scary with the lights

3

at least working. Jay couldn’t go to work for a wee while—he was

working from home—so that made me feel a little bit safer too. Plus

I had my friends around the area. No one was working at that stage.

Most of my friends were teachers and the schools were still being

inspected, so I would just go around to their house and we would hang out together. When Jay did go back to work, the schools were still shut so my friend, Gemma, she’d either come over to my house

or I would go over to her house and we could be together. It felt better. Crazy, wasn’t it, the way I was feeling seems so ridiculous now when you think of the next one.

Having Lucas actually shifted the priority. Yeah, when I think back

to it. I mean we were still having really bad aftershocks when Lucas

was born. I was in St Georges and there were quite a few big ones

while I was there but because I was so focused on this little person who needed me so much, I didn’t really think about the aftershocks. I

was simply fixated on getting up every three hours and feeding him,

doing that mum thing. It was like some background noise, oh yeah, there goes another aftershock, kind of thing.

The day we brought Lucas home was very exciting. We had done

the nursery before the earthquake had struck and although the foundation in his corner had dropped, his room didn’t have huge

amounts of damage. And anyway, he was in our room for a long time.

It wasn’t ideal but it was okay. I used to wonder how my friends

that had children before the earthquake—how did they cope with no power and water sort of thing. As he got older and the earthquakes continued to happen, I found out for myself.

4

Like Jay, I was brought up by a solo mother and lived here all my

life. My dad is a Cook Islander and he was in one of the first groups

from the Cooks that came to Christchurch back in the seventies. They were brought down from Auckland because there was a shortage in the trades—he was a builder. All his family were up in Auckland and so it was quite difficult for him here. Like when we would go up to Auckland to see his family they couldn’t quite work us out. I think

they thought we talked really posh. I know dad had to change himself to fit into Christchurch society, which couldn’t have been very easy. I

mean he was a big Cook Island man at that point with a large afro, so, you know, he wasn’t easy to miss. Mum used to say that when they would go out on a date in those days there were restaurants round town

that wouldn’t let them in. Sadly, he didn’t continue with the language, he never spoke Cook Island Maori at home and refused to teach me anything because he didn’t feel that society could cope. In the end they

broke up when I was about ten. It must have been such a… yeah… sad, just sad really.

He continued to live here until he passed away. I don’t think he was

very comfortable in his own skin. I think he was always trying not to be a Pacific Islander. The circumstances of the time we live in—like

now—it can change the course of your life can’t it. Personally I find it quite difficult today. I am a Cook Islander but I have no real knowledge of what that actually means.

So that’s jay and me. Both brought up by white women and both

had fathers who were Maori and Cook Islander but neither of us really

had a huge connection to that culture. Jay did do Maori at university

5

for a wee bit. I think he should have continued. I definitely think he should have continued. But at the time he was thinking, well, what can

I do with it. Today things are different, there is so much you can do with it now.

At university I started a law degree but dropped it in my second

year. I did a double in sociology and American studies instead. At that point I thought I’d maybe like to work with children so I started with

this charity that worked with the children of prison inmates. We would take them out on a Monday night and do different activities. I found

I really liked it and so after I finished my degree I decided to go to teacher’s college and do a post-grad in teaching. When I finished I

taught for two years at a low decile school and really enjoyed it, actually I loved it. After that we headed over to the UK.

Going overseas I was doing something I had wanted to do for such

a long time but I had to drag Jay kicking and screaming all the way—

you’re coming too. At the airport mum was crying and our friends were there and it was just like, I am so excited, I’m off on a plane! It was such a huge adventure for me. I left home as soon as I finished school so you know, I’ve always been quite independent. But travelling to the other side of the world, that was just so exhilarating.

When we arrived we knew no one. Then I did some relieving for a

term and it was just one of those occasions where everything seems to align. I met some people there and we really hit it off, they made our

time in England amazing. Some of the best friends I’ve ever made. We

stayed there for quite a time, long enough to get married and see some of the world. It really was a great time for us.

