Just Think Of Your Nan, She Was In The Blitz – Rachael Beeton

Just Think Of Your Nan, She Was In The Blitz Rachael Beeton

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Rachael Beeton

I didn’t know… I just couldn’t comprehend it. I knew I was awake but I had no idea what was going on. I knew we were in bed, we had gone to bed and I was asleep, and then I was awake and somehow the bed was

moving from side to side, a rock and rolling motion and I couldn’t get out of it. I knew it was serious; that something terrible was happening and almost the first thing I thought was I’m not wearing any clothes— I’ve got to put some clothes on.

Simon was up and he’d put his top on and then he was by the

door. And as casually as you like he says, ‘You’ve got to get up, it’s

an earthquake.’ He looked fine, but God I was… I thought I can’t. I couldn’t get up. I was totally lit up with this great big ball of fear. I

couldn’t interpret what was happening in any logical way, I just knew I was scared. I was so scared it was like my legs had turned to jelly.

Somehow, at some point, I managed to get out of bed. Or Simon

got me out of bed. I mean it was so crazy; it seemed to go on and on

like that for twenty minutes or something. I know it didn’t, that’s silly, but when I look back on it, time seems different somehow. Anyway, now I’m in the doorway with Simon and we are holding hands and all about us there is the sound of the house popping loudly, like popcorn in the microwave, pop pop pop, but with more depth to it, the wood pulling away.

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It’s a long house, on one level, and from where we stood we could see

out of the French doors to the big deck at the back that was strangely

rolling towards us. Then the floor came towards us as well, it was just incredible, I could feel it in my feet, feel the energy and I remember

holding Simon’s hand and it was… I still find this quite emotional… you couldn’t move, it was just, I… I didn’t have any strength, I had this

ball of massive fear so that I couldn’t move anyway but… you just… I didn’t know what to do. I held Simon’s hand in the doorway and I was

thinking then we were going die. We are going to die, and I don’t know what to do.

And then it stopped. I think I realised that Simon had worked

it out; that he didn’t think anything bad was going to happen. That

gave me some confidence. But then afterwards I couldn’t talk about it because I felt… silly, almost. Yeah I know, I know, but that was how I

felt so I just swallowed it, bottled it up, locked it up in my stomach… we had no water, no television, no radio, we didn’t have electricity, we

couldn’t get water because the supermarket had run out, we didn’t have a car, we only had bikes, we cycled everywhere. No water… I’ve got a

photograph of our sink, it’s filled up so high and that’s what we washed

in for days, you know, we had, we had nothing, no family… no one

really sort of asked because you had no communication and we just

thought everyone was as bad as we were so we had to be stoic, you had to have patience.

I spoke to my mum in England a few days later and she said, ‘Just

think of your Nan, she was in the blitz. Things happen and this has happened and you’re all right.’ Which was true, and to me it was a

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surprise that everyone was pretty much all right. But still, I didn’t talk about it. We always try to suck it up don’t we, and think we’re not going to get hurt. Later I went back to England and had some

trauma counselling and now I can talk about it, I’m not frightened to

talk about it even if it’s still a bit upsetting at times, it’s all good. The therapist there helped me realise you can talk about it and cry about it and it’s fine, it’s fine. It’s fine.

Everything seemed to take weeks but when you look at the

magnitude of the event you could see why. Liquefaction everywhere, so

many places munted, our place was off its foundations, things weren’t

great but we didn’t see the point of getting excited. Well at one point

we did get excited about the possibility of rebuilding the house. We had tentative plans to go ahead and refurbish the house. It didn’t really

need it but it was just the wrong shape in places and we thought we

could divide things up a bit and yeah, we were pretty enthusiastic about it. We loved where we lived and we had the thought that we could turn this into an opportunity. We loved our home and here was the chance to build it back, almost as it was before except now we can do it more

eco-friendly. Sure, the liquefaction was a pain in the bum but you clear

it away and it’s done and we’re alive and now we can do all these things.

So that’s where we kind of got to with our plans. That was the good bit.

One of the not so good bits, for me, was the lack of sleep. I just wasn’t

sleeping. The earthquakes hit everybody differently I guess. You might

think of it as a similar experience but it’s not the same for everybody.

What caused my sleep problem was that the house was very close to the road edge and Retreat Road was in really bad condition. In addition

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to that Avonside had become an attraction; people were coming to see.

Now, I get that, I totally get it. Human beings are inquisitive, they want to know—it just would’ve been nice and perhaps more thoughtful if they’d walked rather than drive by in their cars.

