A Short Time Ago Tracy Laby
And Kindness Lay All About
Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes
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Glenn Busch
Tracy Laby
Lucy’s Story:
Day after day the aftershocks come, we all wait for them to stop. We wait until there are no aftershocks left to feel. We are all happy again going to
school having fun like normal. But on the twenty-second of February, 2011, as most of us were finishing our lunch, we hear rattling and screaming. I
fall to the ground and join in the screaming. I can’t wait for it to stop. I look around at the jumping trees and buildings and I look at the ground moving
up and up. The spluttering, the splashing, the cracking, seemed to be going on forever. It finally stopped. I got up and ran to the field with waterfalls
splashing, turning into liquefaction. Everyone else ran there too. The whole school was screaming. I stuck with my teacher. I was still screaming and screaming. A classmate pointed to our mum. I hopped up, screaming more
and more, dodging the liquefaction, trying to get to mum. On our way to the car, I looked at all the damage. We jumped into the car and drove until the road got blocked off. Then we had to walk most of our way home with
liquefaction under our feet. It was squishy, wet, grey and gross. I refused to go into this really deep bit so mum had to lift me over. On our way back to
our house we stopped at my friend Elena’s place. We went to see if she was okay and then back to the water and liquefaction. We got a lift through the
brown smelly lake that went up to our house from someone we didn’t know. I felt really dizzy after we got inside. We didn’t leave mum once. When
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there was an aftershock, I would freeze. I went to Timaru that night. I
got there at midnight. I went to Mountainview High School for a day. I
did art and drama. For art I drew a fish and an owl. Then we started at Grantlea Downs Primary. Next week we were moving into a rental place
in Andrew Street right by our new school. I miss my Banks Ave School and Mr Edmund and my friends. I miss all my teachers. I was still wearing my school uniform for Banks Ave that first day.
That was it. How she wrote it down, flat out. We were driving in the
car and she just wrote it all out like that. Afterwards she started to
put it into a book but we never quite got there with that. It never happened… it’s just on that piece of paper.
I went to school in Christchurch myself, yes, at St Margaret’s. I
was born and bred in Christchurch and I love it. Actually, no, that’s
not quite true. I was born in Waikari and adopted into a family
in Christchurch. I grew up in Mt Pleasant. I’ve driven up there to
Michael Ave, just to take a look at where we all were. It’s gone now, the sides are off it and it’s fallen over. You stand there and think about what it once was—the whole thing’s pretty horrible.
I have spent a bit of time away from Christchurch, I went and
lived up in Wanganui for a while, but yeah, I’ve always come back. Well, it was home. I never imagined going anywhere else. Even now.
My ex’s family say, ‘Come over to Aussie, you know, just come over.’ And yes, I did look at houses over there—they were reasonably priced
and everything—but it’s not New Zealand is it. I only just took the
kids away this weekend; we went with another family, friends from
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Christchurch. We got away to Tekapo for the weekend and we were driving up to the top there, looking out at the landscape, and I said
to the kids, ‘You know, it’s all very well going to Australia, I know it’s nice and warm over there, but look at this!’
You know what I mean? It’s New Zealand, it’s just amazing. And
that’s one side of my life. The other side is… it’s gut wrenching—heart
breaking—I just want to turn the clock back. I want to wake up and think this is just a horrible shitty nightmare.
It seems such a short time ago that I was feeling good about the
world. For the first time in ages I was very excited. I had just brought
the property I’d lived in for sixteen years. Just managed to scrape
together enough money to buy out my ex-husband and then three
months later it all came to a sudden end. That earthquake shattered everything.
I woke up to a noise that was horrendous and everything was dark.
My kids, thank goodness, weren’t with me; they were with their father for the weekend. The big bookcase had fallen over, so imagine if they’d
been here, chances are that might have collected them. I had my dog and myself and my cell phone. Ha! That was my emergency kit, my
cell phone with a light on it. I knew it was an earthquake and a big
one. I thought this is it, the end, I’m history. The crashing in the house, the noise, and then my bed moved right across the room. Come on I thought, do something, get under the doorframe, right. Wrong. I did
finally manage to stand up and stagger to the door where I promptly
banged straight into it. It was shut. Very clever. Eventually I did get it open but the shaking seemed to go on for ages.
