Who We Are – Lorraine Marshall

Who We Are Lorraine Marshall

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Lorraine Marshall

First there is family. You need to know that. Because who we are, the

people we love, that’s important. And place. Where we come from.

That’s important also. For me it was Brooklands, the place my parents built their first home—and it was a home. It’s why my own home and family is so important to me. It’s where it begins, where all the rest comes from.

My mother had six children in seven years. Yeah, I know, she had

a lot going on. Well, perhaps not so unusual then, she was from a big

family herself and also her sister married my father’s brother—two brothers married two sisters—and they had four children. So our six

and their four, we were closer than close. Two families like one, all very

attached to each another. Lots of cousins… good times, and I loved it.

I loved my childhood. I know some people remember unhappy things

about their childhood, but quite frankly I remember nothing like that.

I loved my schools; I loved my family, and I loved my place.

Everything to do with my family and my childhood comes from the

place I grew up, it’s so entrenched in me. You walked down the road or

through the paddocks and it was all yours. My mum had her community

there. Her people, her family, her friends and they supported her.

Having six children, there was always a neighbour taking a couple of

us somewhere so she could have some time to herself. Occasionally my

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parents used to go on little holidays on their own which was probably

a very wise thing to do. It’s also probably why there were so many of us.

Go away for a week; come back—another one on the way.

What I learnt from all that was the importance of a relationship,

of a mum and a dad, of being part of a community, the significance of friends and neighbours, all those things that give weight and shape to

your life. A place to be you. Exactly those things I would want to instil in my own family and I’m sure that’s how my children are going to feel

about their place. About Avonside. Sadly, there is bugger all of it left… there’ll not be much left at all, so how do you go back to something that’s not there?

When I was young, when I finished with school, I went to work in

an office. Work then was a bit different to what it is now. You arrived at 8.20 am and you were at your desk by 8.30, working. You didn’t just roll in at the right time; you were hard at it by then. You wore

stockings every day, no matter if it was forty degrees, because that’s

what you did in an office. In some ways I think that was quite good, it taught you the ethics of work. After a while I moved on to larger companies, Coca-Cola and then Dominion Breweries. At some point I

put my hand up and become involved with computers just as they were coming into the workplace. By the time I got to the Breweries I wasn’t working down on the floor with the other girls but I wasn’t at the top

with the men either. A woman in the middle. I was there at the time in which Dominion Breweries was a male orientated organisation and

like a lot of workplaces then, quite sexist. I began to see the things that were not quite right and that some of these women needed help and

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support—people had in fact started to ask for my help—and that is

when I started being a bit more active, actually standing up for them.

All of which probably didn’t help my own cause that much. Actually, that’s the time when I met Paul, but I didn’t meet him because of my own work in the Union, I met him because of my sister.

I had been going out with a farmer when I was younger, a man I had

been engaged to and was going to marry but decided at the very last

moment not to. I realised that actually you can love the farm, which I did, I loved the whole idea of being on the farm, but you actually had

to live with the man for the rest of your life. That was the thought that brought me, and the marriage, to a halt. I suddenly realised we were

poles apart and I thought, no, it’s not all just about having babies and life looking very rosy, it really has to be from the heart. That person really has to be, The Person, with a capital P.

So there I was, no longer heading for the altar and thinking I was on

the shelf. Nowadays you wouldn’t blink twice—God, no way! Maybe

at forty-one, but there I was at twenty-one, in my own eyes, a spinster.

Over time there was the odd relationship here and there but I hadn’t

lived with anybody. Even when you were engaged in those days, you weren’t allowed to have your man come and visit, stay in your room, my

parents would never have allowed that. It was a completely different generation. And that is the point at which I met Paul.

My sister, Sharryn, had invited him around and he brought a friend

with him— Karen. I happened to be looking out the window when he

arrived. He had this beret on and his coat and he looked very French.

This was in the days of the Rainbow Warrior bombing and he was

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looking very French. I said to my sister, ‘Who’s that pretentious

prick?’ I was living with Sharryn at the time and as it happened I also knew Karen, she was from Brooklands too.

I’d been meant to go back to my mum’s that night and Sharryn

had invited Paul to have a meal with them. But when they came in

Karen and I started chatting away and so I stayed. I thought what the hell, I’ll be a bit of a gooseberry but I didn’t care. Something just made me stay. I had just got out of the shower before they

came, my hair was soaking wet and I had this—I still remember

it—pink polka-dot dress on. So… yeah, that was our first night, our first meeting, not much was it, not really. Except at the end of

it I’d taken back that first impression, I thought he was really nice.

Turned out Karen wasn’t there as his girlfriend either. She

had come over from Australia because her dad had died and he

thought that she needed a night out. That’s just the kind of person he is. I guessed he kind of liked me too because we were mucking round and he threw a piece of Boogle at me. It’s just a board game

called Boogle, but he threw this little piece at me and I thought

afterwards it’s like a little boy, you know, they’re six years old and they like someone and so they throw something at them. I thought, yeah, he does, he kind of likes me. I reckon I might be in there.