6

I loved my job, I loved the school and we were kind of at a

crossroads, are we going to go home or should I go ahead with this

qualifying teaching status that I needed to stay in the UK. Should we be looking to buy something over here and settle down in the UK? I was definitely leaning towards that idea. I loved the people and what I was doing, but it was a huge thing to have to go through

all this training again. In the end it came down to time. I needed to

have the qualification by a certain date and there just wasn’t enough time for me to actually get it before we got booted out. We pretty

much had six months before we had to leave the country. When we left, I was sobbing on the plane, I was just so upset about leaving. I

knew Christchurch was going to be there and I knew the people— family—were going to be there, but leaving London, it was like we were leaving something that we had built, you know. We had built a life amongst these amazing friends and would we ever see them again?

Half of the reason we went over there was to travel but also to

send some money home, so in our last six months we were like, right, let’s save money. And we did. We chucked as much money home as we could and with the great exchange rate at the time it allowed us

to buy our house. Even so, I was just sad. Coming back… I never

had a great love for Christchurch. I’ve always thought of it as home, but I’ve always been so much more excited by other places. Perhaps

it’s because you know it so well, and so it gets kind of boring, plus I

guess coming back to Christchurch really did mean settling down.

While we were away we were in such a different space. We did things

7

spontaneously, nice day, lets meet up on the heath. Or there are tickets

to one of the theatres, or it’s a Tuesday night—lets go out. That just doesn’t happen here.

I was kind of excited about buying a house, but no, the rest of it…

I wasn’t great for probably the first six months. I was just… I don’t know what it is with guys, it always feels so easy for them to drop

things, for Jay to go out for a beer with his mates, or go out for a surf.

But with my friends it seemed so much more difficult, with children and so on, everything had to be planned.

In the end I had to develop different social networks and we started

hanging out with people who had just come back from overseas. Or

who were still in that kind of career mode, and that’s how we built our little extended family in Avonside, based around that. Those first six months I would pretty much go out, drink too much wine, cry

because we were in Christchurch, and then ring people in England.

That’s pretty much what I would do. The power bill was nothing in

comparison. Yeah, that was my way of coping and it wasn’t until we

bought the house that I started to feel more settled. Having our own home helped a lot.

In February it felt like someone drove a huge truck into it. Boomph!

I was at home working on my laptop and Lucas was asleep. I ran into his room and grabbed him and just held him and by the time I kind

of thought, okay, I need to get under the table, the shaking seemed

to have stopped. I walked out into the lounge and I just stood there, ‘Shit!’ All I could see was water, like in spurts that were higher than me coming up out of the ground.

8

Because I hadn’t seen the liquefaction pumping up in the first one, I

thought the river was coming up. The river’s coming up and we’re going to drown, that’s what I was thinking. The house is going to be under water. It just looked like huge water spouts coming up everywhere. I

tried to get out the back with Lucas, because I knew I’d feel safer out of the house but when I got to the door it was jammed. I backtracked

to the front door and that was the same. In the end I managed to kick

it open and get out that way. The liquefaction was coming up right in

front of me, pouring down from the steps to the garage. I’m looking at it and thinking oh God. Oh my God, the garage door. Somehow

I managed to get it up and of course all of the liquefaction starting flooding into the garage. The neighbour came out at some point and I was like ‘I’ve gotta get Jay, I’ve gotta get to Jay.’ He’d rung by then

and I was yelling into the phone, ‘The waters coming up, the waters

coming up, the house is going underneath the water. I’m coming to get you.’ Not knowing or even thinking what might have happened in the city. I chucked Lucas into the car, chucked in some nappies and a few random clothes for him as well and we were out of there.

I turned right out of our driveway and in front of me was a huge

hole in the road with a car in it. Wow! We are not going that way. I

don’t know that I even registered it was a car in the hole, more like, ‘No, can’t get around that.’ I did manage to get the car through what

was becoming quite a big flood and then drove off blindly into the city.

