Boy We Hugged Each Other Then David Hall
And Kindness Lay All About
Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes
Š
Glenn Busch
David Hall
I came down from Hamilton on a couple of football trips and liked
what I saw. A clean beautiful city, magnificent parks, all the rest of it. And then there was this Christchurch blonde I met through work, I liked her even better. Yeah, she was pretty good news. I was twenty-
three, she was twenty-one. I’ve been here ever since. We got married at St Johns, in Latimer Square… course, that’s all gone now.
I’ve always been a plumber and here’s a thing—you won’t believe
this—I became a plumber because of an earthquake. Yeah, true. This was up in Hamilton. We had an earthquake; our house wasn’t damaged but the drains were and so a new one had to go in. The chap who came
out to look at it said to dad, ‘You need to dig a drain from here to there.’ Well, guess who got to dig it. As it turned out I must have done a
pretty good job because afterwards he offered me work. That was with the government, and then down here in Christchurch I did a short
stint with the drainage board, which was in the PyneGouldGuinness
building until the Council took us over. The job went rapidly downhill
after that. A well-organised system turned into chaos, so I got out of it. Went out on my own and didn’t look back.
So yeah, started out with an earthquake a long time ago… nothing
like these ones though. These are all bad news. Let me give you an
example. We’ve got a friend who one day in February decided to do
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something with his bathroom. He’s a mate so I went down there to
give him a hand. Took the taps off, put some new pipes in the wall, everything where he wanted, and then I’m off home. He offered me
some lunch but I said, ‘No, no, I’m off. I’ll pop back home and have it with Val.’ And that’s when it came. They were sitting there having lunch when it hit. Their home was a beautiful old villa; kauri floors the
lot. After the shaking he looked down at the floor and all this water
was starting to come through the floorboards. ‘Gosh,’ he said, ‘Dave has just gone and now I’ve got a burst pipe!’
But his wife took one look at it and said, ‘I think that’s more than a
burst pipe.’ They ended up with six hundred millimetres of liquefaction
right through the house; they were standing on the chairs and on the
table, yeah, that’s how quick it came up. Couldn’t get out the doors, they finally got a window open and got out that way. Not a good feeling to have your home destroyed like that.
We were in the orange zone for months and then we found out
about two or three weeks ago that we were red zoned. It was a Friday
and as you’d expect we weren’t very happy about that. No… no. Our home has been absolutely… we had our children here, you know… a lot
of good memories in this house, so yes; it’s going to be a jolt to leave it. But they have made their decision and that’s the way it is. We’ve got to go, yeah… got to go. No way out.
It’s been a good home to us. Our kids who grew up here, our
grandkids, and the hundreds of other people that have been through
this house; the students that have stayed here and who have become great friends. Yes… the wonderful memories of all the people who have
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stayed here—that’s the best part. The people who have made it a home. And that’s one thing that can’t be taken away from us.
It’s lovely when we get a call, or perhaps an email or a letter from
these people, wanting to know how we are. How it’s all going. Val sends out a newsletter every now and again, right round the lot of them, keeping them informed. And while we’re talking people, that’s
a big part of what we’re going miss, the community here. We’ve had some good neighbours. Yeah… it’s a pretty close street all in all.
But now we’ve had the word and it’s all breaking apart. Everybody’s
splitting. They have to. Next doors going to Auckland. Across the road
they’re going out to Rangiora. Some are going to Wellington And we, we have to go as well. So yeah, what’s been a pretty tight community is
going to disappear and that’s something that means a lot to us. It’s the emotion in it I suppose. When I go out and drive around—especially in the eastern areas here—I come home, not actually depressed, but
not feeling myself because you look around and it’s all changed. It’s all gone. And yes, people are putting up with other things twice as bad as
what we’ve got to deal with. I know that. But you do feel a wee bit sad. I don’t know, it’s hard to say exactly what it is. I think it’s just kind of
drained me a bit. Not always. Sometimes I’m like the happy fellow I used to be.
