Expendable – Barbara Stephens

You Think They Don’t Affect You But Perhaps They Do. Anne Kaminski

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Anne Kaminski

We’d seemed to come out of it with not a lot of damage. This was September and we felt we had been fortunate.

The dog woke me. Just before the earthquake struck. My reaction

was to run for the door, but my husband, who went to the floor between the bed and the wall said, ‘Don’t! ‘Forget the door frame, you are safer on the floor.’ So there we were, both on the floor and having a

conversation while the shaking continued and saying poor Wellington, this must be the Alpine Fault, the power was just awesome. And when it was over we went outside. It was a beautiful morning, there was frost

and you could see all the lights and it was very still, no noise at all.

We thought everything was fine until my husband walked around the

house and tripped over some bricks at the front door. It wasn’t until then that we realised our big double-storey chimney had collapsed and

actually gone right through the fence into the next-door neighbours’ property. After that we went back to bed. There was not much else to

do. As I said, it was so very quiet, there was no noise, nobody was out, so back to bed seemed like a good idea.

In the light of day we discovered the tap was not going to allow us

a cup of tea. We had water because we had a well; something both the

neighbours and we were grateful for over the next few days, it meant we could wash and so on, but of course there was no power, that was

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out for a few days. Apart from that, September, well, it sort of paled in

significance after February didn’t it. I don’t really remember a lot more about it.

In February I’d been gardening all morning. It was such a lovely day

and afterwards I had an early lunch downstairs. My job in the afternoon

was to finish stripping some wallpaper upstairs. So far I had managed only the bottom half of the walls because I’d been a bit nervous about

getting up the ladder, what with the on-going shocks. Today though, I was going to get it completed. So, I set up the ladder, got the bucket ready and looking at the wall I thought this will probably take about three hours and—you know what—before I do this I think I’m going to have one of my little power naps.

Well, I’d just layed down on the bed with the dog when suddenly

the television is flying across the room. The dog leapt off the bed. I

screamed at him to stop because he was going towards the door and

then I went into the turtle position between the bed and the wall.

Hmm, it was a lot different this time. It didn’t just go from side to

side, it went up and down and the noise was absolutely horrific. Then

the plaster started falling on me and the floor in the bedroom was no longer where it should have been. I knew then… well, I actually thought I was going to die. The noise was horrific and everything was falling, everything was…. the house gave such a big groan and then it

just went… the top storey just went over like that and then it stopped.

When I got up the dog was fine. I looked around and found my cell phone. I thought this has been a huge earthquake and I also realised at that stage I couldn’t get out. The windows were jammed and there was

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a hole in the wall beside the fireplace but it was too high off the ground for the dog and me to go through. The after shakes started happening

then and things began falling around me once more. I looked at my cell phone and thought I won’t dial 111, instead I sent a text to my husband saying ‘Help.’ I don’t know why I did that; he was on the

eighteenth floor of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers building. Perhaps—I

don’t know—maybe I expected him to put his superman trousers on and fly home and save me.

Probably I went into shock for a little while, but I also sent a text

to my neighbour, Sharon, saying the same thing, ‘Help.’ A little while later she turned up on the front lawn. She was covered in blood. She’d

been walking the dog around the river and fallen into a crack as the ground had opened. Out on the lawn she just screamed at me, ‘You’ve got to get out Anne, you have to break a window.’ And I remember

thinking, break a window! Anyway, I looked about and found a drawer that had flown out of a dressing table and I started tapping at the window with this and she yelled at me again, ‘You’ve got to put some

meat into it Anne!’ So, I managed to belt out the frame and the dog

and I climbed down. It wasn’t until then that I realised exactly what had happened. The whole bottom storey of our house had blown out.

It’s hard to describe how I felt at that time. I was really pretty

shocked, hmm… I think numbness is probably the word I’m looking

for. I mean I probably should have grabbed things before I got out, I

should have realised that I wouldn’t be able to get back into the house, but you don’t think like that at that stage. You think about the dog and you think about yourself and… that’s about it. Afterwards I went to

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Sharon’s place to see what damage had been done to her house and helped her clean up a bit. Then I needed to go back and sit in my

own garden and contemplate what had happened. Stefan got home about twenty minutes later and we sat outside together on a bench

on the back lawn, sat through another quite large aftershock and just watched the liquefaction come up over the lawn and bubble away, it was weird.

That day we moved in with our neighbours for a week. We wanted

to be near the house because of looters and so we lived there with

them. The four of us would sit outside at night having a wine and

we would light the barbeque and eat the meat that was in the freezer slowly defrosting. We had some lovely meals; prawns, fillet steak, all the best stuff. And this house that we are renting now, also belongs

to a friend of ours. It was empty so he was kind enough to furnish

it for us and we moved in here a week after the earthquake. Friends have been really good us.

