My Life’s Work - Marnie Barrell

My Life’s Work Marnie Barrell

And Kindness Lay All About Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Marnie Barrell As a physical location I’ve always liked it. I can’t say I’m emotionally attached to it like some but yes; I’ve always liked it. I think of it as

Fendalton without the price tag. It’s got the wonderful river view and

the proximity to town and the nice old houses, everything you’d want, so yes, I was fond of it. And in a way, now that it’s wrecked, I’ve felt

even more affection for it, thinking what a shame, what a damn shame.

Then there’s a part of me that says be careful, you—I—can’t afford to

be this attached to the place. I have to start withdrawing myself bit by bit. Tell myself it’s just a patch of land. That it doesn’t matter, wherever

you go there will be a good neighbourhood. So it both matters and it doesn’t. I’m drawn two ways on that.

Right now I feel keenly aware that I am a separated woman and

that I have no superannuation, that all I have got in the world is this

house and there is absolutely nothing I can do to save it or to save its value. Everything that happens now causes it to deteriorate that little

bit more. ‘Oh well, easy come, easy go.’ I’ve actually heard people say that. But I‘ve only got one thing to leave my daughter, one thing that

has practical value in the worldly sense, and that’s my home and goods.

You might say it’s my life’s work and if it’s ever going to be of any

useful value, it needs to be converted into some sort of liquidity very soon. The problem is that while the world is moving on, clearly East

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Christchurch and in my particular case, Avonside, is not. We are all

sitting here twiddling our thumbs, waiting for a decision to be made about our homes, about our land, and meanwhile we can do no other

than watch the property market elsewhere go up and up. Excluding us, as it does, from more and more possibilities.

I’m nervous. I feel as though I have to be very careful. In my head

I have the value of it, what I understand to be it’s worth. I have my

rights the same as everybody, but every time I hear a horror story about insurance, I think, oh crikey, it’s never going to be what it could have been.

When it came, it was the most frightening thing I’ve ever

experienced and it seemed to arrive completely out of the blue. In

two seconds I am on my feet and into a doorway almost before I realise what I’ve done. Strangely I am quite lucid and calling the

dog in the calmest voice I can muster while at the same time I can

hear my daughter crashing out of bed in the next room screaming ‘Earthquake! Earthquake!’ My first thought is this must be the alpine fault, what else could it be. My second thought is there’s a very old

brick chimney on one side of me and yes, another very old brick chimney on the other side and this is clearly enough of a shake to bring them down. My third—and this is the worst thought—is that the door frame I’m standing under is probably no protection at all. So

for the next forty seconds of that frenzied, violent, terrifying noise, I am very frightened indeed. I actually thought these might be my

last minutes, that if those chimneys came down it would be, quite certainly, decidedly, fatal.

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And then it stopped, and nothing totally awful had happened. At

least not to us personally. Oh there was broken glass all over the place

and a lot of shouting to and from neighbours over the fences as we went out into the back garden. I could hear people yelling out all round

the neighbourhood so I joined in, ‘Everybody all right? Everybody all right?’ and they all cried out, ‘Yes.’ Somehow that little effort seemed to use up what was left of my energy. I spent the rest of the night slumped in a garden chair out there on the lawn with my duvet over my head

and a transistor radio in my ear. God knows how I even knew where

my transistor radio was but somehow I found it. My daughter and her boyfriend decided, quite bravely, that they could go back into the house

to sleep. In the morning I discovered that our old swimming pool had disgorged almost it’s entire contents and that water now covered pretty well the entire garden, except the spot where I had happened to sit.

As the dawn arrived it lit up one of those beautiful spring mornings.

A thing of beauty compared to what had happened only a few hours before. I don’t know that anyone noticed. Out on the street everybody was walking up and down with stunned expressions on their faces. They

stared intently at the sand volcanoes and marvelled at the way so many chimneys had fallen down; mine not amongst them thank God. My

abiding memory however—the picture that sticks in my mind of that morning—is of somebody wheeling out a barbecue into the middle of the road and coffee being made while people in their dressing gowns hugged one another.

February, that was different. I am a piano teacher, that’s how I make

my living. I wasn’t at home when the second one, the big one, came. I

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was teaching at a local school. In a room with a little girl at the piano

and nothing else but a rack of flimsy plastic stuck together chairs. Once

more it came completely out of the blue, in an instance it had bowled

me to my knees. I found myself clutching at those plastic chairs and

thinking a piano would be a good thing to get under at this moment.

