One Ordinary Little Rock Catherine Allen
And Kindness Lay All About
Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes
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Glenn Busch
Catherine Allen
The first thing to say is that there’s a strong sense of loss… and you see, straight away, just having said those words, there are things that
come up. Things that I haven’t thought about now for a while. Things
that I’ve battled with in my head. All these emotions… stuff you think you’ve come to terms with only to find it’s all still smouldering away in there. I suppose it will for years to come.
Not very long ago, I went back to our home to find a rock. It was
just something I’d picked up and placed in our garden. There was
still stuff there that I wanted to keep. Memories. Just memories. So I walked around the back looking for it but the garden had become so
overgrown I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find one ordinary little rock and
it really upset me. I thought goodness, a simple thing like that. Why
am I so affected? I didn’t see it as a sign of weakness, but it did astonish me a little bit. Now I think it was the finality of it, the fact that it was gone, that I couldn’t find it. I mean it was just a rock but I suppose it
was all about goodbye. That final time, the moment when the clock ticks over and all that’s gone before gets left behind.
It was my father that first came to this place. He came over from
Scotland looking for the new. He was a lot older than my mum who he found in Clarence Bridge, out of Kaikoura a-ways. Somebody had said
to him and his mate, ‘Why don’t you come on up to the farm,’ and they
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did. My mother, who was from Waimate, happened to be staying there at the time and that was it. One of those quick romances.
Being a country person she found it hard at first to live in the city
but dad bought two homes here on the river which at that time meant she didn’t have houses all around her. One he brought his parents out to live in and the other became our family home. Many years later two of my own children bought a home here as well, just down the road. It
was an investment—on which they spent much of their hard-earned money re-instating the house to its former glory—but it was also a
place where they could be close to family and friends and the things they knew. It’s my children—all young people really—I feel the saddest
for. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make all this stop. Make it go back to the way it was. Regain our lives and not be ruled by what has
happened to us. My father was a man who built a life for himself and his family in this area and that is what has been destroyed, everything he worked hard to make happen. That is my own sadness, that great sense of loss… I’m glad my parents are no longer here to know it.
There’s a lot of grief, and sometimes with grief you also get anger.
As with all difficult times people get to squabbling over things. I know
this has pulled a lot of people apart but really, it’s such a waste of emotion. You do feel angry, at times you do, but what I think, what I
feel most of all, is that I’m not in control. That I have lost control of my whole life. It leaves you feeling insecure, like you’re just a nomad and you don’t know what is going to happen next.
You get a lot of different reactions I suppose. People I’ve known,
people I’ve been friendly with, have drawn away while others become
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closer. Personally, I’ve found myself becoming closer to folk, I wouldn’t want it the other way around. I like to talk—we have to talk to each
other—it keeps us sane. Where we are living temporarily there’s a shop
just a little way down the road and people are always passing by. I find if I’m in the front yard people will always stop for a natter. ‘Hello, how have you fared?’ sort of thing. Every one of them has a story and it’s so
interesting to hear them. Very therapeutic and let’s face it, the need to tell those stories is going to be with us for a very long time.
You know, sometimes you think you’re very brave, you think you’re
sort of over it, but you’re not. Not really. It’s changed our history hasn’t
it. Changed all our lives, perhaps some more than others. I find it hard sometimes—and I don’t know why I feel like this—when I talk to friends on the other side of the city and they are still doing their normal
thing. They’re still going to the shops, they’re still going dancing, they’re
going swimming, they’re doing all the normal things people do and it’s
only just across the city. I know all over the world people are doing
normal things and I don’t want to begrudge them, I don’t want to feel that, but when you are wearing nothing but gumboots for what seems like forever and the thought of actually going out socially is the last
thing from your mind, it’s hard not to look over the fence and wonder about chance and luck and the way our lives pan out.
I can’t really complain. I don’t want to complain. Let’s just put it down
to bad luck. And to be fair we’ve been very well looked after. Especially
after the first one in September, people came from everywhere to help. Of course, as the earthquakes have gone on, more and more people have been affected and so we have received less and less help. But that
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first one, there were people around knocking on your door all the time, seeing you were okay. The Army, the Police, everybody, I mean just
incredible. The New Zealand Army even brought us a wee army loo—
that was before the chemical loos came out. These chaps just arrived one day, lovely they were, North Island boys, older soldiers and quite
different from the younger ones who never quite knew what to say to
you. I suppose they must have spent about an hour with me, just talking about things. They’d been all over the world and I was interested to
hear their tales. It was good to have that contact and know they were there. And the thing with the toilet was—we had the dugout, but we
didn’t have a portaloo. Well I must have mentioned it while we were talking and sometime later one of the guys jogged back. He’d found
one somewhere and he jogged all the way back back to give it to me. I heard this voice, ‘Cathy, I’ve found you a loo.’ Ha! Just a simple wee thing but it meant a lot. They were lovely guys. Wonderful, which is more than you could say for the earthquake itself.