We lost the contents of our home, all of it, we got nothing out.

Friends donated pots and pans, cutlery and crockery, all the things we needed straight away. The first night we slept on the floor but the

next day we went out and brought a bed and mattress from a place who were brilliant—they delivered it the same day. Yes, we’ve been

very fortunate. Fortunate also that we had some money in the bank so we could clothe ourselves and set up my husband’s ability to work

from home. He couldn’t go back to PriceWaterhouse of course so

we had to set up computers and so on and start from scratch. I only

had my gardening clothes, he only had his suit. We looked like the

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odd couple—we were the odd couple. It was a pretty stressful time.

My husband lost 5kgs, I lost 3kgs and the dog, yes, even he lost a couple of kg.

In the end I’m not sure what was worse, the earthquake itself or

having to deal with EQC and the insurers afterwards. Stefan left me

to deal with all that. As I look back I suppose we were very fortunate that we settled relatively quickly with them; it took five months, but when you are dealing with it almost every day for five months that

can seem like a very long time. We had to wait for EQC to settle before we could start dealing with our insurers. Dealing with the

insurers with regards to the contents, that was another trial. You

have to list every single thing on a piece of paper and its value, which

in turn requires you to go out and get valuations for every single thing. For months I would wake up most nights around three in

the morning and pace, wonder about what I had and hadn’t thought about and have to write things down.

When the contents were settled in December it was like a huge

weight had been lifted. I’d been so busy for all that time dealing with

everything, it consumed so many hours, and to be honest I was a bit lost when it was finally done. Suddenly I’m thinking what do I do

tomorrow? It was like I’d had a full-time job. It makes you wonder about others who might find that sort of thing more difficult than I did. I’m thinking in particular of elderly people who have no access

to computers or other such conveniences. They often didn’t know where to go or what to do. I actually went to visit an old lady who

was in Avondale; I’d been asked by a friend in Auckland to go and

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see how she was. She was in a street that had been obliterated but her place, the townhouse that she was renting, was fine. She hadn’t lost

any of her contents or anything like that but she was scared. She was worried about where she was going to live and what the landlord was

going to do and it’s those people who do need help. It’s okay for us, we are computer literate, we knew where to go, what to do, but there were a lot of people who didn’t and I felt sorry for them.

Perhaps the upside of the whole experience was that it brought

people closer together. People went out of their way to support people

they didn’t know. Other folk came out of the woodwork and helped anybody they could, especially on the east side where so much of the

destruction happened. I think we experienced a lot more than people

on this other side of town for instance. I’m not saying they haven’t had their problems but I don’t think some people realise the scale of things or just how devastating it was over there.

Most of the time I think I coped with it okay. Initially it was bad,

losing your house and all your contents—things like all your photos, all your little bits and bobs that you’ve collected over the years—that

was… that was pretty bad but as time goes on you tell yourself that lots of those objects were just material things and I’d sort of make a joke

of it. ‘A wonderful way to de-clutter,’ I’d say. But then when somebody was nice to me, and would say things like, ‘Oh you poor thing, you’ve

lost your house,’ that’s when my bottom lip would quiver and I’d have to tell myself to toughen up.

Home, of course, is where we feel safe and secure, a place we invite

our friends to, a place for our family to be. Our place was quite…

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well everybody thinks their home is special and I suppose we were no

exception. To me it was a little bit of heaven hidden away in Avonside.

Because of a big tree and the high fence you couldn’t see into our place

at all. We were tucked away there in our own little personal space.

We’d come to it after having another two-storey home in St Martins.

That was a weatherboard place and my husband had said he was tired

of painting old weatherboard homes so I found this one and said no

more painting darling, it’s double brick with a tile roof. Yes, I know, about the worst sort of house that you can have in an earthquake. I

don’t think I will be looking at brick homes again somehow, bring on the weatherboards.

When our place was pulled down the insurers were actually very

good to us, they didn’t just have it demolished, they had it deconstructed, so we could get anything that was salvageable out of the house. We

managed to get three pieces of furniture out, a big sideboard, a table and a box that we had restored. Sadly, we lost all our books but we got

our photographs and that was great, pretty phenomenal really. There were a few clothes and a little bit of jewellery, which was nice because some of it was my mother’s.

Unhappily we had also been burgled while the place was empty.

About a month afterwards I had a phone call from the bank because someone was trying to present a cheque. They had been into the bedroom of our home and found a chequebook that was about eight

years old. I’d cancelled my EFTPOS card and so on but I didn’t… well, I simply forgot about the old chequebook. Who uses cheques

anymore but this person had come in and had already presented five

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cheques. Then he got really greedy and the bank got suspicious so

they caught him. Other people had been in too. Sometimes I would go over and I would find clothes and hair product and that sort of thing lying around the garden. That really made me angry. There was something else that upset me a lot, made me angry as well, and

that was people standing on stalls and boxes leaning over our high

fence and taking photos. Perhaps I shouldn’t have felt that way—I

don’t know—but I would pull up and find these people hanging all

over what was still our home and I’d be tempted to say something. I never did, but I was very tempted to at times.