Then, as I turned and looked over towards it, the piano seemed to leap

in the air and whoosh, thump onto its face. Fortunately, the little girl had had the presence of mind to leave her place at the keyboard and dive under those plastic chairs. I couldn’t get under them myself, I am far too big for that, I simply sat there looking at this enormous bank

of fluorescent lights swinging about and smacking into the ceiling on either side. Surely, I thought, this will all come down, but it didn’t and finally we could stand and flee outside where the children started screaming all over again.

I think it was the shock of seeing how torn up their playground was.

They were weeping and clutching each other and imploring us to give

them cell phones but I just bolted. I said to my little student, ‘You’re okay, there are people here with you and your mum knows where you are. My daughter has no idea where I am and I need to find her.’

I drove like hell down Avonside Drive, which could have gone

horribly wrong because the road was under water and I had no idea

what was underneath. I found my daughter on our front lawn. The

tears were flowing and she was holding onto the dog for grim death.

She kept repeating, ‘People must have been killed, people must have

been killed.’ And me thinking, yes, they probably have been. It would have been optimistic to think nobody was killed. We were so buoyed

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up after September, that it happened in the middle of the night. That

nobody had been hurt. But in broad daylight it was clearly not going to be same. Not in the middle of the day, not at lunchtime.

The aftershocks were huge and frequent and we sat there miserably

on the front lawn clutching at the ground every time there was another one. I was eating a stale baguette and wishing I could go to the toilet but not daring to go into the house. People were running white faced

down the street saying the Cathedral’s down, and I’m saying which

Cathedral? As it turned out it was both Cathedrals, and nobody in their wildest dreams thought that would happen.

After a time my daughter and her boyfriend got in the car which

didn’t have much in the tank and went out to see if they could get some

petrol. It took them an hour and a half to get to the corner and of course no gas. They said the people in the BP station were just handing out milk and bread hand over fist to anybody who wanted it. It was all they

could do. We watched a helicopter flying over to what we now know was the CTV building. Clearly there was a fire going on somewhere

and our hearts were in our mouths about who and how many may have died. Then reports of the numbers started coming in. The deaths and

injuries, it was truly shocking. A day later I had a very tearful call from my ex-husband. He rang from Auckland to tell us his brother-in-law had died in the PGG building collapse.

My first instinct was flight. I made sure I had enough gas in the

car and just went for it. Fled to my mother who lives up in Amberley.

I was there for a couple of months, commuting between there and the city once things settled down a bit. It was a long way to work but

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commuting was nothing compared to getting a night’s sleep. I did the same after the next earthquake too. I just felt that little bit safer 50k

north of the city. A place where you didn’t feel anything except the very biggest of the aftershocks, and where there was another adult around.

Normally I live here by myself with my daughter who was, what,

nineteen at the time. She and her boyfriend were not so bad, not so

fazed out. Personally, I needed some adult back up, which I suppose

is a bit back to front. They were very brave and gung-ho about it all, and I, who am not normally an apprehensive person, was feeling very

fearful indeed. I simply didn’t want to be here. It was almost a physical thing. Obviously, there was a very definite sense that while it was all very well me being up there, if there was another big one, my one clear

duty would be to dive into the car and get back to Christchurch to

save my daughter. I suppose we all do what we can, and yeah, we did the best we could.

To be honest I still find it very difficult. Deeply, deeply unnerving.

There is this thing that says, at any minute, without a second’s notice, the earth could do all this and worse. And then there’s the other

thing that says harden up. Goodness me, there have been what, ten

thousand or more shocks so far and only three have done any real

damage. Hmmm, but with every one of them my heart is in my mouth from the first rattle. Even though we know the vast majority are not

going to be damaging, or even frightening, still, the minute you feel

one, everything stops and the adrenalin races, and everywhere I go I’m thinking how would I get out of here? What could fall on me?

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Six weeks after the big one I was still sleeping in my clothes on the

sofa with the telly on full blast because this room feels safe, there’s no chimney over it, and also because I couldn’t go to sleep without a lot

of noise and light around me. I’ve become so vigilant, so nervy, that when a truck goes past, even if I’m in another city, I’m still jumping out of my skin, looking all around.