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Afterwards I struggled again to get the backdoor open and get
outside. Looking out into the blackness I thought Christ, what’s going
on? All I could hear was water, the noise of water and I could see it glistening in the dark. It was coming out over the grass towards the
backdoor. I looked at the garage then, oh, shit! I had better get my car out of there, now. Thank goodness my keys were in a place I could get
to them. There was glass everywhere underfoot and when I got to the
garage, got the door open, it was full of water. I have this big garage
and I could see that things were all over everywhere and that the water was rising really quickly. It scared me. I looked at how much water was already in there and thought, forget it, that car’s not going anywhere.
I think I was just stunned. I went back into the house. I could hear
people outside and I though, get a jacket on—because it was cold—get my jacket, get my cell phone, get my dog and I think I probably got
my smokes. Then I was standing at my back door thinking, what else should I take? Like am I coming back? Where am I going to go? What
am I going to do? I think I even said out loud—or at least it went
through my mind—thank goodness the kids are not here. By the time I got outside other neighbours were milling around, the water was still coming up and all around me was just confusion.
I went over to Tony and Debbie, who live directly across the road.
Tony had somehow slept straight through it. When he did wake up
he was not a happy chappy. Debbie and I were just like, far out, what’s happening, this is just insane. I just don’t believe this. I was walking
around in bare feet for God’s sake. Water was everywhere and cracks, I could feel the cracks and you knew things were skewed, unbalanced.
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Nothing was level anymore. You could feel it. Don came over then to
see if I was okay. Tony and Debbie were going to take off so he said, ‘Come over to our place, we’ve got the fire going, just come over here.’ It must have been a couple of hours before the water sort of slowed
up. I can’t remember the exact time but it did eventually slow down. You could hear it. It had been like a gushing noise and you could see
these Rotorua type geyser things—I had no idea where it was coming from. I thought maybe it was the pipes and things? Tony thought the
river had come over and then it was hells teeth, are we going to have a tsunami and have to get to higher ground?
I finally got hold of my husband—my ex-husband. Actually, he got
hold of me.
He said, ‘Are you okay? ‘No!’
‘He said, ‘Well get in your car and come over.’ ‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘there’s water all round me.’ ‘What!’
He was over in Brighton you see and they just had nothing, not
that time, nothing at all over there. Like they knew they had been in an earthquake but he had none of the damage we had. He said, ‘The kids and I will come and get you.’
I wasn’t so sure, but I said, ‘Okay, I’m over at Don’s.’
By the time they got there we were all sitting in Don’s lounge. He
and his family had only just got back from America. You wouldn’t
believe it; they’d had their big overseas trip and only just got home. Didn’t even have milk in the house. Got home, fell into bed, jumped
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up next morning and that was it. Their house is on a lean and they
are still living in that house at the moment, its incredible. And then Craig arrived with the girls, my oldest daughter was on crutches. She’d
broken her leg skating the week before—and yeah, he couldn’t believe
it. He said he came around Avonside Drive before they closed it off, around by the dip, past the wee bridge down by Kerrs Road and around
the corner there and said it was just mind boggling. And do you know, the night before it happened I had cleaned the house. The kids were
away and I totally cleaned everything up so when the kids came back, they’d come back to a spotless house. It was never cleaned again. Not like it was that night.
Before we left I went back to the house. ‘I’ve got to go home,’ I
said, ‘I’ve got to go in and see what’s happened.’ Cosmetically it didn’t
look too damaged but when you walked into it you felt the sickness, because of the lean—the way it had sunk. What was crazy was, before
we actually left, I insisted on hanging out the washing. What a bizarre thing to do. It was in the washing machine and I wasn’t going to have
it left in there smelling. So I hung the washing out—standing in water. My ex was standing there going, ‘What the hell?’ He thought I was crazy. Perhaps I was.
I was quite stunned once we left our area. There were cracks and
bumps and things but there was nothing like what we had around us. It wasn’t until a few days later and people got their power back that you
actually understood what had happened. We were sort of isolated, just
like pockets of us—Bexley was really bad, Dallington, and Avonside, all round through here was really bad.
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The kids and I ended up going to stay with my girlfriend in Opawa.
Afterwards my brother came up from Timaru and took all the kids back down to his place for about two weeks, until we knew if we could
go back into the house. It took me quite a while to come around to it. I had this tiredness—just didn’t have that oomph. Sleep was a problem for a long time. Sleep was hard to come by. Nightmares, you know, and my kids too. End of world sort of stuff. I was scared in that house for
a long time but eventually I thought okay, get on with it. It’s probably going to be a write-off, it may take a couple of years but you’ll get a new house down the track. In the meantime, I thought we can stay
here. We can live here. Three or four of the neighbours had moved out straight away but we stayed. I thought we’d be all right.
