Perfect House, Lake Views, With Own Private Beach – Sally Aldred

Perfect House, Lake Views, With Own Private Beach Sally Aldred

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Sally Aldred

I listen to the stories at work sometimes and someone will say, ‘I had a crack in my living room wall and they’re decorating the whole place

for me,’ and I’m just sitting there looking at them and thinking great, that’s great, potentially, I’m going to end up with a mortgage and no home at all.

I remember the lawyer explaining it to me, ‘This is the scenario,

you are either in the shit, or at best, coming out with a little bit of money.’ I’m sitting trying so hard not to cry. It’s no good. I’ve got

tears streaming down my face and I get in the car thinking there is no one here to comfort me, to console me. I know my friends are

there for me but I can’t always go relying on them—they have their

own stuff to deal with. No one is having the easiest of times. People have children to deal with, they have lived with no toilets for months and their families may need help… I can’t keep expecting people to

look after me. I keep saying things can’t get any worse, ha, and then they do. But there you go, like everybody else I’ve got to be strong

enough to cope with that. It’s just… it’s just when you turn around, and there’s no one to talk to about things, it gets… yeah, it can really start to wear away at you.

When I bought this place, it had belonged to an old woman. With

my partner at that time I ripped the carpet up, put down a wooden

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floor, built a deck all the way round, did all sorts of improvements

but it seems with no proof of building, all that will not be taken into consideration. This was my first home as well, so yeah, I put such a lot

into it but right now I don’t know whether I can be bothered again. I think perhaps I’ve had it with houses. The thought of buying another one certainly doesn’t appeal right now. Maybe it’ll be my first and

only home. Who knows? There is one good thing, the place came with a cat. He was a skinny cat and now he’s a fat cat, so someone came out of it on the right side of the ledger.

The thing is I really love this city but sometimes I feel I don’t

want to stay here, especially when there are more and more shakes.

But then, I don’t really want to start again somewhere else either, and so I’ve got to make the decision to accept it for what it is and don’t

get down about it. I want to make it a best place, not a bad place.

But right now I keep kind of going round in circles. I want to stay, I want to move, I want to travel, I want to stay, I want to move, I

want to travel—do I want to set up another place on my own? Do I hang out and wait until Mr Right comes along? Truth be told, there

doesn’t seem to be a surfeit of Mr Rights out there. Ideally, in my head, home for me would be settling in and creating a family, those

are the thoughts that go around in my head now in a never-ending loop. Like the song says, ‘Do I stay, or do I go.’ The future is confusing but right now the present is about paying the mortgage and finding

ways to save money so that I can have some form of life. That’s in the short-term. Just try to sort out my house and hopefully come out on top, or at least with no debt. After that I don’t know.

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I was on the other side of the earth when the first one arrived. I was

in the UK when I heard from a friend, saw the pictures of liquefaction

in my driveway. I had my house rented at the time and the tenants were really good. I wanted to be back in New Zealand straight away. I was so thankful, so blown away, that nobody had actually died in this

huge earthquake. New Zealand is home to me, I’ve been here now for ten years and as much as my parents want me to move back to

Wales, it’s not something that is going to happen. So those were my first thoughts, I just wanted to be back here.

I got back in November, so my first experience of an earthquake was

that shake we had on Boxing Day. Just after Christmas. It was quite

jolty and I had absolutely no idea what to do. Freeze or flight; I just

tend to freeze. These days I go through phases, if there hasn’t been an earthquake for a while I get a little unnerved, I’ve kind of got used to

everything rocking and rolling and when we don’t get one for a while it starts me thinking, what if it’s building up to another big one.

The real big one came in February; I was out in Lincoln where I

work when it happened. It was the first serious one I had experienced and I didn’t really know what to do. One of my workmates said her

memory of the earthquake was me doing a silly little dance in the

office going, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ It was weird. It kind of felt a little bit like a

rollercoaster and I don’t think I realised the severity of it until we were all evacuated and went outside.