Having confessed all that, there are some ways in which you

could say I am a lot more laid back. I’ve never been a particularly fussy person but you might say I’ve become a little less fussy still. I take what happens now in my stride. If there are more or less people

for a meal than there were before, so be it. The house is not up to scratch, the garden looks like hell, there’s stuff on the floor I don’t care anymore. And do you know what, I think in my case, with my

particular personality, it’s probably been a good thing to lighten up

a bit. Take life a bit more as it comes. Nor am I the only one. I

know people who were previously very house proud and fussy, whose house now is quite messy. The garden has gone to wrack and ruin

and they say they don’t care. They’ve lost in some way their previous

attachment to their house and to their way of life. They just feel there’s better stuff to do.

It feels so damn discouraging doing something like gardening,

particularly here where we’re now zoned orange. At this moment I have no idea if this house is written off or not. I think it is, because

the insurance people think it’s written off. But I don’t know about the

section and quite honestly, I don’t want to build again on this piece of land. I want high and dry and a long way from here. But the situation

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is what it is, there’s nothing I can do to affect it and that’s a thing too, the sense that there’s nothing you can do to affect anything.

Subconsciously there’s quite a ferment going on, sorting out the

things you can control from the things you can’t. And in some ways, that’s been good, I’ve become less particular about things that once

would have bugged me. But the other side of that is a certain fearful fatalism that stuff can come out of the blue, just blow you out of the

water and there’s nothing to be done about it. You can’t foresee it, you can’t cope with it, you can’t mitigate it in any way. All about us

the churning wheels of bureaucracy are whirling. The Government, CERA, the Council, the insurance companies—and there again is the

feeling that there is little or nothing you can do to affect anything at all. That your only choice is to sit and await their pleasure.

I’m not usually a particularly patient person but I’ve had to sit and

wait patiently for the last 18 months. Perhaps along the way I have got

a bit more resigned and a bit more patient because as everybody says, there are other people in a far worse position and as long as you’ve

got a roof over your head and food on your table you’re doing better

than many. That’s pared me down a bit, made me think about what’s important here. The need to choose my battles carefully, to work out the things that are really important, because there are just so many things that I have no choice about at all.

I’ve been fortunate not to lose too many bits and pieces and anyway

the things I totally care about are not in Christchurch any more, they’ve all been shifted up to mum’s place now. Perhaps I’m just that

little bit more fussy and vigilant about putting cups to the back of the

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bench, shutting cupboard doors and putting a bar of wood through the

handles, doing the little things you can do as a matter of routine. But the truth is stuff just doesn’t matter so much anymore. That there’s food

on the table, that we’re physically safe, and have a roof over our heads.

That is significant. Knowing where my handbag, my keys, my wallet, a torch and my shoes are, before I go to sleep, that the car’s got a full tank of gas, those things are the new important.

I’m sure it’s the same for most people, after an event like this your

concerns change. Perhaps not change so much, more like our awareness of what is meaningful sharpens. Becomes more finely honed. For me

it’s my relationship with my daughter. Keeping her safe is number one, and keeping our animals safe too. There’s some other stuff; my most

beloved things, the equity in my home, they also very much matter at the moment.

Peering down on it all it’s actually been a fearful year for me, not

only the earthquake but also because my sister died of cancer a month

ago. Really dreadful things have been happening this year, and it’s… I don’t sit down and numerate the things that I value very often, but you

start to get a sense that it’s all getting a bit more focused in that regard.

Are they on the, don’t matter page, or do they belong on to the, does matter page?

I guess we’re all teetering along stressed and nervy and running on

adrenalin. So perhaps anything that happens is going to feel like it’s more drastic—I don’t know. Obviously, it was always going to be a

drastic thing for my sister to die of cancer, there was no way that was

ever going to be good. But with the smaller things, in some ways it

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makes you more resilient. Oh well, it’s just another broken cup, rather

than that was my grandmother’s china and I can’t live without it. Then

sometimes I catch myself doing two things at the same time. Having

a little cry over something—my Grandmothers cup—even while the voice in my head is saying, ‘Hey, it’s just another thing.’

Probably everybody’s affected psychologically—that feeling of

fatalistic despair—will this ever be over. We feel less hopeful than we did a year ago. A year ago we thought a lot more would be up and running, that a lot more progress would have been made. I do have admiration for the people who have actually been down the holes

making things work, but I am incensed with the length of time it is taking the City Council to do anything effective. Okay, I suppose they are behind the people who are down the holes, but the people down the

holes have done a good job. The people that are making the decisions, I am much less sure about them.