No, wrong. It was awful. Every time something went by the whole
place shuddered and rattled. It wasn’t pleasant but I had in my mind
that eventually we’d be okay and that’s what I tried to tell the kids. ‘Everything will be all right, we’ll be okay.’ I even got a video put down the drains and they were okay. There were a couple of wee cracks but we
started to use the toilet again just before February. My eldest daughter
had just started at Avonside Girls. It was a big thing. She’d been going to Chisnallwood School for the last couple of years and that was quite
a distance. Now all she had to do was walk down the road to Avonside. Everything was going well. I had a good job. I’d bought the house. I’d had a pretty hard time with my marriage break-up but now I could see
ahead, see that life was going to be okay. Even the garage was going to be fixed. Yeah, on the morning of the twenty-second the car went back
in the garage. They’d come out that morning and fixed the garage door.
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I was so rapt, I could push the door open and shut and I thought, yay, small miracles and then two hours later—well, you know the story, it was all stuffed again.
Melissa was on the trampoline and I was by the clothesline and it
started to shake. I remember looking at the house and thinking, oh no! The ground was jumping, the house was just flexing and banging and it was incredible being outside looking at it and my little dog was running up and down barking. The cat went flying off the fence
and just took off. I imagined everything opening up and whole thing
disappearing. I was trying to reach out for Melissa who by now was screaming. I was looking at her and she was looking at me and it was
like, this is it, this is it. The noise and the shaking was just incredible. Your whole head felt like it was disengaged from your body and you couldn’t stand. We’d actually been about to get in the car to go and get Melissa a pair of running shoes, which meant we would have been in
town. Knowing now what happened there, that’s not a good thought. When I finally got to her my initial reaction was thank God Melissa’s here, and then it was, oh my God, my other two. I’ve got to get my other children.
We grabbed the dog and got to the car really quickly, drove out
of the driveway and at that stage there was no liquefaction. We got down Retreat Road, across the Swanns Road Bridge—the car just
went cajunck off that one—I knew we probably shouldn’t have driven over it, and then I went to turn into River Road and it was gone—
just gone! Okay detour. We got down to Swanns Road, turned onto
Stanmore Road and I remember looking across and seeing the town,
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and seeing clouds of dust and the smell… by that stage I’d got on my
cell phone and rung my birth mother in Auckland because Melissa was
just hysterical. I said, ‘Look, talk to Nanna!’ She’d only been down a couple of weeks ago and we’d been driving along the same road, by the
Richmond Workingmen’s Club, the side of which was now gone. I was muttering by then, ‘This is bad, this is bad, this is really bad.’
We got down to North Avon, turned down North Avon, got out
to the River and River Road again and just before you got to Banks
Avenue, it looked like a damn creek, there was water everywhere and I looked and thought bugger it, let’s just go for it. At one point the car got stuck and I thought I could feel it going backwards. I’m thinking
we’re done for, and I said to Melissa, ‘Get ready to get out and run.’ But then somehow the car got through. We got to the school, which is
where I also worked, but I hadn’t been rostered on that day. I remember first of all hearing the children—hearing screaming—and I saw Rapinda one of the Indian ladies come along and she tripped over the
tarseal, the tarseal was all up and I saw her fall over. I must have been
in a daze because I could hear all this screaming and looking at the building I could see all the bricks had moved and yet for some reason
I walked straight in the entrance like I always do. Then I thought what the hell are you doing in here, get out! And Melissa’s like, ‘Mum!
Mum!’ We go out into the schoolyard and there are children crying, wailing, teachers crying, water coming up and it was just the worst
kind of scene. Sheer terror and panic and someone said, ‘The towns
gone down, there’s people dead, there’s people everywhere.’ I remember staying and helping for a while until a friend, Marge, said, ‘Look, take
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your kids and go home.’ I thought I don’t know what I’m going to go home to. Then I saw some friends of ours, a Japanese family who were
really good friends—they used to live right next door to us on Retreat Road—and they said to me ‘Have you seen your home?’ ‘Why?’ I said. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I’m sorry, he said, ‘your place is under water.’