I certainly thought I would retire and die in this house but that’s
not going to happen. Well, hopefully it isn’t because we aren’t going to be here for too much longer. But no, it’s just that we’ve got to look for another house and sort ourselves out. We’ve got to make the
effort like everybody else which I’m sure nobody is enjoying. I could
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certainly have done without it. But hey, look, we’ve still got most of
our belongings and there are a lot of other people who haven’t. More
importantly we’ve still got each other and that’s the most valuable thing of all, no question.
I suppose that’s one thing these earthquakes make you realise; just
how important people are to each other. In February I’d just pulled up
the drive and gone into the garage. I’d got out of the car when she hit and I had a dickens of a job to get out of that garage—I really thought
it was going to come down. Through the window I could see stuff
flying out of the pantry across the kitchen. It was like bullets flying about. Well as soon as I could I raced inside and grabbed Val, who
luckily had walked out of the kitchen just a few moments before. Boy we hugged each other then. Well, I knew what could have happened if she’d been in the way of those missiles.
Obviously, it had been a big one so we turned the radio on—we
had no power, no water again—but this time we were much more
prepared for it. That first one, in September, no one was prepared. That
was a real shock. We had some family with us at the time; a grandson
and his father were staying. Val took off to make sure the grandson, Jack, was okay, picked him up, and Smithy, my son-in-law, was there as well. We had the fire going too so I had to check that and then I said okay, we’ll get outside. Across the road the neighbours were
all gathering outside as well. They’d had difficulty getting out of the house because of all the doors and windows being jammed but they
finally managed to get themselves out. They came over here and stayed with us for a while.
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Of course, it wasn’t till dawn arrived that the full intensity of it
actually showed. I went outside again to look at the house and tripped over at the front here. The concrete path had dropped a hundred
millimetres. The front wall of the house was badly cracked and as the
light grew we could see that the porch had come away from the front by fifty millimetres or so. I thought then it must have been the Alpine
Fault, I really did. For it to be that big I thought the Alpine Fault had to have gone. We got the radio out, a little battery radio I had, and
heard the news, heard the strength of it. I thought, if that was a seven here, what the heck was it like up at Arthurs Pass. We had a place up there one time and I was trying to imagine what it must be like. Then
we found out it had come from down Darfield way and that to me was the biggest shock of all.
Like a lot of people I thought Christchurch would be the last place
in New Zealand to have an earthquake. We’ve certainly been proved
wrong on that account and like I say, we were unprepared. No power, no water, no toilet, it certainly brought out your camping skills. For a couple of weeks there—being a plumber—I was pretty busy doing odds and sods for people. Well, it was a community thing and we all
pulled together. Helped each other out. Plus our son brought us in a
generator from the country, a solar shower, containers full of water, all that sort of thing, and we were able to share with the neighbours until we got the water back on here. We had a wee bit of trouble with that
but when Brendon Burns the local MP got on to it, it was a different
story—it was there the next day. He did a marvellous job. He did a fantastic job. Yes, if it weren’t for him it would have been a lot harder
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for the folks around here. It seemed like we must have been a bit of a
back water or something because we never saw anybody up this street for a week—ten days—whatever it was. I think the first one we saw was the Red Cross.
In February the liquefaction was back with us again. Like I said
before, it came right through all over the place, everywhere, and that brought out a bit of despair in the street. But then once we got the
radio on and found out how bad town had been hit that took all our troubles away and we felt for those people in the city.
We were talking to people who had walked from town, and at first
we couldn’t believe what they were saying, what was going on. As they came home from their work and other places they were telling us, but
we just couldn’t visualise it. I felt quite sick to be honest… I’ve loved Christchurch ever since I shifted here and seeing it the way it was—at the time you feel really very sad. And also, in a way it made you feel a wee bit better for not being there… if you can feel that way.