I could hear a few people saying Riccarton Police Station had

closed down and some buildings had fallen… at that point we were all

allowed to go home. At the time my place in Avonside was tenanted

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and I was living with a friend in New Brighton. By car it normally

takes half an hour to get home, that day, with the bridges down and all the rest of it, it took me just over seven hours.

As soon as I got into the car I rang my parents and left a garbled

message saying that in case they heard anything, I was fine. What I was most fearful for was my friends; they are like my family here and

a good many of them actually worked in the city. I was hoping to God everyone was okay and just desperately trying to get home. I was hearing things on the radio on the way home that had me in tears.

It felt so crazy being stuck in all that traffic, driving along roads

that were so absolutely broken. I remember seeing all these cars

covered in mud and I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I got further down Brougham Street, that’s when I saw the sinkholes and the liquefaction coming out of the ground everywhere. I have this memory of looking at the people in the cars I passed—everybody had

that stunned, shocked look on their face, like they couldn’t believe it had happened. None of it was good. I still have this image in my mind of being right next to a big lorry on an overbridge when an

aftershock arrived. I am watching it heaving back and forth beside me and thinking this is not a place I want to be.

It didn’t feel like seven hours, it was only when I got home and it

was getting dark and there was no electricity and the burglar alarm had been going off for hours and hours and the emotions were…it’s

a haze…its an absolute total haze that journey. I do remember being

thankful that I had a four-wheel drive because there were quite a few illegal moves.

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Even so, the car didn’t make it all the way home. I ended up

abandoning it near the sewerage ponds, walking over a broken bridge and then stupidly coming through the forest there, thinking it was a good idea to trail through a lot of tall trees while the ground was still

shaking. As I walked on towards the flat I’m thinking it’s all going to be fine, it’ll all be okay. I’ve just got to get home. When I finally got to

stand in front of our block I could see that the front had totally fallen out of one of them and guess whose place that was. We had a glass

frontage and the whole lot had smashed through the balustrade, so there was glass all over the one below and absolutely no front to our apartment at all.

I stood there looking up at our place wondering what we should

do. The trouble was it had taken so long to get home and there was

nowhere else to go, so we decided we may as well stay. At least for the

night. We got into the house and everything had kind of collapsed in on itself. We lifted a cable out of the way and a bookshelf and dragged

Fi’s mattress from her bedroom. We cleared a space so that if there

were any more aftershocks nothing would fall on us. It wasn’t a great night. We slept in the living room with no front wall and it was raining and it was windy and there were alarms going off and the blind we

pulled down for some privacy kept flapping about in the wind. It was probably very silly to stay there but it had taken all that time to get

back and with all the bridges down and floods all across the street, where are you going to go? What are you going to do?

We stayed until first light then we got up and made our way out of

there. My flatmate worked at the hospital and she’d told me that it was

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just destruction everywhere. Amazingly, The Press put out a newspaper that morning—of course nowhere was open and so they were just sitting there on the pavement—and we took one and put our money down and that was the first I actually got to understand what had happened in a larger way. Afterwards we walked to the abandoned car

taking with us random belongings that we thought we’d need—half the stuff I didn’t need at all—yeah, nothing sensible, clothes I hadn’t

worn for years. Nothing matched. What was I thinking? Anyway, that was my earthquake, my first earthquake. Sadly, not my last.

My place in Keller Street was at the back of the section, two houses

on the same plot. After the September earthquake my neighbours

had been told that their place was pretty much a write-off. EQC said mine was fixable and gave me a cheque for $3,000. So right from the start I had issues with them. After February the place was not in good

shape—no water, no electricity, no sewerage—and my tenants left pretty quickly. Not having family here and not wanting to impose on my friends I ended up moving back into the house myself. Underneath

it was packed with liquefaction and every time it rained hard or there

was a high tide, the floods came. With the rain I also had water coming

through the ceiling, it was not a good place to be living. It took a week to clear the liquefaction and I remember the piles of it reaching right

up to the telephone wires. I’ve got pictures of that and all the shovelling

that went on. The army was there helping me get into my house because the door wouldn’t open or close. In the end they hacksawed a chunk of

it off so the door would work but since this one in December, you can’t get into the house at all now.