We finally went out together to a Dominion Breweries

Christmas function. Our first date. Instead of taking a car we walked home, back to my sister’s house. All the way home through

the park we were holding hands and I was thinking, this feels

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really comfortable. This feels good. That’s where it grew from, like

a friendship with, hmmm… what you might call a bit on the side.

I guess we sort of clicked. At twenty-six and twenty-nine we’d

both had other relationships—you don’t get to that age and not

have a past—but I didn’t ask of his, and he didn’t ask of mine, it

was like it didn’t matter. That’s when you realise what’s special.

Actually I can remember the very day when I did realise—When

I knew this was it, this was for life. I was over at Taylors Mistake where he lived and we were playing a game of Backgammon. I’m sure he must have been cheating because he was beating me and

I’m rather keen on winning. Then out of the blue he suggested we should we go for a walk. At first I thought, no! Damn it, this

is a game of Backgammon, and I wanted to win. I thought it was important and then I thought, what am I saying. I’m here

to be with him… that’s when it came to me… when I realised how important it was for me to be with him. That was a defining

moment in our relationship. We went for that walk holding hands and I thought this is where I want to be for the rest of my life, and it has been. From that day on it was a given, we’d be walking on

together. My hand in his. Most people have a few special moments in their lives—that was one of mine.

Later I went to mind my grandma’s place for three months

and he came to stay with me. After that, we found a flat together and a couple of years later I said to him, ‘Do you think I should

go home and get my gear?’ We’re still not married. There’s been times when I’ve thought about it, and times when he’s thought about

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it, but neither of us has ever really felt the need for a piece of paper.

He did he ask me once and I said, ‘Don’t you think we should just save our money and get a house?’ And then all of a sudden time goes

by and it doesn’t really matter anymore. We’ve moved on, and when you have two children and a mortgage, well, what’s the difference? He

did give me a ring once and now—even if I did want to throw back at him—I’ve put on so much weight I can’t get the bugger off. You’ve got to have a laugh don’t you, and all through our relationship we’ve been lucky that way. He comes from the same kind of background that

I do, just normal working-class people. Two sisters he loved, cousins, his aunts and uncles and I knew the things that were important to me were important for him as well. Yeah, Paul and I, we just clicked.

That year, 2010, was the first time Paul and I thought we might

leave our children on their own. The kids were old enough and we wanted to spend some time together, just the two of us going to a

friend’s Silver Wedding Anniversary in Auckland. We took off in the

plane that Friday morning, laid back in the seat there and we were

feeling… I guess we were feeling a little like we were back to being

Paul and Lorraine, not mummy and daddy. Well, not totally. It was the first time, and you do just feel a little of that apprehension—my

children, my children—as you walk out the door. But no, it was going

to be fine. Lucy was going to stay at her friend Jessie’s house and Jake was going to be home here on his own with his girlfriend. I thought stop it, they are good kids, they’re responsible and they would be fine.

The next morning, the Saturday morning, we woke up in our hotel

quite early, about 7am. We’d had a great time the night before and

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thought we might have our breakfast in bed. Then Paul turned on his

cell phone and it was just like, bing, bing, bing, text, text, text, all these

noises and he didn’t say anything, he went off somewhere and when he came back he said, ‘Right, you need to get up. Something’s happened in Christchurch.’

I immediately thought that the house had burnt down, or Jake had

spilt raspberry or something all over the carpet, or a huge party had gone on that we weren’t supposed to know about. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s been a major earthquake in Christchurch. Oh God! The kids. That was my immediate thought, my nightmare, the kids, the family? Our

friends? He put his hand out then and he said, ‘From all accounts, everyone that we know is fine. There has been no deaths, but there has been some major damage.’

Of course we turned on the TV and you see all the worst images

straight away. Then Sharryn rings me up and says that the house is badly damaged but Jake’s fine and to be calm but they are continuing

to get aftershocks. Everybody else in Christchurch that we spoke to was in shock and so their own immediate panic and anxiety transmits itself and you find yourself going along with it.

It’s now 8 o’clock in the morning and we need to be home—we’ve

got to get home. We text the kids and tell them we were coming and

then I get a phone call. I had thought I was fine, I thought I was coping but I get one phone call from a friend, a colleague in Auckland who thought I was still in Christchurch. He just said ‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’

And then I lost the plot. I started to cry. Oh my God, I’m just so far

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away from my babies. The one thing you always want to do is protect your children, and I’m not there—the one time, and I’m not there. I have failed. We are in Auckland and our kids were in Christchurch and it seemed a long way away.