I remember seeing another woman driving along just sobbing, looking

all around and crying her eyes out. But for a big part of that whole trip I have no memory of it at all. Suddenly I was in High Street, where

9

the Polytech is. Somehow, I was there. I remember having to swerve around buildings that had come down. I was driving right through it

all. Then my brother rang from Auckland and I’m like, ‘I’m going to get Jay.’

He said, ‘Are you going into the city?’

I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to get Jay, our house is going to be under

water.’

At that point I thought we were homeless. I completely thought all

we had was each other and the car and some nappies, pretty much that

was my take on it. But then there was the relief of getting through to Jay, of seeing him standing on the side of the road there, I felt so much safer. It was like, now we’ll be okay.

He’d been waiting outside his building for me and I jumped out

of the car and we hugged each other, tight. ‘I can’t drive,’ I said. And

then I must have said, ‘It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s really bad. We can’t go back through the city, we have to find another route home, the house is underwater, we need to go to your grandparents’ place.’

And he’s like, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not just the

liquefaction?’

‘No,’ I said, it’s not, it’s terrible.’

I was pretty confident that we didn’t have a home. That’s the way I

saw it at that moment. It felt to me like Avonside had sunk. I just didn’t know how it could still be there from what I saw.

So then we had to find a route to Brookhaven. I ended up sitting in

the back and thank goodness I was still breastfeeding because Lucas was starving and yeah it was all becoming a bit of a blur. I remember

10

Lucas crying a lot and I remember Jay getting really frustrated at the

traffic that was hardly moving at all; it was just insane. I remember the car rocking a lot because of the aftershocks and around the Sydenham area seeing bricks and stuff falling down and feeling

really worried—wondering if something was going to fall on us.

Then going through Woolston, trying to find a route that way—it

was just so bad, yeah, you really began to realise how bad it was then.

It was good to finally get to Jay’s grandparents. Jay helped his

granddad clear up a little bit. They were picking up a cabinet and there was a bottle of whiskey that hadn’t broken and Grandad was

like, ‘Right Jay, let’s have a whiskey.’ So him and Jay knocked back a couple of whiskeys but Jay’s nana didn’t seem to understand how

bad it was and she was like, ‘Oh, we were going to go out for dinner tonight, do you think the restaurant will still be open?’

And I’m like ‘Well No! You can barely get out in the street; how

would you be thinking that the restaurant would be open!’

I was a little scared about going back to the house. I think I

would have preferred to stay, but Jay really wanted to go home. I don’t think he believed me about Avonside being under water. So back we went that night. It was still pretty crazy trying to drive

because roads like Woodham Road were really badly damaged and

down Retreat Road the locals were monitoring it because it was so

badly flooded. Whenever anyone drove through it, it was creating waves that were then going into the houses. Anyway, Jay went to

drive through and one of the locals came out and said, ‘Look mate, you can’t come through.’

11

And I just cracked it. ‘I’ve got a screaming baby in the back of this

car, I need to get to my house!’

‘Oh, okay,’ he said, ‘sorry, very sorry.’

When we got home it wasn’t as bad as I thought really. It was still

there anyway. Still standing, and the liquefaction maybe wasn’t as bad as September, but again the lack of power was scary.

That night was the worst night ever. I insisted that Lucas’s cot be

brought into our bedroom; I wanted him close to us. I don’t know if he was affected by the aftershocks or if it was because he needed be in his own environment, but he just screamed all night. I ended up

in the spare bedroom with him, he was so upset. I don’t think anyone

slept that night really and next morning I just went, ‘Blah, blah, blah. Pack up the car; we’re going to Katie’s—my friend who lived in

Spreydon? Somerfield? Whatever that suburb is called? Hoon Hay, kind of area anyway.

They had electricity and we got to watch the news, which was

totally shocking. Even though we had driven around quite a bit, we

didn’t know, we didn’t realise the city was like it was. I think, myself, I was still in my own little bubble of trauma. I didn’t actually look and see what was happening to the city, I was kind of more worried

about our house and us. It’s surreal, because when you see anything

on television, you automatically have a barrier up, you see so much

graphic stuff on television that it’s easy to think—okay, it’s not us.