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Its amazing how quickly you get used to things and don’t even think

about it. In a very short space of time I didn’t think twice about going

to the portaloo with my jim jams tucked into my wellington boots—

me along with the rest of the street. It quickly becomes the norm. I

used to call it luxurious camping because I had four walls and a roof, my bed was there, so yeah, luxurious camping.

I was up working in Waikato the day the Government was finally

making an announcement about the zones. I had a meeting there but

the people were very kind and gave me a little time to myself to take a look. I went online and checked the website and there it was, Keller

Street, Avonside, red-zoned. In a way it was a big, big relief but that was also when the battle really started.

My house had been tenanted in February and it was insured as a

rental property. Then, when our flat fell to pieces, and I had nowhere else to go, I thought how fortuitous it was that my tenants had moved out. You know, I really thought I was doing the right thing by moving

back in. Then a few weeks after the earthquake happened my sister was

diagnosed with a brain tumour. She lives in the UK and has two kids, a four year old and a two year old, and she had to have an operation.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d been trying to deal with all of the earthquake

stuff here and then suddenly I had to fly back to the UK to look after my sister’s kids and help out with the family. As they say, interesting

times. I was there for a month before coming back to my place that was still broken.

Before going back to Britain I rang the insurance company telling

them I wanted to be insured, that I’d moved back in, my tenants

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had gone, and so on. Nobody told me at that point that because I

changed the insurance after the earthquake, it would be deemed as a pre-existing condition. With the rental insurance I would have been

entitled to loss of rent because it is classed as an investment property.

Because I moved back in, I wasn’t entitled to anything. On the other hand, if I had been living there when February happened, I would have

been entitled to a temporary accommodation allowance because the

house was deemed uninhabitable. I would have been able to move out

straight away and got rented accommodation and be covered for it. As

it was, they said I was entitled to nothing. It finally took a medical note

from my doctor saying whoever was in control of this situation should

be strongly advised that this person needs to move out of the home, that it was both physically and mentally damaging to her health. So, thanks to my doctor that was one I won. Sadly there are many more battles to go…yeah.

I was in the WINZ office the other day because what insurance

I managed to get has now run out. Currently I am paying mortgage and rent, insurance on a property I can’t live in, rates on a property I

can’t live in, there is a temporary accommodation thing that you can get but apparently, I’m not allowed it because the house is deemed an investment property. In going to live there, I thought I was doing the

right thing but sadly not, it turned out to be totally the wrong thing.

I had the same sort of trouble with the forty per cent rates rebate that

they were going to give people, I had to fight for that one because they said, ‘We’ve got no record of it being uninhabitable.’

I said, ‘It’s in the red-zone!’

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‘Doesn’t matter,’ they said. ‘You need to provide an engineer’s report

to prove it.’

It can get rather exasperating. I want to stay, but maybe someone is

trying to tell me something. Seriously, I am very, very grateful because I’m here and there are people who are no longer here. There are people

in worse situations than me—far, far, worse, so yeah, I’m going to do my best to get through it.

In June I had gone to Wellington for a meeting and I was at the

airport when I looked up at the TV and saw Gloucester Street, where my friends lived. They were showing a building that had collapsed and

it was thought that people were in it. I went to the desk and told them I needed to change my ticket. It was an absolute nightmare trying to

get home again. I ended up having to fly to Nelson or Blenheim? I can’t remember which one it was, and from there I hired a car to drive back home with no idea what I was coming back to.

It must have been about eleven that night when I got back to

my own car. As soon as I hit Avonside Drive, there were floods

everywhere. I crossed my fingers and just powered through and the

water came—it felt like it was up to the bonnet and coming all over the car. Then came Keller Street… and yes, there it was, Lake Keller

all over again! In February we’d made a sign—Lake Keller, Residents

Only—and on top of the big piles of liquefaction we had a deck

chair and an umbrella. We used to joke, you know, perfect house, lake views, with own private beach.