All sorts of crazy things are going through your head at that point

and we still weren’t sure how we’d get back. Then somehow we are at

the airport and we are organising our flight home. Air New Zealand

were absolutely fantastic. I was so surprised by the support that people gave us. Not just people in Christchurch either, people from Auckland were just as shocked. The whole of that day everybody felt it. If I hadn’t

been in Auckland I would have not realised just how affected the entire country was.

So we flew back to Dunedin, that was our best option, the best

they could do, and we were going to drive from Dunedin back to

Christchurch. When we landed we started feeling the aftershocks and we’re thinking, dear God, if we are feeling them in Dunedin how big

is it back at home? As it happened Mount Cook put a flight on and

took us home, which was brilliant, it meant we didn’t have to drive.

But the nearer you get, the whole time we were on our way, the more

apprehensive you’re getting. Paul’s sister met us and took us back to her house, which is where we had left our car. By this time it was close to 6 pm. It had taken the whole day and I was absolutely emotionally exhausted.

Finally we get home and find Jake sitting in his bedroom in the

dark with a torch doing nothing, just sitting there. Now this is a mum

thing, but looking at him sitting there I was struck by one thought and

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it’s stuck in my mind from that day to this. All the time that you spend with your children saying, ‘Now, listen, if this happens you do this. If

that happens you do that. If there’s an earthquake, ra ra ra, you do this.’

And every time you say it, you think, does it ever sink in? Well Jake, who was here at home with his girlfriend, did all the right things. He

got up and he knew to put his shoes on straight away because there could be glass. He turned the power off in case of fire. Then he went

into the bathroom and filled the bath up with water and made sure that the fridge doors were shut. Exactly the things I had told him, plus we always said, ‘You stay put until we come and get you. No matter where

you are, or how long it takes, we’ll come… we will come and get you.’

And he had done all of those things. I was really just sort of—that got

me, you know. So all those mums out there, when you’re trying to drum these things into your kids and you’re thinking do they actually hear it?

The answer is, yes, they do.

Then we went to pick up our daughter who was staying in Dallington

with family friends. When the earthquake happened, Lucy jumped

straight out of bed and dragged her friend down beside it—they were sleeping in the same bed—and she said it was lucky they did, because the wardrobe came down and hit the bed and she would have been

underneath it. She did the right thing too, but Lucy, like a lot of kids, probably freaked out a wee bit and it’s taken her a little longer to work through things.

Anyway, finally we were all together and off we go back to my sister-

in-law’s in Avonhead. We were there two or three days, which is about how long it took to really comprehend what had happened. I look

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back on it now and think it was a bit like jet lag. All that adrenalin, you’re just on the go and then all of a sudden, bang, and you’re like, wow, what the hell has happened? And then everybody had a story which you had to listen to and it was so obvious that people were still

in shock on that third or forth day. You went to the supermarket on

this side of town and people looked like zombies. There was… it was people just going through the motions. Paul, being Paul, was straight

onto the insurance. Paul, being Paul, was straight on to everything, including support mode and of course I lent on him, the kids lent on him, and others did too. And you know what, it does bring you together.

What was also strange about coming home was that we flew

into the airport—which is in the west of city—and we had seen all

this destruction on television but looking around us, there was no

damage at all. What they’ve now started calling the tale of two cities.

The shock came as we drove onto the east side and began to see the damage here. I can understand why my sister, who lives just across the road, thought if we are like this, what’s the rest of Christchurch

like? When something like this happens it’s not always easy to see

the bigger picture. Mostly you just tend to see what is in front of you.

When we arrived at the house there was liquefaction and dirt

everywhere. I didn’t understand what liquefaction was then, it was a

new word to me. All I could see was this mud everywhere and I didn’t understand how it had got there. I had no idea. I stood there looking

at cracks in the earth and looking at our much loved home that had come off its foundation.

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To go inside we had to use torches to grab what we wanted. We

could see that things had fallen over but my main thought is, okay, the house is still standing. It has come off its foundations and there’s all this mud but my kids are fine. I didn’t give a damn whether… I just wanted my babies and I wanted to get out. That initial thing was to

get out because we didn’t know what was going to happen next. We hadn’t lived through it, we didn’t feel the earthquake and we had no

idea of the intensity or what these guys had felt. We were just looking

at the aftermath and that was enough for us. Everybody around us had become earthquake victims, you know, and now we felt like victims also. In a weird way I felt a little cheated because I hadn’t actually felt it, but that didn’t take away what we had gone through, the stress

of not being by your children and that was heart-wrenching for me.

My whole life my children had been the most important thing, and I

wasn’t there—wasn’t with them—at a time like this. The kids seemed

to be okay about it but I honestly felt like I had failed and I felt guilty because part of me was grateful that I hadn’t had to go through it

myself. Little did I know that that experience wasn’t too far away, that I’d get to know only too well what it felt like.