What was happening was I could feel the vibration of a car but I

couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t hear it until it got close but by that time I’m already thinking this is an earthquake. That went on for months and months and months and if you add into that mix the real earthquakes—

the aftershocks—I was always on alert. I was never not on alert, which

meant I couldn’t get to sleep. I wouldn’t fall asleep until sometime after

4 o’clock in the morning. That was my routine for such a long time. It was my therapist who got this out of me—who worked out that my subconscious wouldn’t allow me to sleep until after 4 o’clock because

that was the time of the earthquake. Such a simple thing really, but I didn’t put it together, I just didn’t put that together. So rather than

dealing with my fear and my anxiety and being able to express it, whilst

everyone else was going through the same experience, I locked it up.

I thought you can’t complain, you just kind of get on with it and be

strong for the neighbour next door, be strong for your partner, so much so that you end up forgetting yourself.

Eventually we came up with the idea of putting some cones out on

to the road to create a chicane, that meant the traffic would have to

stop and let each other pass and also, they were away from the house

and the damaged waterpipes and so on. By this time it wasn’t just cars, we had fifty-two seater buses coming past full of people wanting to see the earthquake damage.

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Our house was white with pink windows, beautiful flowers and the

grass was still being mown. What was more difficult to see was that the house was shattered. Sadly, there was this family that took it upon themselves to think we were being looked after—as in privileged—by having these cones, that we were being treated better than others. It

started one day in the garden, I was out there working and suddenly

there was a lot of abuse, fingers, people swearing at me, it was just

bizarre… and it kept going on. They’d come at 12 o’clock at night and knock down all the cones, shout abuse at the house and I became really

quite absorbed by all this. The fear that I hadn’t dealt with became… you know, I was so scared about these people… we’d sit outside and

have a cigarette late at night and a van or something would come past

and he would stop, open his door and snot on the cone and call us

names and then drive off. We would be left looking at each other and going, what the… I mean after everything that had gone on, what does it bloody take for people to come together, rather than be like that. The woman and her daughters who yelled and screamed at me, drove their

car at me then stopped and who spat in my face, did they need the few

extra seconds it might take them to go past so badly. It wasn’t just me, there was a woman next door to us, an old age pensioner, who’d had a

heart attack and she was on her own. She had no insurance and she was feeling it… others too.

What I’ve learnt from all this is that some people judge first and

foremost by what they see—it’s something that I can learn from too—

don’t judge from what you can see. A book by its cover and all that. So

anyway, all these things going on around us, and that was just September.

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Then there was Boxing Day and then came February. Strangely

enough we had a visit from a Chief Inspector that day, seems we weren’t the only ones concerned about the speed of the cars and so

on. She said, ‘You’re only one of hundreds complaining about this so don’t think it’s just you.’ Hearing that made me feel a bit better, I didn’t

want to sound like a whinging pom. She was lovely and we ended up talking about all sorts of things, quite a girly conversation really until

we realised how late it was and she had a meeting to go to and we were supposed to be going into town ourselves. We said goodbye to her

and I went to my computer to turn it off and then the quake hit. We

got to the doorway of the lounge and I just stood there and hung on.

I couldn’t look anywhere, but Simon was looking out the window, he said ‘The river looks like a car-wash, it’s thrashing around all over the

place and I just burst into tears because this was big, way bigger, and I felt this time people will die.

Seeing those crevasses in the road after September I had been

shocked, the whole thing had seemed quite bizarre, but in comparison

to what had happened now they were like nothing. The road damage,

the liquefaction, the whole house, the cracks in the walls, I knew, everyone knew, this was so much bigger. Plus the time of day it

happened was not good. And knowing how much things must have already been weakened by what had gone before, well, logic tells you that things will have broken.

So much had already happened and now this, it was like a black

moment and you knew there was going to be a lot of grief. We heard

bits on the radio and there were the constant sirens and the dust and

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yes, I was incredibly frightened all over again by what had happened.

And beyond the fear it was all just a blur.

There was no water again and we went searching with backpacks

full of old coke bottles. At first we had difficulty finding any and then

we meet a guy with an artesian well who was kind enough to offer us

water. It was pretty filthy, full of silt and so on but better than nothing and so we boiled it up and were grateful for it. It seemed to take weeks

before any support appeared and it wasn’t because they’d ignored you, it was because they didn’t have the resources to get to you. They can’t be everywhere, it’s as simple as that and unless you report it and—

catch-22—you can’t, because you haven’t got the communications to do it, so it all becomes very surreal.

Strangely it seemed to take ages for anyone to realise how bad

Avonside was. And that’s not to say there weren’t other places exactly

the same. In the end we just kind of thought, well, we’ve got to go.

We’ve got to go and live somewhere else, you know, we’ve got nothing

here, and I don’t think anything or anyone’s going to get to us very quickly because this one’s really bad. We’d heard by then there were deaths in the city and that had to be a priority.