Yeah, not the sort of thing anyone wants to wake up to. We’d actually
had quite a late night and so we’d only been in bed for something like three hours when it came. Our house is two-storey and I can
just remember my husband, Chris, yelling out, ‘Cath, this is the big one, quick, get out. Get out.’ We did manage to get out of bed and
went for the doorway but we were getting shaken around all over the
place. At one point I got hit quite badly by a bookcase coming down, never mind, we finally got there. Chris was hanging onto the doorway with me hanging on to him. We just stood it out upstairs, there wasn’t
much else we could do. I believe it was the longest one of them all
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and to be honest it was terrifying. Listening to the noise all around
us, everything smashing and banging about. Everything was down, nothing was left standing. It was so… so unreal. I don’t even know whether I was frightened—it was like at that moment we were living someone else’s life.
Chris went downstairs, we didn’t have a torch upstairs and so he had
to go downstairs to get one. We had no shoes on and I can remember screaming out, ‘For goodness sake, watch your feet.’ And then Chris
came back with the torch and switched it on. Looking down from the stairs I could see nothing but absolute devastation. I think that’s when it kicked in. Whatever it was down there, it wasn’t my home anymore.
The next thing I was grabbing the duvet and heading downstairs
where already Chris was starting to clean up. Then I heard a yell outside and it was my son, Richard, who’d come from just down the
road and he was worried that the house might have collapsed on us. He’s screaming out, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ By then we
were in the living room so we pulled the curtains back and looked out
and it was the most bizarre thing I’d ever seen. The river had emptied and the water was moving along the road, and then everything just
filled up again and now all we could see was water all over. At first it
disappeared and then it came back again until we were totally flooded. Water right up to the steps, and everywhere else in abundance.
Richard helped a bit with the cleaning up and seemed concerned
somewhat with getting me off to his place because it was on higher ground. He was thinking of his mum I guess but I said we’d come
around a bit later when we’d done what we needed to here, checked
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on the neighbours and so on. That was one of the marvellous things
that came out of this, the way people looked out for each other, the
way you met neighbours you hadn’t even talked to before. My biggest concern was the young woman next to us who was on her own with two children. Anyway, we got what we could sorted out and then went off to Richard and Jacqui’s place for the night. The worry for us was with
the safety of the upstairs, the way it was sagging—and the flooding. That’s what bothered us. She was an old wooden house that had been
the family home all those years from the time of my dad, but look, she’s still standing. We’ve learnt a lot about what stands up to earthquakes in the last year or so.
We came back the next day because the Rapid Response people
were coming to check on things. It wasn’t easy to look at it again. Pretty mind-blowing really, you’re staring at all this destruction; it can
take the breath right out of you. I know they are only belongings, but they are your belongings and everything’s broken.
Chris just said ‘Right, we’re going to stay. We can’t be upstairs, that’s
not so good but we can live down here. We can sleep in the dining room,’ and that’s what we did. Got stuck in and cleaned the place up
and the dining room became our bedroom. We simply made ourselves a little bed on the floor and tried to get on with our lives.
I was home baking a few months later when the second one came. I
don’t think anyone thought it was going to happen again. Perhaps, we
said, we’d get a few wee tremors, but no, not something as horrific as
that again. Not again. When it stops the first thing you want to do is phone your family. I’ve got a very special family and I needed to know
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they were all right. As it turned out that took quite a while. But then I
heard someone calling out to me from across the fence. It was the girl, the daughter, she was at home on her own. I didn’t even know she was
there. The water was rising again by this stage and she yelled out to me she was hurt. Her mum worked over the river at a day-care centre and
the boy, her brother, was at St Bedes on the other side of town. I’m a bit vague about why she was at home but I’ve a feeling it was a day
off for some schools. Some sort of teacher’s day, you know, no kids at
school. Whatever it was she was home and I ran out and as I did some workmen nearby said to me, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m fine, but there’s a wee girl yelled out next door that
she’s hurt.’
So these guys kindly came in with me. We had to be careful because
the lines were down again. As it turned out she was okay, it was superficial—she just panicked.