We stayed away for as long as the power was off which I think

was about a week, then we were back. Straight away we got stuck into cleaning up the house, doing the back yard, getting rid of the

liquefaction, helping people out in the neighbourhood. We wanted to

keep it as normal as possible. You kids will be going back to school, mum’s going back to work, dad’s going to do the same and yes, with

the power back on I have cleaned and vacuumed the floor which means

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that you still do not take your coffee or your food into your bedroom.

I just felt it was really important that we stuck to the rules and carried on being a family as we had always done and in some ways

I think that helped them get back to everyday life. This has been an

event, this has been a challenge, but life does go on and you just have to rise above it. Getting our home together and helping to get the neighbourhood back up and running was important too. Realising

that everyone has got their own particular strengths, that there will be those who need help and not to judge anyone that does. If it’s

needed, you go and do it. I think that was really good for the kids and I also think it helped them get through the next one—the big one.

There’s always another story and the twenty second of February

was just that. A different story for everyone who was part of it but I’ll try to tell you mine the way it came. The way I think of it.

Of course Paul was away again. It became a bit of a standing

joke, Paul’s left town, be careful, there’s bound to be another one.

But I was here and it really hit me. This was the first one I had felt

and it was pretty bad. I’m on the fourth floor in the Trade Union

Centre building and Ian and I are in the office on our own. We’ve

just started talking about what we are going to do at lunchtime and

I said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go down to the library to drop my books off, and then I’m coming back to pick up the car and I’m off home.’ This is about a quarter to one I think. Lucy has just rung and said, ‘I want to go to the mall, can I go to the mall?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m coming home, you stay home till I get there.’

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I didn’t want her going there. I was still aware of the aftershocks—

that we were still having these little shakes—and there had been one

that morning. Just after nine, I‘d been sitting in the car in the car park talking to Neville, another work colleague from out of town.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘there’s a wee shake, the car’s moving.’

‘How are they going, how are you finding them?’ he asked me.

‘Oh, you get used to these wee ones. They’re just wee shakes now,’

I said, ‘life has moved on, I reckon we’re on the right side of things now.’

That was in the morning and the next thing I’m standing there

talking to Ian by the reception desk and it… do you know, I can’t even

remember it starting. That’s the thing, it’s just like you are in it without even knowing that you are in it. Then, oh Christ, it’s an earthquake and Ian is holding on to the front desk and I just grabbed him and held on for dear life, just buried my head in his armpit. I had said to

myself before, if there’s an earthquake—I had this vision—I didn’t want to be in the office. I didn’t want to be upstairs in this building.

The violence of it really surprised me. I don’t know why, I thought

they would be like, something rolly, but it wasn’t like that at all. It

just shook. I mean it really shook like hell. I was absolutely shocked

by the violence of it. The crash and the bang of things as stuff jumped

everywhere. I did a bit of a cry and a scream and I’m yelling at poor

old Ian—he does laugh about it now—‘You’re not the man I’m meant

die with.’ I’m sure he thought the same. I wasn’t the woman he was meant to be with either. But at the time I wasn’t laughing… I honestly thought this is it. The building’s going to collapse. We will die.

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You could feel the building actually starting to tilt at that stage but

then it stopped. And as soon as it stopped, as soon as the movement stopped, I went over and got my handbag. Yes, I know, because I’m a

woman I got my handbag, then I got my key and I said, ‘I’m going, I’m leaving.’ I said, ‘There will be another aftershock, the building is leaning,’ which was pretty obvious, and I said, ‘another aftershock and we could go. So that’s it. I’m off.’

As I went I could hear others in the different offices crying and

screaming and some of the ladies and the men were running around

and supporting everybody and I thought, do I stay, should I stay—in that moment it went through my head—do I stay and support these people and I thought, no, I don’t, I survive. I need to get out. I need

to go. I need to be there for my children. They were both at home and

I thought if this has happened here, what the hell is our house like.

It’s already off it’s foundations and I thought of them lying there and needing me and yes I felt guilty afterwards, thinking maybe I should

have stayed and helped people and then I don’t feel so guilty at all, it was an act of survival—I just got out.

They still talk about me screaming as I went down the stairs saying,

‘Out of my way, I’m leaving and I’m never coming back!’ And I knew

that I would never ever go back in that building and I didn’t. I have never been back. It’s gone altogether now but I won’t forget what happened or the difficulty I had getting out.

When I got to the bottom it was blocked off by bricks that had

come through the wall of the foyer, piles of bricks and dust were

everywhere. I just took my shoes off and walked over the bricks, I was

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actually crawling down parts of it to get out. When I got to the bottom

I got up, shook myself off, and went straight through the doors and as

I did, as soon as I got outside I thought, people have died in this. It

was so obvious. We weren’t that far away from the CTV building that

disintegrated and also we were right close to Pyne Gould Guinness, so when that one… you could hear… like when car accidents happen and you can hear metal scraping and screeching, that is what I could

hear now as it all went on collapsing. I could hear screaming from the kids coming out of the Centennial Swimming Pool, yelling out for mum and dad and crying… my God, it was, it was like a war zone.