But this time it was.

In situations like this you either have that fight or flee mentality

and we are opposites. Jay will fight, but my inclination is to say, I’m

12

out of here. I just wanted nothing to do with it. The next day I sent a text to a friend in Darfield and said, ‘How are you guys out there?’

She was like, ‘Fine, you know, come out and stay?’

We drove out there and it was awesome because you didn’t feel the

aftershocks or anything. Then my brother rang and said they are doing cheap flights to Auckland.

‘Okay.’ I said to Jay, ‘Let’s go to Auckland.’

‘No.’ He said, ‘No, I don’t want to go to Auckland, I need to work.’

‘You can work from anywhere.’

But he was like, ‘No, I don’t want to go to Auckland, we need to sort

the house out.’

‘Well, I’m taking the baby and going to Auckland.’

I left on that Sunday and went to Auckland for a week. I was quite

the novelty up there. I felt a bit like a refugee. I also felt like a solo

parent after just a week by myself with Lucas. That was a little lesson, I take my hat off now to any single parent. It was good to get away, to see my family for a week but it was great to come home.

At this point Avonside is pretty much synonymous with earthquake,

you couldn’t even think about Retreat Road without thinking about earthquake damage. I thought we were going to be stuck here for the

rest of our lives and I didn’t want to be. I didn’t really think about… there was a little bit of talk about the land being so damaged, but I

didn’t really relate that to us. I still hadn’t made that connection. Or

maybe I didn’t want to hope there might be some way that we would get out of this. I was thinking then we would be here for the long haul and we would have to think perhaps that this would have to become a

13

rental property. There was no way we would be able to sell the house, I knew that.

At first I’d been a little betwixt and between. I thought that they

would fix it up. I knew there was a lot to do to get it up to scratch

and initially I thought this is kind of good, we are going to be able to do stuff to the house and get it done the way we want it. And then I kept coming back to the idea we are going to be stuck with this

house. Every time I switched on the news some commentator with a microphone would be on Retreat Road and I was like, ‘Bugger off !

Stop talking about us.’ And then you go anywhere that people are talking about the earthquake, especially back then, and they were

like, ‘Where do you live? Avonside! Oh no. Retreat Road, Oh God!’ That was how people reacted, and for good reason. The whole

area was just so destroyed. Like when I was pregnant with Lucas before the September one, I would have my run route—which

slowly became my walk route—around Avonside, and I would think to myself, it’s going to be so nice when I have the baby, it’s such a beautiful area to walk around, this is going to be great. Later I did it because I needed to get out and walk, but it was a bit like offroading. Yeah, and then it got worse.

We were still there for the June one. We were there up until

September, but by June we had heard that there was going to be

an announcement about the land. I think there may have been a

couple of weeks difference—there was the June earthquake that hit

and a couple of weeks later the land announcements. Before June I was like, ‘Hmm, I wonder where we stand?’ As soon as that one

14

hit in June, I was like, if we’re not red, I am going to be extremely surprised, extremely.

June was like ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ there is just no way we can

stay in this house. When it came I was lucky to be at home—just

imagine if I was working, like, say teaching, having to stay there until… anyway I was at home. Lucas was playing on the floor, right near the

table, the first one hit and I immediately dragged him underneath it.

We didn’t lose power or anything, so it was kind of okay, all right.

Then Jay turned up and not long after that the next one hit. It was like our house just imploded. We’d never had much damage in the way of

bits and pieces but whether it was the way it moved, I don’t know, but

our whole kitchen went boom! It smashed a whole lot of stuff. Again, Lucas was in bed—the safest place for him—we were actually quite thankful about that because a lot of things fell down.

My brother rang after the first one and I was like, ‘It’s happening

again, there’s been another lot of liquefaction, it’s happening all over again.’