Well she’s only fourteen or fifteen, and anyway she came over to
me and we just stayed together, we just hugged each other every time there was another shake. They were pretty nasty and that’s the way we
stayed, until one by one everybody started congregating at my place. My youngest, James, came around, so I knew he was all right. But then we couldn’t get hold of my daughter-in-law. Well, she wasn’t quite my
daughter-in-law then but soon to be. And Chris, I was worried about
him because he works in an old building and of course, like the first one, you couldn’t get through on the phones. He didn’t arrive home until sometime later after he’d been to check on mum over in Shirley. He was worried about her because she lives alone. She’s a very brave wee
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lady and the good news was she was all right. Unsurprisingly though it
all became quite chaotic as time went on. People in cars and so on were
becoming stuck in the water around us and Chris spent a lot of time
helping to pull them out or ferrying them home. There was one chap
who was so desperate to get to his child over at Banks Avenue School that he swam across the river to get his wee boy and somebody loaned him a canoe to get back. We’d set up our barbecue by then and were
boiling water to make coffee in the backyard. Somehow giving people hot drinks at times like that seems to be a big help. If you’d just swum across a river it would warm you up a bit anyway.
In the midst of all this, the most terrible thing, the worst news,
was my daughter Jacqui—she was trapped. She was in the Clarendon
Towers where she worked and the stairways had collapsed. She was in her office, which I think was on the seventeenth floor, and they managed to get as far as the tenth before they could go no further. I’m not sure how many people there were altogether, maybe a hundred—a lot of people anyway. Thank God Richard managed to get in phone contact
with her. I was going round and round in circles after I found out. I
think I wore a hole in the lawn. Always now after those earthquakes arrive, the first thing you want to know is that your family is safe. To
find out she was trapped there was gut wrenching. The only way was to
keep busy. I know I was blocking it out, but it was the only way I could survive it. Richard got down to just texting with her because they didn’t want to use the batteries up. Then at some point he had to go back to his place and I lost that connection. He’d got a call that a couple with a
baby were in his driveway and needed help, needed a place to stay. Also,
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the water all about was still rising and more and more people seemed to go into panic mode, there were cars stuck all around us here. Chris
kept on a pace, doing what he could for everyone and I kept handing
out coffee. Then at last we heard the brilliant news that she was out, that the firemen had managed to get into the building somehow and
get them all out. I can’t tell you how thankful I was. Even now I can’t stop thinking about it. It haunts me still.
On the surface Jacqui appeared to cope with it quite well. She
said herself she was fine, and she has done really well to cope with
everything that came after, but no one goes through that sort of stress
without some consequence. I think she’s incredibly brave. Three hours she was trapped in there and I’m sure it was the longest three hours for her. It certainly was for me.
I think we finally left our place about 9.30 that night and went
down the road to stay in the kids’ house. It was absolutely full by then, even the wee baby was still with us. I’d baked that day before it all
kicked off and luckily I was able to salvage most of it. I’d been doing
it for my youngest who was getting married and the tins were full. It
was something to offer people and seemed to be just what they wanted. Coffee with something sweet and comforting.
Our own home was pretty banged around by now. Assessments at
the time were being done pretty quickly. When they came to us their
opinion was that it was green, but they didn’t even go inside. It was deemed that we were allowed to stay in the house. Pretty soon after that though we had the EQC men around and they said, ‘Don’t go upstairs,’ they told us that it was all rather unstable. Well you could see
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that yourself when you got down the hall, the dip in the ceiling, sagging
away there and in the end we had to have a lot of stuff inside holding
everything up. It looked like a construction site but we continued to live there, we lived there until it became totally unbearable.
Things got worse in June. That was horrific, yeah, that was a bad, bad
day. We were both at home then and Jacqui also arrived after the first quake. She had been working down at Ferrymead with her new job but anything over a five and you were sent home. She’d come straight over here and we were out on the lawn together. Chris had actually come
home because there was something wrong with the car and ever since
the quakes he liked the car filled to the brim and in perfect working order. He was actually lying under the car in the driveway working on it
at the time. Jacqui was understandably a bit freaked out, it just brought everything back. That terrible time she’d had in February. I think it started flooding again too. The floods come up very quickly round here
now because the land has sunk. What was once the walkway around
the river is now called the dam. The area where the road used to be, that’s how badly we’ve sunk.