Then it hits you… you’ve got to get away. I can’t stay here because

buildings could go. More buildings could go. When I got to my car

there were all these kids, teenagers, around the media club next-

door, texting. Standing around trying to text, and then the ground shook again and they were like giggling and sort of laughing amongst themselves and trying to cope I suppose and I just kept saying to

them, calm down, calm down; I was starting to get a bit titchy then

myself, it’s like I wanted to get out of there quickly and they were in

my way. I was saying to them, ‘You need to find your parents, you need to be getting out of here, you need to be supporting…. just go, get the hell out of here! There will be more, and that building there is about to fall.’

In the end I just drove home. I don’t know… I got home before the

second really big aftershock so I probably made it there in about three

or four minutes which normally takes me maybe ten. Between five and

ten. I went through red lights, didn’t matter, everybody was just going

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for it so I went for it too. And as you go home you see houses that have fallen, you see the damage and it’s a lot worse than ever before.

I needed to get home. All my focus is on the kids again—I want to

get home, I want to get home. But the truth was I was scared of what

I might see when I got there. I didn’t bother trying to text them on the way, I just… every second counted. I thought that I might need to be

lifting bricks off them. Nothing else mattered. I was a mother and I was in a fiery rage to get home and at the same time so frightened of what I might find there. I raced up the road and there they were, both

of them outside and they… I collapsed then, right into their arms. I

was crying, sobbing, they’d never seen me like that before but it was just the relief of seeing them. Absolute anxiety. It’s very hard to explain it. You’re meant to be the strong person in front of your kids but here they were supporting me.

After a bit I calmed down and I said, ‘Okay, we’re fine, we are safe

now, we’re together, now let’s look at what other people need.’ I saw

then that my brother-in-law, Gordon, had come home so I went over and asked where Sharryn was. He was upset because he still didn’t know, then the big second aftershock came in and we both made our way back onto the street.

He said, ‘Do you think I should go and find her?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no, no. She’ll be making her way back here. You need to

be here for her when she comes.’

Then we saw a neighbour, Helen, running down the street, going

to get her three children from Banks Ave School. I called out to her,

‘Wait Helen, I’ll take you in the car, as far as we can go, it’ll be quicker.’

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I knew my kids would be fine with Gordon. The car took longer than

we thought, the roads and the liquefaction again and what this time

looked like claw marks down the road, you just got really confused.

Had I done the right thing? Should we have gone on foot? By the time we got there Helen at least was feeling a little calmer. We had talked

about it in the car; the school will be making sure that everybody’s fine.

If anything it’s probably safer that your kids are at school because they

have things in place to deal with it, rather than being in a mall, where

all will be chaos. Anyway, we got her kids and there was lots of tears in the car and everything but we were on the way home. I was saying, you

know, everybody’s fine. Mummy’s fine, you’re fine, we’re all okay. Just trying to keep everyone calm, which calmed me down as well. What I had forgotten was that poor old Paul would be trying to find out where

the hell we were. But that’s the thing, you live in that moment, you are not living in his.

When I got back there was a whole lot of school children from the

neighbourhood who had come back to our house. They had come from the mall back to our house because they couldn’t get hold of their mum or anyone else, so I said, ‘Right, I’ll walk you.’ By this stage I realised

that walking was the only way. So I had to get them over Dallington

bridge, which they had already closed off to travel. It was just like… it was just absolutely… you know, you could close your eyes and see it

all again, over and over again. Anyway, we got to the bridge and we

met Chelsea’s mum who had walked from town with no shoes and was absolutely beside herself and just… you could see all the grief and the

horrible fear of mothers for their children. At least we could tell her

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that Chelsea was fine, we already knew that Mike had got Chelsea.

‘But,’ I told her, ‘you need to get to Banks Ave, to the other kids, he can’t get there.’ We knew this by now because had got ourselves a bit

organised and were trying to keep an eye on all the kids round the neighbourhood.

After that we carried on walking with the other kids, trying to get

them all home. By the time we got to where Jessie and her brother lived in Halberg Street the water was up to our knees and it was like, I don’t

know how far to go with these kids, you know, should we be turning back? There were cars that had gone down holes and all you could see

was the back half of the car sticking out. So now I’m thinking, right, you need to let me go first and you walk behind me, if I disappear— don’t go there. I do have a wicked sense of humour and I think that

helped. You can feel the children looking towards you, making sure. If you aren’t panicking, they’re okay; we’re going to be all right. So there were no tears from the kids, actually they were very good. We got them home in the end and so that was it. ‘Come on Lucy,’ I said, ‘we’re out of here. Straight back home.’