I abandoned my car on the road. It was no use even trying to go up

the driveway, I knew it would be full of liquefaction again and that bare

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feet would be the only option. The floodwater was less than an inch away from actually going into the house. Naturally when I opened

the door there was no electricity but somehow I found a torch and switched it on. Everything, as I knew it would be, was all over the place. A real mess.

This one actually broke me. I burst into tears and I rang my

friend who lives on Gloucester Street. She asked where I was and

when I told her she kindly said, ‘Come over. Don’t do anything else, just come straight over, now.’ So I put my wellies on and packed

my bag, a bit more sensibly this time. Water, wine, bottle-opener, opened the door and walked out around the corner to Gloucester Street. The funny thing was, my wellies, as I walked out I realised

they had a big hole in them but by that time I was totally over it.

What did it matter anymore?

I stayed one night at my friends before saying to myself, ‘Nah, I

have to deal with this. This is my home and I’ve really got to deal with it. I mean there is only so many times you can actually talk to your friends, burden them with your problems. Everybody in this city has enough of their own.

I got back and I just needed to figure out what I was going to do,

how I was going to live there. The first night I was on the phone

to my mum, reassuring her that I was fine and that everything was okay. It’s been really hard that. I only give them parts of what’s happening here because I don’t want to put any added strain on them. Sure, I feel bad about what’s going on, but I know what they are dealing with at home is far worse. I suppose it must have been

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about ten in the evening when we started talking, I said ‘I’ve started

to clear the drive of liquefaction, the flooding is kind of subsiding, its not coming into the house anymore which is great and…’ and

then I heard this sound, there was a bit of a crash and I looked up and water was starting to drip from the ceiling. Crap! I said, ‘Sorry mum, I have to go!’

What a mess, water came pouring through the ceiling. The

hot water cylinder had shifted and then it shifted a little more and suddenly I had a monstrous flood in the kitchen. Then it was

spreading into the living room and into the laundry cupboard, all my bed sheets and duvets, everything just got soaking wet. I’m yelling to

myself, ‘What’ll I do? What’ll I do? Water, turn the water off !’ Yep, okay, I can do that and I got my wellies with the hole in them on

and ran down the driveway and it was like, oh no! I had cleared some

of the liquefaction from the drive but not from the street, which is where the stopcock into the property is buried. So at 10 o’clock at

night I’m digging with my hands, trying to get at the damn tap.

Pushing my arms down into all this sludge to get it turned off. I had

to ring work the next day and say, ‘Very sorry, I need to take more time off.’ It doesn’t feel good taking all this time off work, especially when so many out in Lincoln where I work aren’t affected by it. You

know, I go to work out there and everything is fine, then I’d drive back to the reality of this absolute nightmare.

So that was June and then it was Christmas. I’m sitting in the

van with my friends in the driveway of their home in Richmond. I’m strapped in the van with their two little ones, Tony’s putting the boat

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on the back and all of a sudden the van starts shaking and Karen says to me ‘Aunty Sally, is that an earthquake?’ I look in the wing mirror

and Tony’s holding onto the side of the boat and he’s got this grin on his face, and I said, ‘No it’s your daddy being stupid.’

I yelled out, ‘Stop it Tony, we keep thinking it’s an earthquake.’

‘It is!’ he said. Dear God, no, that really got my heart racing again

and then I saw Hannah at the end of the drive going, ‘Awwhhhh!.’

We all got out again and went into the house, everything was over,

the Christmas tree had fallen over and the cupboards had popped open, it was a mess. We all just sort of sighed and then started the

usual round of picking things up. Stood the Christmas tree upright, tied all the cupboards together, turned the electricity and the water

off and left. I didn’t even bother going to my place. I just thought what—what can I do? There is nothing I can do.