‘He was like, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

I think for him, having been brought up in Christchurch and

watching it from afar, I think, yeah, he was quite stressed about the

whole thing. And by then I had had enough too. Enough of the earthquakes, enough of that house. We’d been living with a portaloo

for so many months that by then it had become normal. And that is something no one in this country should ever have to say.

It was a daily grind, the whole thing. It’s strange how things become

normal, how you become used to living with gumboots by the front

15

door and all the rest of it. We were lucky we got a chemical toilet as

well, so I didn’t have to go out at night. I think mum found it hardest because she was coming to look after Lucas while I worked two days

a week and every time she came, she was like, ‘I don’t know how you do this!’ During the day you actually had to leave the house, so you could only really go to the toilet when Lucas was asleep. For water

I would take Lucas for walks with the buggy with all these empty bottles underneath him and we’d trot off to a place where we could

fill them all up. There were also a few big tankers around where I could fill up when I was out in the car. Our friends who still had water had given me their keys—most were back at work—and I had a little circuit, a rotation, using their washing machines. Getting

water and cleaning ourselves, it took hours; by the time you had done everything pretty much a whole day would be gone.

There was quite a build up to the red/green thing, finding out

what was going to happen with our neighbourhood. I was at work at the time and quite a few of my colleagues also lived in the eastern

suburbs. They were in a similar position to us, waiting to see what was going to happen. At lunchtime we set up the television and then they announced it was going to be online, so we all jumped on

computers and someone managed to get the site up. I’m like, ‘Put in Retreat Road.’ And then because the whole staff was there I said ‘Look, just so everybody knows, if it’s not red, I may swear and then

cry.’ They all had a good laugh and then I looked… Red! I was so happy. Jumping around the staffroom and then I rang Jay, and asked him if he’d seen it?

16

I said ‘Are you sad?’

‘Yeah, I’m a bit sad,’ he said.

‘Don’t be sad, it means we can get out.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but it’s our home.’

And I’m like, ‘It’s just a house, just a house.’

And pretty much by that time it had really had become just a house.

Just a house that had sewerage problems and many other issues. I was really, really happy. We weren’t going to come out worse off if we took

the Government offer and just really glad that we had an end in sight.

At first, looking for a new place was really quite exciting; exciting

and a little bit stressful at the same time. You feel this real pressure because you know there are so many people in the same situation. We’d turn up to these open homes and they would be just so many people

there. We started looking around the Beckenham area because we had quite a few friends that live out that way and I suppose because it was a

little of what we were used to. But we’d be going into these houses that were visibly damaged and I finally said to Jay, ‘I don’t think I can buy a house that has huge cracks down the walls; it just feels really wrong.

Then as the process went on, the excitement went away and we found

we were looking for a house that ticked some of the more practical boxes, things that would be good for our family. It was a completely

different way of buying a house than what we were into when we bought Retreat Road. We weren’t emotionally buying a house, we were buying a house to put a roof over our heads and that’s what we did.

On reflection, I would never have gone straight out and bought a

house as we did. I would have sat back a little bit. I would have waited,

17

I would have rented I think. In the light of what’s happened with this

new place I certainly would have. I’m not that worried about a re-build; I’m quite excited that it may be. I’m a little bit upset about the land— how that’s been assessed as blue/green, which means that if there was

another major event it could have significant liquefaction, something it never had before. But it also means if there is a re-build, it needs stronger foundations which begs the question, what does that do to the value of our land? We bought here because it was a really good school

zone and we felt that the properties in this area would hold their value quite well. Also, the land value on this was really high in comparison to the house so I thought while this isn’t the house of our dreams, not

by any stretch of the imagination, it has quite good bones. The sort of house that we could quite easily add value to because it is so dated

inside, completely dated. I thought we could make a little bit of money

out of this but now we’ve had this reassessment, that the floor is out of alignment and it may have to be rebuilt, it’s like, wow, where are we at with that?