Immediately after you have one of these big quakes you start
to think of all the usual problems. The water, the power, the toilet
problems, they all blend into one after a while. Summertime you cope. I mean we’re campers, we’re used to that, so we would go out to the
Waimak River, take our water tanks out there and fill them. The boys would go for a swim, have a wash. But when it started to get cold, when it became winter, it got harder. To be honest the cold got to me. I mean
none of our pipes worked and you’d be amazed how many buckets
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you have to empty when you do the washing or something. You also
start to realise how many times you go to the toilet every night, yeah, which seems to be constantly. I remember coming in one night and I
had my anorak on, a big scarf and I’m holding my little torch and I said to Chris—I must have been crying because I said—’I don’t want to be doing this. I’m too old to be doing this.’ I mean it takes a toll on
your nerves doesn’t it, which, if anything, seems to make you want to
go more often. Later Chris dug another hole in the backyard and my son who is an electrician bought me one of those headlamps—like a miners lamp—and we all had a good laugh about it.
What do they say; if you don’t laugh you’ll cry. It’s a bit like that
with all the stress these things bring. Chris runs his own business, he’s a panel-beater and painter and he’s an incredibly hard worker but with
the recession things have been hard over the last two or three years. Not that he’s ever been a man to give in, he works and works and works
and we’ve always lived in hope but this whole thing has been like a kick in the teeth. His workshop was in Barbadoes Street, right in the city
and he was shut out for ten weeks, which affected our business hugely
and put him under a heap of stress. He’s like a workaholic and not
being able to get into his business was just horrific for him. He spent a lot of time going round to his customers trying to keep it all going
but it was incredibly difficult. People stop doing things don’t they when something like this happens. So many others had lost their jobs and we found it grim. At times it was hard just to make ends meet. It’s the old
story when you work for yourself—no work, no money. I really admire his strength through that time, I always have, but no one is unaffected
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by these events and when he’s affected it affects me too. Living on a
shoestring along with every other thing that’s happening is something
lots of people in this city are dealing with. We’re not the only ones so I try to think something good will happen, I try to be positive, because surely things can’t get any worse. Eventually they’ve got to get better.
By the time the second one arrived that day though, I’d had enough.
The house stood up to it—which is to say the house stayed upright— but inside it was all but demolished once more and that was really it for
me. I mean things—stuff— it doesn’t usually mean that much to me. The family, people, relationships are much more important. But that day we couldn’t even get in the back door. Our belongings had been thrown from one end of the place to the other and I just thought, it’s
left me with nothing. Nothing at all. I guess we picked it all up again
and continued to stay on for a time but I was never happy there again. That really was it for me. Chris, on the other hand, still had to come to
terms with it. And you can’t just… I could have left there and then…
but that’s not what you do. So, until he came to terms with it we stayed. Winter was coming on by then and we had no heating. We weren’t
allowed heating because we’d had walls taken out and our fireplaces removed so it was intensely cold. We had beams everywhere inside
holding the place up. We did in fact have a little fan heater and we had a sort of gas heater, but at the same time we had to use the
dehumidifier constantly. You needed a torch to get anywhere and
when you touched the walls they were wet. We had that black mould growing everywhere. I remember having a couple of neighbours in and
they said, ‘Your lounge is sopping wet!’ Everything was wet, our clothes
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were getting covered in mould as well and that’s not good to live with, not when your husband’s an asthmatic. I was very nervous whenever I
was actually in the house, I didn’t feel it was safe and finally I couldn’t live like that any longer. It had become unbearable.
In the end an old neighbour rang me up and said I’ve seen two
places advertised in this area and gave me the chap’s number. When I rang he wasn’t at home but I left my number and address and a while later he turned up at our place. He was a lovely chap and he would only rent to people who had properties in the red zone, in fact he himself is just down the road there, also in the red zone. Dave Gorrie, one of the good guys. And so we took this place and it was just a palace
compared to what we were used to now. He kindly put in a heat pump
in for us and two days later we had snow again. Imagine how I felt, it
was brilliant. Just brilliant. It was still handy too, just around the corner really so yeah, good for work which was picking up a bit, and Chris, I think, was happy to move. He’s been the better for it. We both have.
Then again, it’s hard to tell with Chris, he’s like a lot of men; he
doesn’t perhaps talk as much as I do. I hear him talk more to his brothers
in Australia—of how he feels about it all—than he says to me. I know
it’s one of the worst things he’s ever been through and that’s true for both of us. For myself, it also gave me this fear—you carry in you this fear—that it could happen again. That anything can happen but you are never going to know when. And so it is. Every single time you feel
it, it comes as another shock. Especially at Christmas. At a time when
we all want to feel good about things, it made me sick to my stomach. To feel it all move again with such violence, that really unnerved me.