Getting people where they need to be and whom they need to be

with, that’s important. Our own have been really good and still are

about that. I need to know where they are. They have seen me in a panic, the anxiety of not knowing how they are, so they know what

they need to do for me. Because of what we’ve been through, they

know the importance. There are no qualms about it. No, mum’s being over-the-top, they understand it and there’s never any argument. I’m

really pleased that our relationship is like that, because, my goodness,

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it really has shown how important it is that you have an open dialogue, keep that connection with your children. And after the twenty second

of February it became even more important, paramount that you knew what was going on.

After that day I realised I needed to talk to them both. I kept going

back in my mind to the shaking in that building, realising how easily

it could have been any of us lying under the rubble. You keep hearing stories of those poor people, trapped and talking to their families on cell phones, and right there is the realisation of how fragile our lives

are. It wasn’t long after that I sat them down and said, ‘Look, there

are some things I need to know. I need to know what your dreams are, what your hopes are. Not because I think something might happen to you, but something might happen to me and I don’t want be lying

there thinking I don’t know these things. They probably think I’m a

wee bit nutty at times, but I thought, you know, hopes and dreams are important. It’s important for me to hear them, and for them to voice them. Say them out loud.

After February we moved out and went to live in Papanui. Jake

was going to school in Papanui, Lucy was going to Burnside, so at that stage there was not one thing that was normal in our life. Both

Paul’s and my own workplace shifted here and there and we weren’t living in our home. Because we were no longer in the neighbourhood

the children weren’t seeing their friends the way they were seeing them before. It was okay for a time, people were kind, but eventually it just didn’t feel right, so we came home. We had a need to surround

ourselves with what was normal. With people that were familiar, the

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home, the cat, the whole thing and we actually started feeling better

in ourselves. Yeah, all of that I put down to simply coming home.

I’ve seen other people, often with little children who’ve moved on

and it was probably the right thing for them. But for us it was better at that point to come home and I was thankful we could do that.

The aftershocks came again and again, kept on coming, but it’s

not the earthquakes—they upset me no more than anyone else—it’s

the aftermath, trying to find out whether your loved ones were okay, that’s what gets me every time. I know with Paul being away he

struggles with his own demons when he’s not here. We make a bit

of a joke about it but the truth is we were alone again. And that’s

part of his job, has been for the last thirty years. Two or three days a week dad is away.

In June I was on my own once more. I immediately got in the car

and went to get the kids. Because of the school situation they were now across on the other side of town. I’d got to Lucy in Burnside and was heading for Papanui to find Jake when the phone rang. I

pulled over to the side of the road and it was Paul. Now the funny thing was that as I answered the phone, the second and larger of

the two quakes that day hit us. So he got to experience it with me screaming at him on the phone.

He’s saying, ‘Just tell me what’s happening, what’s happening?’

‘What do think is bloody happening, we’re in the middle of a

frigging earthquake!’ I didn’t say frigging, I said fucking earthquake.

In the heat of the moment I forgot my daughter was there, I said, ‘We’re in the middle of a fucking earthquake, the car is shaking like

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hell and people were running out of their houses, I can’t talk!’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘well, well…’

I said, ‘Look, you are miles away, I have to go and pick up Jake,

I’ll call you when I’m ready,’ and I hung up.

The poor bugger was left on a limb. I felt… no, I didn’t feel terrible;

I just felt that I had to go and get Jake. I felt angry that he wasn’t here because this time both children were in separate places and once again

I was on my own. And part of that, I suppose, is that I lean on him.

He’s my rock, we have each other but he wasn’t there. Not his fault, it’s probably worse for him, but earthquakes have this ability to make rational thought disappear, like a puff of smoke.

We were getting close to Papanui School and I’m thinking to

myself, this is going to be a nightmare. Lucy’s going, ‘We won’t find him. I don’t know how you think we’re going to find him.’ Well we get

to the school and there’s fifteen hundred kids walking out the gate. But then, the moment we arrive, the very moment, I see Jake. He is just

walking out—unbelievable. I got the window down and said, ‘Right, in the car, we are going home.’

Of course, with our family it’s never that simple. Jake had a friend

with him, a boy who needed to get home to his mum. Okay, get in

the car we’ll go. I’m thinking I’ve got them all with me and that’s the main thing. If you’ve got your children with you, you can go through

anything. You just go into survival mode, just do it. And for some

reason once we were all in the car, I didn’t really feel as if we were in that much danger. Being on that side of town once again, you didn’t see any damage—the tale of two cities.

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It took a wee while to get the boy home. At one stage we had to

go down by Kerr’s Reach and the water was coming up over the doors, but we just kept going and going and going and we managed to get him home. In some ways being in the car actually calms everybody down. Everybody’s together, you talk, we’re communicating and you

talk things through. ‘Where were you and how… what happened at

the school… are you okay mum?’ I told them then to text their dad as well, to say we are all together type of thing. I couldn’t ring him mind you—I don’t think I could have got through anyway.