When I got back I couldn’t open the door. There was no entry in

and no way out. Since February there’d only been the one door that

opened and closed and that was the front door. Now I couldn’t even

get through that. In the end I opened it with a mallet. At that point

I was in tears once more. Crazy, but I was in tears because the house was intact and I just wanted it to fall down. It would have solved so

many problems. I remember a little later standing on the street with a friend of mine, Ian, and again I was in tears, ‘This used to be such a nice street,’ I said, ‘everybody knew everybody, and now there’s only about four left here.’

It’s so sad to see everything that is important to you disappear

like that. I have lived in Avonside pretty much since I’ve been in

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New Zealand, it’s been my side of town, but today I really struggle to go back there, to look on it like it is now. By the same token I don’t

know anybody where I live at the moment, no one. I have a roof

over my head but I don’t feel like I have a home. Home is the people around you, they are what make a house, a home.

You will have heard a lot of people say this but things—stuff—

means nothing to me now, absolutely nothing. It’s people who are

most important. They always were, but even more so now, that is

something we have come to understand in the most profound way. I

know we’ve all been affected psychologically, how or how much I’m not totally sure. For me it’s not just the earthquakes but my sister and her brain tumour, that’s the hardest thing psychologically. I feel

very guilty that I’m okay and she is not. I feel guilty that a lot of

good people have gone, or are very sick, and here I am, still here and healthy, complaining about bricks and mortar.

At the moment I feel like I am actually stuck in a situation I can’t

yet see the end of. I can’t move forwards and I can’t go backwards

either, it’s the frustration of sitting still. I want to go on but I can’t make any plans because I don’t know what the future holds. It’s really tricky. And I keep thinking that if I end up with nothing and a mortgage, what am I going to do? But then I think, what if I end up in a good situation and do come right. What will I do? Keep smiling I guess, that’s what we all need to do.

Not long after a big shake I was trying to get diesel for my car and

had been told no at so many different gas stations. I was sitting in the

car almost at the end of my tether and then I looked up and staring at

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me was one of the clown doctors, all decked out in his full costume.

Normally they work with kids and so on in the hospitals but during

the earthquakes they were out on the streets. He just looked at me with this big smile on his face and it was really cool. You couldn’t help but

smile back. And there are other bits of humour people had got up to, the sign on top of a huge pile on sand in the street—Free Liquefaction.

All those little things that make you laugh. We need plenty of that.

I would really like the aftershocks to stop now and I would really

like to see some progress in the re-build of Christchurch. You know I truly think we’ve got an opportunity to make one of the safest, most

environmentally friendly cities in the world. How desirable would that

be. How many places actually get the chance to wipe everything clean

and start again. I would like to see us achieve that, I would like to be

part of it, so that is a motivation to stay, to help create one of the best cities in the world. I really believe that we could and that we have the people here to do it. Ordinary, everyday, people. You saw the proof

of that immediately after the earthquakes. Everybody was talking to everybody and everyone pulled together. It’s not often that you get

a whole street laughing and joking but in Avonside we had regular events, barbeques and so on with everybody helping each other. So many random acts of kindness. All those little unheard stories about

the small, unexpected things people did for each other. It was really fabulous, someone should write a book about that.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is to keep that up, to stay strong.

Everyone keeps saying business as usual, but how do you do that when there is so much devastation and destruction all around? How can you

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not let that affect you? How can you not let it upset you? Those are the questions aren’t they. I understand we have to, otherwise the economy

will be buggered and Christchurch could go down the tubes, but at the

same time a lot of people are forgetting what’s happened. Maybe they

are moving on and I’m not, maybe… I try not to regret things in life…

maybe that’s where a sense of humour comes in, why it’s so important.

A while ago my some of my friends and I realised none of us were

really talking about things anymore, and that actually we still need

to. That it was part of the process. That the way to stay strong was

to keep talking and acknowledging whatever feelings come along—

whatever happens. Doesn’t matter whether it’s good or whether its bad, just acknowledge it. That’s how you stay strong. Deal with whatever

emotion it throws at you and work through it. I know a lot of good people have already gone and that’s why I keep thinking, don’t go. Stay

strong. Stay and be part of what could happen here. Don’t desert the place now, not when it needs us… just stay.

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