Perhaps if we could turn back time, we would have left Retreat

Road and rented. Maybe not have taken the Government offer but

waited for the insurance company. It would have given us more money but because we’d already purchased a place, the difference in the money

would have been eaten up waiting, paying two mortgages and waiting

for the insurance payout. So yeah, I probably would have rented, waited for that and kind of sat back a little bit. I mean we didn’t know that Christchurch was going to be re-zoned. If we’d known that was

going to happen I would not have looked at the property. Never mind.

18

There is no way I would want to be in Retreat Road any longer, so I’m happy with where we are. If we had it to do over again things might

be different but you can’t really dwell on things like that, right. Not in this place.

Having said that, December really pissed me off. It made me really

angry. I think it was about then that I started going, ‘Why did we buy?

Why did we put our money back into this city—should we really be

living in it?’ I don’t know, after June it took a month or so and you were like, it’s over, all good, no more earthquakes, its fine. I had got to a point where I didn’t even think about an earthquake and then December happened and I was just annoyed.

I had been getting ready to go out. I was going to meet Jay and

some friends at the Pegasus Arms for Christmas drinks. Mum was already over to look after Lucas, I was getting ready, I was doing my hair and all of a sudden it hit and I heard my mum go, ‘Oh no it’s a big

one.’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I walked in to the room

here and mum was in a turtle position over the top of Lucas and Lucas

was crying. We went outside and I just didn’t want to come back into the house. I felt safer in the garden. One of the neighbours popped

his head out to see if we were okay and then mum was like, ‘Right, I’m going back inside to go to the toilet.’ All I can say is I was holding Lucas and suddenly the whole house was just going thoomp! Thoomp!

Thoomp! Thoomp! Mum comes flying out going, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the toilet!’ At least she didn’t trip over her knickers.

I rang Jay and it’s like, ‘You’ve got to come home.’ Even simple

things like celebrating Christmas with your friends, it’s like earthquakes

19

just…they wreck everything. Our friends ended up coming over here

but it’s just so bloody annoying, you just get completely set back again.

I was wondering too what Retreat road was like. The majority of our neighbours are still there, we’d actually been to a barbecue at one of the

homes a few weeks earlier. I just couldn’t believe they were still living in their houses and one of them was saying about how they’d been

getting quite sick because they were living with the liquefaction under their houses. They all still had their heaters and fires on at night. I know when we were in Retreat Road our power bills were five hundred

dollars a month and still the house wasn’t warm. Underneath the house

it was all damp, wet from the liquefaction and thinking back mum was

always saying how often Lucas got sick last winter. He seemed to get

everything and, you know, you wonder… the dust, the wet, yeah…. it is so good to be out of it. Anyway, it was scary that one, and then there

are the aftershocks—you get back into that space where you are like sort of floating—you package them up and try to forget about them.

You know… I didn’t really want to come back to Christchurch and

some days now I wish we hadn’t. I was always pushing for Auckland but Jay really wanted to live here. I don’t know why, it must have been

friends and family. At first when we came back and he couldn’t get a job I was like ‘Right, you’ve got another month, and if it doesn’t happen

we are moving to Auckland.’ Ha! he got a job. But I was always pushing

for Auckland. I’ve always felt that it’s more of a city, and Christchurch is kind of more of a town.

After December and especially after we went on holiday in the North

Island, I was like, why did we tie up our money in Christchurch. Being

20

away like that you begin to realise the pressure that the earthquakes

have put you under, that maybe you are always a little bit on edge.

Like we were up at this bach in the Coromandel and someone would jiggle their leg on the deck and it would shake, and both Jay and I were

thinking, an earthquake, no, it can’t be. Or you are in a café or a bar or restaurant and looking around going why have they got all those things

on the wall, don’t they know they will fall down. You find yourself always assessing, it’s automatic, and you can’t stop it.

I have always thought I was coping really well but when I look back

certain things are quite blurry. I think perhaps I’ve been in shock a bit of the time. I don’t really have very good accounts of the months after

the earthquakes. I don’t know, perhaps we’ve just been getting through things day-to-day and somehow a lot of it has slipped away.