When we finally got back home, I mean it takes an hour and a half,

maybe two hours to do all this, but by the time we got back, there were all these kids that had come back to our house again. And once

more we had no power but it was daylight and so it was the usual tidy

up, clean up, sweep up the glass, sort out this and sort out that, make sure people round the neighbourhood are fine. I think by June people

had things in place a lot more, even though it’s a bit of a shock—it was more than a shock—but you kind of know what to do and it’s frustration that hits you now more than anything.

Christmas… that was completely different again. Paul finished work

on the Friday, at lunchtime, like a lot of other people did. I’d already

finished on the Wednesday. I was so tired I decided that I would finish a bit earlier this year. I’d just take my time. We were going to have

the family here at home for Christmas Day and we had a few more presents to get, so Lucy and I went to The Warehouse. When we got

inside she took off to get some things from the toy department, I was

getting her present from the… I can’t even remember what it was…

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iPad—iPod, something for teenagers that they must have and which, of course, is very expensive. Gone are the days when you could fill up a stocking from the Two Dollar Shop.

Once again I’m looking at all this stuff and didn’t immediately

comprehend there was an earthquake. Then you’re aware that people

are running, you hear the noises and I realised I didn’t have Lucy with me. Immediately I was screaming out her name so that she could find

me in amongst that huge place full of people. I was so scared that she

wasn’t with me and ran through The Warehouse towards the toy area.

I’m yelling out ‘Luuuccccy,’ I was probably halfway when she heard her

name and she knew it was me. I grabbed her hand and we ran outside.

I didn’t realise at the time, when it was happening, but I was having

an anxiety attack. I couldn’t breathe. I was hyperventilating and while

doing all that—trying to breathe and so on—I had also had a little mishap. Not so uncommon I’m told, not these days, not in this part of the world.

We got to the car and I said to Lucy, ‘We’re going to Grandma’s

house.’ I didn’t really want to tell her, but I’d had a dream a couple of

days beforehand, that we were in The Warehouse when an earthquake

struck. In my dream we went to Grandma’s house and there we were

safe, everything was okay, so I said, ‘That’s what we are going to do.’ I

think Lucy just rolled her eyes. Oh God, here she goes again, my mum.

I had left work that Wednesday saying to my colleague, ‘Six months

is up on the thirteenth of January, six months without any big shakes, if we can get to the thirteenth of January we are going to be fine. We’ve moved on, you’ll see.’ And I really believed it. I thought we were all

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over rover, this couldn’t possibly happen again and it was the letting

go… I had let the whole thing go. I’d let work go. I had all but finished

the Christmas thing; I was just getting ready for the day. The children

were both home and everything was perfect. My life was back on track.

Life as I knew it before the earthquakes had come back to us, and boy was I happy about that.

Then it happened. Three more earthquakes in one day and it was

just… how could… how could this happen to us. How could it happen

again? I just could not believe it, I thought no, no, no, I don’t want… and then there was this thought—it’s not going to be months, it’s going to be years. It could be years. And what do we do now.

Before that morning in Auckland, before all this crap happened,

I had thought that Paul and I would live in our home till we grew old. We had brought this house for the next forty years. This was our home. This is where we wanted our children to grow and our children’s

children to come and visit their grandma and poppa. This was the home our children had known and they would know it too. We would say to

them, this is where your mum lived, this was her room, this is where your dad ran around and played cricket. We would watch our grandchildren

grow up here as we’d watched our own children. So it hurt, it cut me, the realisation that the future I thought I would have was now never going to be. Our lives have changed… that is what I realised… two days

before Christmas I knew that beyond any doubt things had changed.

And it just took the core out of me. It just broke me.

There’s a toll on everyone of course. Events like this change lives,

sometimes for the good but mostly for the not so good. Do we stay

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here or leave, and at what cost… you hear a truck rumble past and you freeze. Is that affecting the way I understand the world now. What about the kids, what is the cost to our children? Are we putting them

in danger? Should we be doing this to them? These are decisions all parents need to make. And it’s not only the kids, what about the relationships between adults?

Stress like this, it either brings us together or splits us apart. I

know of women who were at that time on the verge of leaving their

husband, women in bad relationships who now feel unable to leave, because financially they are stuck in this horrible bloody situation of uncertainty. I mean, money and children and this huge mess, where

do they go, what support can they get. It’s another crisis that maybe they couldn’t face, so instead they are putting up with more than they should. There’s tension and dilemma in relationships with people who

want to stay where they are, and others who say no, we need to go. The kids and I are too important. Lucky enough Paul and I, we’re okay. We are fine. After thirty years we have been through enough to cope with

most things and the truth is I just love the guy. I need to help him as much as he needs to help me and that’s what we do. I feel pretty happy

that this is not something that has actually pushed us away. True there were moments when I was angry, but angry about what has happened

to us, not angry with Paul. And I think he realised that and when I saw him at times getting frustrated, I knew the frustration wasn’t at us, it was the frustration of what was happening.