I still go over to see my garden two or three times a week and

try and keep it in shape. I’ve always been a gardening nut and I just

couldn’t bear to see all we’ve done here let go. We had a half-acre

garden and that was my obsession, my love. In fact, it was also my job, my work. I was a gardener. Not always, I moved around a bit when

I was young and then worked in the Post Office. I came from the

South—Palmerston—but my father was a keeper in the lighthouse service and I was in there too until I was twelve. I think dad thought his three children were becoming a bit feral, so out we came. Our last

light was on Turituri Matangi, in the Hauraki Golf, after which my

father became the proprietor of a seven-day dairy and that was a bit of a shock to us all.

I did the rest of my schooling in Papatoetoe and left as soon as

possible. I got a job with the Post Office Savings Bank for a year and then I went to Australia. Eventually I came to Christchurch and met

Stefan, I was twenty-three and here I still am. It’s been a great life.

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When Stefan and I got together I re-joined the Post Office Savings Bank and I stayed there for quite a few years until I had my son. I

went back part time for about five years but as I said, I’ve always been

a gardening nut and so I started doing private gardens for people, working as a gardener. I did that for a few years and then I was fortunate enough to get the job as gardener at St James Rest Home, which is in Patten Street. I was there for eleven years. That along with keeping up our own large garden kept me pretty busy. So there you are, that’s my life and my passion.

Quite by chance I was back over on the East side—actually I was

in the supermarket over there—when the June quake, the first one, hit. I’d only just driven back to where we now live when Stefan said he’d rung our old neighbour, Sharon, and she sounded a little shaky, so

okay, we jumped in Stefan’s car and went back over there to see how

she was. Actually, she was okay, she seemed fine, and so we were on our way back here when the second one arrived. We were in the car

at the lights and it was a strange sensation, the car rocking backwards and forwards, everything moving. You think they don’t affect you but perhaps they do. It’s the little things isn’t it. It’s taken me quite a few months to be able to have a shower if Stefan isn’t in the house. I had

this silly idea that perhaps the house would collapse and my old naked

body would be thrown to the ground and that’s how they’d find me.

In fact, this house we are in now hasn’t really sustained any damage so I feel quite safe, even though we’re upstairs again. Even though I still jump at unexpected noises. The truth is I thought I had got over it

pretty well, but that one just before Christmas, I was outside when the

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first one hit and I could hear things falling in the house. Here we go

again I thought, but, you know, I was fortunate. I have been fortunate.

There are many people who have had much worse experiences than I have. Even so, when some people from Auckland sent me a text a little

later my hand was shaking as I replied. Yeah, it’s those little things that make you realised it will probably take a while to get over it totally.

You do what you can to get around the way we’ve all been affected

but if I’m honest I miss my place terribly. I mean, we are really lucky, we’ve got this place which has a bit of a garden and that helps me

keep my sanity. We’ve moved our goldfish over here too and it’s those little touches of home that are nice to have around, but the truth is I

have nowhere to nest. I don’t have a home to nest in. I don’t have my

own garden which took up a lot of my time and I was quite proud of.

I think that’s how it’s affected me the most. You can overcome such

things by going for a walk when you are feeling a bit miserable or even

try something new like taking up golf. I just haven’t quite got to that yet. My dream—the thing that would make me really happy—would be to have a few acres in the country and a couple of Alpacas and some chooks. Who knows, it may happen yet.

You know, after that first quake in September there were quite a

few aftershocks, and I got a little bit worried about our house. I mean

I spend a lot of time at home I had begun to notice little cracks here and there, cracks that appeared after the EQC people had been. In the

end a friend sent a builder around for a chat, just the Saturday before

the earthquake, and Stefan even said to him, ‘Would you please put

Anne’s mind at rest, she worries the house is going to collapse.’ He

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looked around and said, ‘Yeah, a bit of separation here and there… no I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.’ But then, no one really

knew about un-reinforced masonry then did they? EQC didn’t pick up the signs either.

Then when it came you realise it was just a time bomb waiting

to happen. A horrifying experience. I try not to think about it too much. People ask if I get flashbacks… not really flashbacks. Every now and then I think about it, think about how lucky I was, but I try not

to dwell on it too much. When I watched that documentary on the Japanese earthquake that happened such a short time later, well, that

was a reality check wasn’t it. It put what happened here into perspective don’t you think? Something we all need to do. I mean we lost our home

and we lost the contents—things—but we were still alive. People died,

but we still have each other. We are well and living in a nice home.

Maybe it’s not our home, but compared to a lot of other people we are very fortunate. I try not to forget that.

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