I have the feeling the City Council is descending into chaos and

I have grave concerns about how well they are able to manage what’s

going on. I’m spitting tacks about the city manager’s—Marryatt’s—pay rate. Pay rise. Of all the ill-timed, insensitive things to do, I imagine

the whole city is incensed about that. It just reinforces the idea that nobody in that room knows what they are doing—that it’s all cronies and favouritism and nobody is actually on top of the job.

Official people have been zero help to me. Those who have actually

cheered me the most are all those kind people from the churches and

other organizations. So called ordinary people, who come round saying, ‘Are you okay? Is there anything you need? Here’s a bit of baking I’ve

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brought you.’ My own church community, some of them have been bravely helping as well—even while they too are suffering. They have

been staunch, they have lead by example, they have not cut and run.

Sometimes that can make it more difficult to make decisions. I don’t know if it’s brave to start again somewhere else or cowardly. I do know

there are people that don’t have a choice at all. That makes you think.

Makes you want to harden up, don’t be a sook. I feel very grateful that

I do have some choices, at least theoretically, because there are an awful

lot of people who don’t. What I might actually do with my supposed choices I don’t know yet, the jury is still out on that.

In one way it’s started to feel like a jail sentence that’s going on and

on and on and you have no idea when, or if, it’s going to get better than

this. Usually with a jail sentence you know how long it’s going to be… right now I feel as though a two-year jail sentence has just turned into a life sentence with the prospect that this could go on for decades, and the longer we wait, the more anxiety there is that EQC and CERA and the insurance companies are not going to see us through it.

There is certainly one voice in my head that says, ‘Let’s go somewhere

else, let’s just not be here’. And I love Christchurch. I came back to Christchurch from Auckland after my marriage broke up seven years

ago, and it felt like home. My old stamping ground, and that gave me a lot of joy. It felt like this is where home was for me. Now I don’t

think I feel so attached to it anymore and I’m sad about that. The

importance of this place to me has been stripped away. I used to come back to Christchurch with my hopes high and a feeling of coming

home, now I come back with a sinking heart, thinking oh hell, more of

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this. I’m a person who stresses quite easily and where once there was peace and quiet, the feeling that I was safe… that’s gone… I never feel safe anymore.

I was taught music as a child and I had an aptitude for it. My

mother was musical and so my sister and I just chugged straight ahead

doing grade after grade and then diploma after diploma as long as

it took. As I grew into a grumpy, solitary, introverted, bad-tempered

and ill-natured teenager, music was something I actually took a certain amount of pride in. This was a side of me, separate from school, where I

really excelled, really knew what I was doing. Not that it ever occurred to me to play for anybody, never, this was just my private little thing.

At university I did other stuff, psychology and what have you, never

music. It was not really until I was in my late twenties, when I met my husband and he was musical, that we started playing chamber music together. I kind of rediscovered what I once had and when my

daughter was born, music teaching suddenly seemed like the totally obvious thing to do. As soon as I did it, I thought this is what I do. I felt a real sense of vocation, I care about this and I’m good at it.

I suppose the BA in Psychology was supposed to be the gravy train

occupation but I never used it. It wasn’t until we went up to Auckland

that I found a subject, other than music, that I was really interested in.

I became curious about theology. Not content just to take on board

the warm fluffy stuff, I actually wanted to dig into it in some depth, to know what was real and what could be relied on and to find out what

was just wishful thinking. That really mattered to me, and that was what the theology degree did for me. In some ways it was unsettling because

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so little could be shown to be factual and solid, but on the other hand, liberating because you are entitled to an opinion, and whatever opinion

you held on these things, you would be in good company with highly

intelligent people who have really thought about it a lot. In a very real way I found it deeply fascinating—the things I learnt and thought

about meant a lot to me. In fact, these days, as well as a music teacher, I’m a writer of hymns. Doing that degree gave me ample material from

which to set words and music that are appropriate for the world that we live in now. More relevant I believe than an older theology with its Victorian cosmology and moral outlook.

I have a belief in Christianity and a belief that people are basically

good. While there may be a lot that militates against that, when the

stuff hits the fan and people are reduced to what’s really important, they still surprise us in the best of ways. And yes, we all know the minute the awfulness stops it’s a very human thing to start blindly

building our house of cards all over again. Perhaps we women need to

forget what’s unpleasant or nobody would ever have that second child, would they. Seriously though, there are many things in our way of life

that encourage insularity and greed and competition and I don’t like it.

But let me tell you something. There is an elderly woman with a certain

amount of disability lives on this street; every time there is a big quake there are three or four people standing outside her fence hollering, are you okay. That tells us something. Something I like to hear.