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There were four of them that day, all of them big ones. As always
I went outside because it felt safer. The neighbours were all checking
on each other and then my daughter arrived, she was very unnerved by it too. We all were. I grabbed the water bottle and set up a table and some chairs on the lawn. I had a friend here too who had come for lunch. Pretty soon there were quite a few people here and more
seemed to keep coming. We all sat there drinking cold lemonade and just being together which I find is the best way to cope. I went
and checked on my wee neighbour next door too, asked her if she
wanted to come over but she had someone with her so that was okay. She said she was fine. But it surely puts you off celebrations. I’d been so looking forward to Christmas with all the family so that came as a real downer. I can’t say I’m getting used to them. Every time they come it turns my brain to cottonwool.
In the end of course I had to pull myself together. We had a meal
to make for the family and so Chris and I did the dinner together. He really helped, he was brilliant. And having all the kids here and
my grandson for the first time, that was so good. Having the family around you seemed like the one certain thing. I mean love is the one certain thing isn’t it. But all this that has happened, it makes you reflect
on things and realise just how fragile we all are. Chris and I know
something of this from when our son was very ill. Nothing is more
important than your children and he was deadly ill. It put us down, Chris and I, kicked us in the teeth.
The professor, when he told us—gave us the diagnosis— he said
this will either bring you together or it will blow you apart. And he was
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right. Sitting at the bedside of any sick child is a stressful time but you work hard together for your children and it did bring us together more
than ever. Lots of people worked hard for our boy, they were brilliant and he was a real fighter. He came through it and today has a beautiful
son of his own. The thing is, when everything is okay again, you put that stuff behind you. You think life will go on happily, day after day until
you suddenly you get another reminder of how vulnerable we all are, how breakable it all is. That nothing is really safe. Which is why it’s so important to live with all we have, every day.
In a little while our life will change again. We will have to move
from this area. The Government will buy the land and the house will be covered by insurance. Of course, it’s not just a house to us it was our
home, a place where families have grown. A place where all those little things that make a family what it is have happened. There have been
many tears, certainly from me. We’ve had our farewell family dinner
there and perhaps I will go from time to time and pick a flower from the
garden but, yes, I do find it hard to go back there. I’ve said my goodbyes,
but not Chris, not yet. He goes down every other day, feeds the birds, pulls the drapes, mows the front lawn, and if you could see what the house looks like now, I don’t know why he bothers. But he does, he
still has this real commitment. You wouldn’t believe it, we actually got a
beautifying certificate last week because of the way the place has been kept so tidy. It’s not just for us though; we do that for our neighbour too. She’s still there on her own and we know what that feels like. It’s
not very nice if people just up and leave and everything goes to rack and ruin, that can be pretty sad for the people that are left there.
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As for us, there’s nothing we can do now but move on. If the land
is not safe there’s not much we can do about it. Initially we’d hoped we
might be able to rebuild, but then they told us we were going to lose, not only our home, but the land also. That was a huge disappointment. I think I had a bit of a blank there for a while—I didn’t really know
and I think Chris was the same—we didn’t really know how, or even if, we wanted to move forward. We focused mostly on the business and just got more stressed about that. Well we had to have money, you have
to survive but now I think we are seeing a way forward. We have been
looking out Rolleston way. We’re not totally happy but that’s what life’s like at times. I am a bit more pushy than Chris is about getting somewhere, I suppose it’s my nesting instincts but I do want to have
a home. It will be a long way from what we had with the river and all
but sometimes you just have to be practical. Pick up and get on with it. I said before that talking about yourself is not easy and it’s not. A
while ago I went to a reunion with the girls from Avonside Girls High. Much to my mother’s horror I left and got myself a job as a hairdresser
before I had even sat the School Certificate. The headmistress seemed to feel the same way. She had me in her office off and on for two weeks trying to get me to change my mind. I was in the A stream and
it seemed she thought I could do better with my life. In actual fact I
think I’ve done pretty well, certainly I’m a happy person and happy
with the way my life has worked out. Anyway, they all stood up these girls and spouted about what their achievements had been, and rightly so, but I’m a bit reserved. It’s not something I like to do. I find it
difficult to say I’ve done this, I’ve done that, it’s just not me. I suppose
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I’m a reserved sort person—and, yes, a little bit crazy at times. I am. It’s
what my kids will say anyway. Mum’s a bit crazy, and I suppose I am really. Chris and I have a lot of fun, a lot of laughter between us, and
I think in many ways it’s what keeps us together. Keeps us going. You know, we can have a bitch but at the end of the day, right down at the end of that tunnel, we can see the light, and we can laugh about it. We
do laugh about it. Without it, without that sense of fun, well you’d be
feeling a bit helpless wouldn’t you. A bit of humour, it’s what you need
to survive right now. Anyway, it certainly helps. Plus, I’m an optimist. Did I say that? Well, you have to be, don’t you. Otherwise, goodness me, you might as well start digging the hole right now.
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