With both of us in unions, in the helping professions, it’s not

always easy. Having a husband and a father like Paul who cares so

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much and tries to do his best for everybody can be hard. As Lucy said the other night—when we had just come back from a red zone

meeting and he was immediately back out again to explain a few things

to some neighbours—‘Even when you are here dad, you’re not here.’

That touched home. He stayed a bit longer then and when he came

back home he went and sat in her room, I think it hit him quite hard.

Sometimes helping other people, you need to remember the people right in front of you too.

So now we’ve had the letter from the government and it seems we

are to go red. I heard about it at work and I just collapsed on my desk, I sobbed, I couldn’t believe it would happen. But it had, and that took

some time to get your head around. Then one day you do. You start to

think a little differently. After all that has happened you start to realise, at this point—financially—the red zone is the best thing for us. But

emotionally, my heart wanted it to go green, and that was because of the community, the people, our home and everything around here, you

wanted it to stay the same. You just want to have what you had. What you know. The way it was.

When I heard for the first time we’d lost the house, when they

first said the house wasn’t going to be a re-build, I went through a real

grieving process—my home, not my beautiful home. When Paul and

I bought the house, as we came up the pathway to look at it for the first time, I said to Paul, ‘This is it, this is the house we could have our family in.’ And we came round the back and saw the backyard and it

had the big trees, tree huts and everything else, you immediately felt this was a home. Then we came into the kitchen and I knew Paul felt

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really great about it, because he said, ‘How do we go about making an offer?’ And the woman, the real estate agent, she said, ‘But you haven’t seen the rest of the house.’

He said, ‘What I have seen is everything we want, anything else

would be a bonus.’

So that was it. We bought it and it’s been a home to us ever since.

People might move on from houses, they don’t move on from homes, and we have been here for twenty-two years.

And then things changed yet again changed. At first we had thought

we could rebuild here. That our home was gone but we could rebuild.

Then came the day when we were told no, that could not happen.

Not here, not in this place, not amongst our own community, and that

brought the hurt all over again. But you know something, after you get over the initial shock, there comes the realisation that my life could

have changed in a far, far more devastating way. I could have lost Paul,

I could have lost my children. I could have lost my parents or my sister, my family, my friends. Because none of that did happen, it’s become easier to look to the future.

What I see now is a new step and I’m not afraid of it because I

have Paul beside me. Sure, you fall in love, your buy your first home, you have your babies, and so much of that seemed to be wrapped up in

this home, but after thirty years together—we may no longer have our home—but I still have his love. We still have our children and their love. Nothing is more important to me than that.

In the past I’ve heard people say things like, ‘It’s been six weeks now,

aren’t you over it. Or on television, ‘It’s all finished with now, so we can

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all move on.’ Well, no, it hasn’t finished. Even if the earthquakes were to

stop—and that’s by no means certain—there are still the consequences that will go on for a long time to come. In my own future is the fact

that we will have to leave Avonside. There’s a possibility—we have

talked seriously about it—of going to live in another city, in Nelson.

If that was to happen we need to get as much equity out of this house as possible. Money has become important in that we are now in our

fifties—mid fifties or late fifties for Paul—so for where we might want to be in ten years’ time we will need every cent we can find. And right now this is all we have, this broken home is our asset and we’d need to

get as much as we possibly can from it if we are to rebuild somewhere else.

Whatever happens in the end, wherever we go, whatever we do,

I will still grow old with Paul, I will still have my children, I hope I

will have grandchildren, so yes, I will still have all those things I was

hoping for, it just won’t be in Avonside. It will be somewhere else and

that is a loss we will have to bear. Even that will ease over time and the memories will take over and that’s the process we call life isn’t it. Paul and I will make plans—they won’t be the plans we made two or three years ago, but who knows, they might actually be more exciting.

One thing the earthquakes can’t do, will never do, is to take away

the memories. All of those wonderful times and special people that have moved through our lives and through our home, those memories

belong to us. In a way, it’s why I have to become cold-hearted about

moving on, because I don’t want the bad memories to consume me— and they can consume you. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, they

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are with me every day we are here. When you’re at work and you hear

something large rumble by… or when you wonder about whether you should go into a particular supermarket to get your groceries… the fact

that you think twice before you walk into any place, that’s the insidious way it can eat away at your life. Those are not the memories I want to have. And I will not let it happen. How dare you take away my life! You

can’t take my children, and you can’t take away what Paul and I have.

I know it won’t be easy, that it’s up to us to make it happen, but after all these years together I’ll tell you this, all of those good things will happen again. We’ll make sure they do.

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