We ended up going with neighbours up to the Sounds, the

Marlborough Sounds, that was six days later and it was the first time I got to speak to my mum. We had no signal or power or whatever

in Avonside, just those bits off the radio. It wasn’t until we got to the Sounds that we had visuals—that we could see the television—and

when that happened I was hooked. I couldn’t leave it, I needed to know everything and I’ve since learnt that’s not always a good thing. Like the

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event happens, and it’s bad, and when you find out what’s happened

there’s this ongoing want—a need—to know more. It’s like adrenalin, and the worse something is, the more justified you kind of feel… but really what I wanted was for it all to be better. There is this huge and horrible situation in front of you and you just want it to be fixed.

By the time we had those two big earthquakes in June, I had run

away. A little before I’d actually haemorrhaged, the stress… it was

largely unexplained but I went into hospital here to have an operation

and yeah, I was not in a good space. I was cranky physically and in my mind, I was just not dealing with it all. Then we had some more shakes

and I bolted back to England, I left Simon here, I left Simon behind, I… I ran, I ran away, I just couldn’t do it anymore.

On the plane going out I was numb. I was not Rachael, I was a

zombie, a total zombie. I sat next to a Japanese couple whose language I couldn’t speak and they had limited English but they tried really hard. After a while she found out I came from Christchurch and she

reached over and took my hand and said, ‘It’ll be okay. It will be okay.’

That was kind, but at the time I had so much going on in my head, I wasn’t ready… I was basically living in fear.

When I got back to the UK I tried… my mum tried… but I just

caved—I went into a cave—I just wanted to stay in my room. If a lorry

went past I’d jump. I had bad thoughts and horrible things happening.

I was on Prozac, I was on Valium, I believed that shutting down my

world would mean less risk. In the end though I did get some really

good help, EMDR therapy, which I think is good to talk about. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, it’s where they say that

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a tragic event happens and then gets locked up, doesn’t get processed.

From that experience I now know how good it is to talk about things, or cry if we have to, let things out and not bottle them up.

Simon came out a couple of months later and so he was here also

when the earthquakes happened in June. Being in England I had started absolutely kicking myself, thinking oh my goodness, I left, you know, I felt really guilty, really bad, but I couldn’t not go. I couldn’t stop

myself. I needed looking after. At the same time I felt really awful that

I’d abandoned Christchurch. The people and the place I was part of. It was very weird, I felt like I was going for my support when in fact I

was leaving my support behind. Even the various agencies would come knocking on our door in Avonside, ‘Do you need counselling?’

‘No, not me, you need to go and see so and so down the road, she’s

having a hard time of it.’

We never took it ourselves but that’s… that’s what I suppose I’ve

now learnt.

A few months later we were back here and I’m a different person,

and, this might sound really weird, but I’m really grateful for the

experience of the earthquakes because without them I doubt I would have been catapulted into the big question—what is it all about?

Simon and I have been together four years in May, but we’ve known

each other for about eighteen years. I didn’t come out to New Zealand until 2008. He’d lived here for twice as long, about eight years, then he came back to England and we met up and I was going through a separation at the time, not a particularly nice one, but then they never

are. Sadly, my mum’s sister was murdered in Barbados around the same

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time so there were a lot of bad things happening and perhaps you could see it as an escape, me leaving and coming out here. I suppose it was. But it was also a cleansing thing, you know, like I don’t have to

talk about it because nobody here knows about it. It was a fresh start, yeah, a very fresh start, and I was very happy to be here. Still learning about my new country and still loving it, becoming part of it. I really did have New Zealand down, and Christchurch and Avonside Drive in particular, as my home.

Today it still is, and even though we are no longer in Avonside

I’ve never thought of abandoning New Zealand because wherever you are you can have things happen. And when the bad things do

happen, it’s about how we deal with them isn’t it, about remembering that there are plenty of minutes in the day and weeks and months where there aren’t any earthquakes, and that there’s a lot of other things in our lives to enjoy.

When we came back we knew that there’d still be ongoing quakes

and none of my family were too happy about me leaving, but they also knew that I wouldn’t do anything that I didn’t want to do. I’m quite

strong-willed in that way, and so everyone just wished us luck and

we got on the plane and we, we were like… well I felt re-energised.

It was like I’d unlocked myself and a lot of that fear had gone. It

helped me to realise you can retrain yourself; retrain your mind into seeing things from a different perspective. I mean, I’m still allowed to be scared, that’s a reaction, so when we get an earthquake I might

jump, I might go outside. But I don’t have that catching of breath anymore; I don’t hyperventilate and think, oh my God! Oh my God!

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Even if there’s another big one, I can’t change it. I can’t control it.

Okay I may not like it but I’m not sitting around right now worrying about it.