‘But I was just at home a while ago, and it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘Well it is now,’ he said, ‘you’ve got a lake.’
So we got back in the car again and went down Gayhurst Road.
We got down to about where St Paul’s was and had to walk the rest
of the way home, which was pretty bad—it was—it was bad. There
were people walking from town and you could see there were injuries. Things that kids shouldn’t see. I was just so thankful Melissa had been at home when it happened.
We got down Retreat Road and the water was waist deep—it was
deep—it was just a lake out to where we were and I sort of stopped
then and started to cry and there was this guy in a car and he said, ‘Where are you going?’
I said, ‘My house is down there.’
‘Jump in,’ he said. He had stuff on the floor of the car, it felt
dodgy as, but he drove us down home—got us home—for which, you know, thank you.
I had the keys in my hand and we got to the door. I sort of looked
at it and thought what will I do. I was just stunned—it was surreal—
everything was familiar but it was just so wrong. Nothing was right. I
couldn’t get the back door open until finally I kicked it open and got
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inside. We walked into the house and there wasn’t too much down, not
like the first time. A lot got broken that first time. The children came in
and Melissa walked into her bedroom and her wallpaper had flipped, just like that, and there were certainly a lot more cracks in the house. It looked really bad, it did. She just turned right around and left. She never went into the house again. I just stood there thinking what am I going to do?
One of the neighbours came down, Peter, he’s a wonderful guy, and
he said, ‘Why don’t you come down to our place, we’re okay.’ And so we
did, we ended up going down to his place for the night. Then people started coming back and other neighbours came too. Peter had a brand
new house and although he’d got water all through it was still like a kind of safe haven. We had an area, I had my dog over there, and
I’d had dinner all prepared for that night so we had—I think it was nachos. I sat there thinking the day had started like any other; I had an
organised day ahead of me. I was all okay, I was into it, life was good and a few hours later my children were crying and saying ‘Mum, we just want to go away, we want to go away, we don’t want to be here.’
I’d written on the door of our house, We’re okay, we’re down at
Peter’s on Retreat Road, and I’d left the number there too and
sometime after dark this guy came and knocked on the door. He said, ‘Is Tracy here? I’m a friend of your brother, Miles. I’ve just come to see if you guys are okay and does anyone want to come back to Timaru with me, I’ve got two spare seats.’ I’d never met him before but it turned
out he was a teacher from Mountainview School there, so my eldest
daughter Melissa who was thirteen and one of the twins, Lucy, who
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was nine, went back to Timaru that night. They got back there around one or two in the morning and I was glad they had gone because it
was a bloody terrible night. God it was awful. Scary. There were so just many shakes and rattles and sirens going off, it was just horrible.
The next day I talked to Miles, and he said, ‘Get yourself packed
up, we’ll come and get you, you’re coming to Timaru. And yeah, that’s
what we did, packed up to leave. I think I was probably… yeah, probably
stunned for a long time after that. Miles took over and said, you know, ‘You’ve got to be here—you and the girls can’t stay up there. You can’t stay in that house.’ And so we left the next day.
It was bloody awful. I cried my eyes out. When we got onto Linwood
Ave there were houses down, yeah, I remember seeing a house totally collapsed. Then we drove down to Eastgate and saw all those shops
on the corner and I thought, oh God, there will be someone dead in
there. There was a dairy that would have been open, and they were all down—seeing all that raw… yeah, I was just bawling my eyes out. And
like friends—I wanted to see friends to tell them I was leaving and I
couldn’t, we just had to get out. There were floods of people leaving. The whole way back to Timaru, it was very very hard. We had the dog
in the car and at one stage the wheels of the car touched the rumble line on the side of the road and the dog was very jumpy about that. He wasn’t right at all. His nerves were frayed and so were ours.
I truly appreciated what my brother had done for us, I really did.
I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. I knew with the
liquefaction and everything else that I couldn’t do this again, I just
couldn’t. This was huge. This wasn’t going to be fixed, not for a long
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time. Not for years. I am one of the lucky ones. We’ve done quite a few trips to Christchurch since. We still love Christchurch, but I’ve
talked to people who are still there now and they’ve all got problems. They’ve got issues with sleeping; they’ve got issues with nerves. You’ve got people who’ve got the best marriages, people who have been best
friends for years, and suddenly nothing’s right. I think more people will go. I think people for their own sanity are going to have to find
somewhere. We’ve had a lot of people coming to stay with us. Some are coming down for a break this weekend. Just getting away from the
mundane task of taking the kids to school, going to the supermarket, driving down buggered roads—trying to get out of your damn driveway
with all those diggers in your way. People are sick of it, and so even a little bit of time away—it helps.