I’ve always liked to think of myself as a realist, someone who didn’t

like to dodge facts. In the past I loved to plan ahead, and very much

disliked any unpleasant surprises… well, you could say that’s changed.

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People and places that were once part of life are no longer here. I

feel exceedingly sad about the Anglican Cathedral; it’s great interior, within which many wonderful things have happened—so many

memories, so many experiences I have loved. But not just that, there are so many other parts of our city, so much of our heritage, that has

disappeared. It’s not easy to look at all this destruction. You can really

feel incensed about so many buildings and places that mattered to us, then months turn into a year and you start to think, oh well, if it’s

gone it’s gone. There is more than our opinions and our sentiments

and our nostalgia to deal with here, they have got to be safe. And if

the ground isn’t suitable then it isn’t suitable and that’s the end of it.

But they better get it right. We have to build stuff that’s

worthwhile. I really hope it is not going to be all tilt-slabs with dark

glass. We don’t want to see that sort of crap filling our city. This is

their chance to add some colour and a bit of quirkiness. You know, I’m saying this, but it suddenly occurs to me I’m nearly sixty years

old and I don’t know if I’m going to actually see it—live to see it. I really don’t. That’s a sad thought but then someone once said, faith

is planting a tree when you’re ninety-five, so perhaps I’ll keep that in mind.

Work-wise, times have been, well, let’s say a little chaotic. Lots of

kids, as you’d expect, have been emotionally all over the place. Some

have left town and of course there have been schools out of action

for long periods. By this time I’m usually all booked up, but not this year. I’ve had to go down to Work and Income and say I’m not able to put food on the table and that’s the first time I’ve ever had to do

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that. Hold my hand out like that. Okay I never get paid over the long

holidays, but usually it doesn’t matter, I’ve got a bit of padding in the

system, but not this year… and I have to say Work and Income, they were good. I expected to be humiliated and shamed by having to do this, but no, they made it okay.

I won’t pretend life wasn’t something of a roller coaster even

before all this happened. Just before the time of the first earthquakes I was feeling rather sad. I’d been having thoughts of my daughter eventually leaving home, as they do, and asking myself if this was going to be my life. Sitting of an evening on my deck with a glass

of wine in hand and absolutely nobody around who might know or

care about what my day was like. So much of my life had been about caring for my child, about dealing with the aftermath of a marriage

breakup, and about re-establishing myself here. Around September

we had just come back from a family holiday overseas. It had been

lovely, but soon after we came back I began to feel clinically anxious.

I was feeling that a period of my life was coming to an end and I didn’t have another phase in mind. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I also felt that whatever it might be, I was going to be doing it on

my own. That’s when I hit the Prozac. And here’s the crazy thing, the earthquake gave me something else to think about, something other than my own miserable skin. And do you know what, it’s connected

me with people I needed to connect with and it’s brought me out of potential isolation. Right now I’m living in a household of six

people and I love it. It’s really good for me. It’s a case of whose here tonight, okay what will we stick on the barbie? Yeah, even though

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I’ve thought of myself as an introvert, it’s a way of life that suits me.

I thrive better with community connections and people around me.

An earthquake is something that you can’t do anything about, it’s

happened, almost before you know it. And these last couple of years have certainly affected my priorities… my life. There were a lot of things

I was going to do that will not now happen. But the consequences

flowing on from this experience have been many, not all of them bad.

It’s made me, for one, realise that the personal things are up to you. So, if I’m sometimes sitting alone on the patio with a glass of wine, I hope it will be because I want to, not because I have to.

Something else I’ve realised; you can have your life so fossilised,

so fixed in your expectations that you know what’s going to happen

moment to moment. Today I feel it’s actually better not to know what’s

going to happen. That it’s more enlivening and invigorating to deal with stuff, with life, as it comes. In a funny way the earthquake has

been a contributor to that. It’s even got me out of the habit of too much forward planning. I mean okay, yes, I suppose if you were to push me about the future I’d like all the usual. A nice little house that suits

me, a place for my daughter to come to when she wants to see me. My

health, of course, and to have a flourishing piano practice… actually, do you know what I’d really love. I’d love to be like my own music

teacher. A splendidly eccentric old lady, dripping with glorious jewels and rainbow colours and to hell with what anybody thought of her. A

woman of devout faith and warm goodwill and really good with kids, and if somebody said the same of me at the end of my life, then yes, oh yes, I would be well pleased.

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