Earthquakes are the powerful unknown. Any man who says he’s
not scared of them is a fool. Like everyone else I wish I’d been a
million miles away from it… that it had never happened here—that’s
all I can say on it really. Except to mention I used to work in the PyneGouldGuinness building, one of the big ones that collapsed. It
was many years ago but even so, that ratcheted it up another notch on the belt for me. Yeah, still find it hard to believe.
June? What happened in June? We had a daughter in June but
that was many years before the earthquakes. June, I know we had two
in one day but I’d have to think on that. I remember the December
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shake a whole lot better. Just before Christmas. Our grandsons had
come in from the country, the lot of them, up to see Puss in Boots, the movie, at The Palms. We took the morning session because I
thought there would be less people there. I suppose we’d been back
home an hour when she hit. Two of the boys thought it was great and the other one was a bit upset. He’d been through a few already but the other two couldn’t wait for the next one to come. Youth knows
no fear. They were sitting on the sofa there and asking, ‘When’s the next one coming Nana?’
Personally, we were like everybody else by then, getting pretty
sick of them and probably we would have given a lot to get out of
it. But then you’ve still got to come back to it don’t you. Some days you get a bit despondent but you’ve got to buck yourself up and
get on with it. If you start thinking about some of those people a lot more unfortunate than you—you’ll soon pick up. As for the future, well, hopefully the earthquakes will stop and we can find a
nice little place where we can live our lives out together in happier
times. I don’t imagine it will be an easy task. The money we’ll need, well, you’ll probably use all your assets up. We certainly couldn’t
afford a mortgage. If we had to have a mortgage… no, we couldn’t afford it. That makes it hard, there’s not a lot of choice, or if there
is, they are few and far between. But then everybody will be in the
same boat. We’ll just have to hop in the queue with the rest of them. So yeah, I hope in a few years’ time we’ll be settled somewhere in Christchurch. There’s no way I’d want to go anywhere else. After all these years Christchurch is now my home.
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It’s hard to believe sometimes, I’ve now spent more of my
life here than anywhere else, but today parts of the city are almost unrecognisable. I find now I might be looking for a street and you can
walk right on past it. Maybe there used to be a landmark on the corner, a building you’ve known most of your life, and they’ve all gone. Where there were once beautiful buildings there are now just road works and those orange cones everywhere.
I might not live to see it but we have to rebuild, not those old
buildings, they’ve had it, they’re not safe. Not high either, not unless
they really do something like Japan’s done on the foundations of its
buildings. Rebuilding a city, you’ve got to put a bit of thought behind it and sometimes you wonder if this council is. They went off to different places and looked at new ideas, even invited a couple of mayors out here and have they taken any notice? I’ll tell you what; if they are going to allow stuff to be built higgledy piggledy then we will be back to where we started. The trouble is there’s too much in fighting with the
Council. When you look at other centres, like Napier, all that time ago they managed to do the right thing. Napier is a beautiful little place now. Well why can’t we do something like that? Personally, I think Christchurch would be stupid to go high. There’s no need to, there’s
plenty of room, especially now. I told my lawyer the other day there, if
he’s going to go back into one of those high-rises in the square we’d be finding another lawyer.
I think the government have done as much as they can. I mean any
government, whatever your thoughts on politics, would have problems. Stepping in with the offer of buying the houses was really a great
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thing. It helped a lot of people who were uninsured or who had other problems and they must feel it. To go out and have to buy another
house and to have another mortgage around your neck, it ties them up
for years. So in some ways the government has done okay, and in some ways they haven’t, but that will be for the future. How well they’ve actually done, that will come to us eventually.
A couple of years down the track I hope we will be settled in, got
back to what we like and everything is happy. I would hope to see that
the city is starting to rebuild itself in a couple of years. They should be
getting close to starting by then and as I say, if they can come up with
a great plan, we could see something wonderful occur. I hope so for the
young ones because there’s no going back to what we once had. Sadly, there is no genie—I’ve tried rubbing the teapot but nothing seems to happen.
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