One thing I won’t forget—and I guess this tells you about the sort

of stress around sorting out our home—happened at work. It was during the purchase of this house we have now, with all the added

insurance issues and the fact that we were going to have to pay two

mortgages and so on. I was to have a meeting with the principal at school about some work I was involved in, just a chat before classes

started, but when I sat down I started crying and I couldn’t stop. It was so unlike me.

‘Are you okay?’

‘I don’t know.’

Then she asked me why I was crying.

‘I don’t know why I’m crying,’ I said.

‘Perhaps you need to go home.’

21

‘No I can’t go home.’

But it was like, ‘You’ve got to go home, you can’t teach your class

like you are.’

Jay was starting later that day and so I walked in the house and I

still hadn’t stopped crying.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’ve been sent home. ‘

He thought I’d got fired for some reason.

He was like, ’What!’

‘No, I just can’t stop crying.’

‘But why?’

‘I just don’t know.’

I spent the whole day crying, and then that was it, suddenly I was

fine again. I think what triggered me was I’d been into a café to pick up a coffee before I went to work. While I was waiting I read an article

about the loss of community, it was talking about Avonside and I was

like, that’s really sad. I could feel my eyes welling up even then and by

the time I got to work and I sat down in the boss’s office, it all came out.

I just bawled. Obviously it hits you at different points and you don’t realise what you’ve been living with, or coping with, until it happens.

That summer, the summer before the earthquake and the summer

before we had Lucas, it was just the best of times. As soon as we arrived in Avonside both our neighbours came around and introduced

themselves and told us everything about the place. I felt it had a

younger sort of vibe going, the little pizza place up on Stanmore road, all our friends close by and coming around to see us. Awesome. And

22

now that’s all changed. The future, I suppose, will be with this new place and what’s going to happen. We are quite organised people so

when we bought our home in Avonside we knew that we wouldn’t have

a child for a year, we wanted to hammer that mortgage so we’d be in a good financial position to have our child. I would be able to take some time off work. We did that and then the earthquakes happened and it meant that all of our organization, our hard work, where we were heading, had simply gone down the tubes.

Financially at least, our lives have been put on hold. Our savings

have been eaten up, completely devoured, by having to make this move, having to buy a house when we weren’t ready to buy. While we have

been luckier in some respects than other people—that we didn’t make

a loss—we still had to buy again which has increased our mortgage by fifty thousand. Having just had a child, that wasn’t something we were ready for. To have your plans put on fast-forward like that was pretty

disappointing. We were doing things slowly, the way we wanted to do them, on our terms. Now those terms have been taken away from us and everything else is on hold. No one likes being forced to make decisions that they aren’t really ready to make.

I know we’re not the only ones in that boat. Nearly everyone we

know has been, or is being, or will be, subjected to some sort of change.

We are going to have a whole different city for goodness sake. And this

is going to sound really awful but I hated the city, as in it never had a

heart—it didn’t work. Our city had been eaten away by suburbia really

and so in an awful kind of way, it’s a fresh start and we can re-build a city that works. I am really hoping that it doesn’t just get overrun with

23

tilt-slab and that we don’t end up with the New Zealand equivalent of Milton Keynes. It’s an awesome opportunity really to think outside the

square. What they’ve done with the shops in containers is really cool, really funky, and a good example of innovative thinking. It’s what any new city is going to need.

The best thing I can say about it all is that I’m happy we’re in a place

that is comfortable, that we’ve got a roof over our heads, I’m happy with that. I try to view these things that have happened as a sort of blip in our lives. I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I sometimes wonder where we’d be if none of this had happened. I just have to look forward

to the future I guess. I’m really happy that Lucas hasn’t been affected

by it. You know, he was young enough that he didn’t really understand what went on. The best thing is that we haven’t been harmed. Jay works in the city and in my mind it could easily have been his building…I love my family… so, yeah; I’m thankful for a lot of things.

24