It’s not like it just happened once is it. It’s that they keep on
happening that gets people. It’s the waiting, the uncertainty, the not knowing, the when and the if, none of that helps. Then they get on
the TV and say, ‘There is such and such chance of a six point whatever happening.’
And you are going, ‘Shut-up! Shut-up! Leave it alone. We don’t
need to hear that shit.’
We don’t need to hear that—it’s just so big, it’s huge. I really wish
Don and the people who are still in the orange zone, the people in Retreat Road who’ve been there since September last year, I wish they
could know what was going to happen. It seems so complex, all these issues with the TC3—red/blue, blue/green, or whatever it is, it’s just delaying them more and I have this feeling that things are going to
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start going bad. People are just…there’s going to be huge emotional
issues, people’s relationships are going to fail, there’s going to be kids with huge problems, and nobody, surely, wants to see that.
June was horrendous. I was standing on the driveway here in Timaru
talking with the neighbour and she goes, ‘Shit! That’s an earthquake!’ And it was true. The next thing the hedges all around us going like mad, I stood there feeling like a trapped rabbit. I thought, not again. I felt really really bad because you don’t sense many down here and I knew if you did feel one it had to be a big one. There was two that day wasn’t
there. The one afterwards was even bigger. I was crying you know, it’s all happening again. And then Christmas! How much more can these
people take. You hear Cantabrians are going to stay strong and stick together and I mean I appreciate all that but I actually think now that
I’m quite pleased to be down here. I say that, and then I feel like I’ve abandoned everyone. Ideally, I would want to be in Christchurch… its everything I know. But it’s hard.
All these strong emotions, all the fears and those horrible things
that mess with your head. Not that the people around here haven’t been
kind. More like absolutely fantastic. I’ve made some really good friends down here. People have sent around meals, helped with blankets and
what not, you get to see just how wonderful people can be. But there
are a lot of people in Christchurch I miss. I miss the familiar. My home, my old friends, all that has been ripped away and none of it was my choice. Not my choice at all.
Loud music helps when I’m angry. Peaceful music when I want to
settle down. I didn’t drink much prior to the earthquakes. I do have a
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drink now. I’d given up smoking—well pretty much given up smoking, that comes and goes—but I bought a packet on the way home just a minute ago. Right now, today, you live for the day. You don’t think too
far ahead. I don’t like to get too excited about anything anymore… because… well, for a while now anything good just seems to turn to shit. I bought the house. Everything was fine. The kids were getting
on good at school. I had a fantastic job at the school, I was permanent
staff; the job was there for as long as I wanted it. Everything was good. I liked where I lived and I was going to do the house up, then it all just changed. I find it hard now to get too excited that things are going to be better down the track. I learnt a lot about that when our son died— the child I lost. He would be eleven now but he was stillborn. I suppose
I learnt then that you can do everything right, you don’t smoke, you
don’t drink, you don’t do anything, just what you are supposed to do, but things still go wrong. Drastically wrong. And I remember what went through my head back then—why don’t you just do what you want?
I don’t know. If I could look into the future I’d wish to be back
in Bracken Street, in Christchurch. It would be nice also to have a companion, its hard going, three children by yourself—it’s tough—
yeah, it is hard. But anyway, I haven’t got time to look; I’m running every minute of the day from here to there. Imagine that though, a
nice man, settle down, a nice home, just have yourself a quiet, peaceful, uneventful life. A little white picket fence, no drama and throw in a rose garden—no, actually, since this is my own personal fantasy, let’s make that a lavender garden.
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Seriously, I really would like it all to settle down and for things to
go back to normal again but the reality is, it isn’t. It won’t, it’s not going
to happen. Not back to like it was. And that all takes a toll. If you’re not careful you can get beaten down, wear yourself right out. Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m tough, but I’m not tough—I don’t know. I’d like to do something with my life. I’d love to be at Teachers College, that or
something similar. Life is too short to have regrets isn’t it. Maybe what you need to do is seize the moment, seize the opportunity. That’s what
I’m looking for and if I ever see one in front of me, hell yes, I’ll go for it with both hands.
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