I feel now that life is for living, for being happy, and yeah, you

have some hurdles along the way, earthquakes, murder, you know, and maybe that sounds like I’m making light of it but I’m not, it’s

just you can’t carry all that about with you. We’re not capable, we’re

not equipped to carry that sort of load, so my feelings now are that

you deal with the situations as they happen and then, with respect, you have to gently let them go.

Anyway, our attitude coming back was completely different. We

couldn’t wait to get back to our house, our home. Maybe it wasn’t much of a home anymore but to us it was. We’d been living with

parents and friends out of suitcases, so to come back to our house

with it’s funny old table-tennis table and just chill out was great.

Just being on our own, having our own space, it was like a sanctuary, so regardless of the conditions, it was, at least in that sense, fine.

On the other hand, it was also non-functioning. You couldn’t do the

things you normally did. You couldn’t garden, it was covered in silt.

You couldn’t hang your washing on the line because it was too dusty, you couldn’t even sit outside in the sun because there was so much dust, in the end you just didn’t bother. On a windy day with all the traffic constantly moving on those roads, trucks coming to empty the

sewage, to fix pipes and so on, you had to totally batten down inside, it was that bad. We didn’t want to leave where we were, even with how bad it was, we still cared about our home. We talked about it at

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length, tried to think about the situation as it was, what our options were in these circumstances and finally we decide to move on.

Ideally we would’ve liked to have taken the money and then have

the freedom to do what we wanted when we wanted, but that would have cost us a lot. We would have lost a hundred thousand if we’d

taken the cash offer, not something I think is very fair, but okay, there’s no point arguing it. They weren’t going to budge. That meant we had to buy and we had to buy quickly because the housing market in this

climate is unique and you didn’t know what was going to happen. We didn’t want to find the market had suddenly risen and that we couldn’t get back into the same sort of situation we had had.

So, we chose a figure that we were willing to spend and we found

a project we were prepared to take on. It was a beautiful house but it

needed a bit of work. When we moved here I was just… I felt wonderful.

I could hang the washing on the line without worrying about the dust.

I could garden, I could breathe fresh air, you know, there was no grit in

my teeth and there was no grit in my hair, my clothes felt clean. Okay, the place needed quite a bit of brightening up and that’s what we were

prepared to do. We took the house on with damage and knowing there

was a fair bit of work to do, including a full paint inside and out but we thought that’s great, we can put our own effort into it and that’ll

be fine because we wanted– we needed—an income, because we’d also decided by then we were not going to stay in Christchurch.

It was not a decision made lightly. It wasn’t because we don’t want

to support it, but five to ten years out of our lifetime—before the city

even starts to come back—that’s a big ask. And it’s not that we wouldn’t

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come back if that was the case, but for us it’s about going forward, it’s about keeping on going forward. I was like ‘Woo-hoo, let’s get on with it,’ and then came December. We were lying in the back garden reading and I felt the ground roll and I held onto my cushion—as if that was

going to help. Anyway, at least we were outside and nothing was going to fall on us. I’d come back with new eyes, really excited to be back, and

then December threw me. Not to the extent that I wanted to run back

to England, but it did throw me. And when we went back inside the house, we had—excuse my French—shitloads more damage.

I guess we kind of knew the procedure by now; we’d been through

a munted house in a red zone before. When you can’t shut your doors and the fireplace hearth has popped up and the floor’s not level and

I’m now cooking back on the stove like I did in Avonside—the sort of cooking where when I put oil in the frying pan it all ends up over to

one side—you know this house is a little bit more damaged than it was

before. This is our house, the biggest asset we have, and it’s starting to feel like we are back in Avonside Drive again.

I’m forty one years old, not that age means anything to me but

I’ve had quite a few difficult experiences. We try to live a very simple

life, so we loved getting on our bikes and cycling into town, going to

tennis, you know, all of that sort of thing. Today I don’t like going into the town, I just don’t like it. Yes, I think it’s amazing what they’ve done with the shops in containers, I think that’s all brilliant, a really

good idea, but when you’re walking around you also see the ghosts of buildings past, you look into those spaces and see what we have

lost. And they’re still taking buildings down—they’re not even at the

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rebuild stage yet. So much of the city is gone and there’s still so

much more to go. You can’t have a city without the people and you don’t have the people if you haven’t got a city. Part of me wants to

support it but at the same time I have my own personal life, my own

agenda to live, and it’s not that you can’t live here, of course you can, but I want a bigger world. I want a larger experience.

We had a friend come over—it was a bit impromptu—just after

Christmas, and she was very keen to do a road trip so off we went.

First to the West Coast and then on down to Queenstown. We loved

it there. We really did. The outdoor life we both like anyway, and as we go to England pretty much in the winter we’d escape that part of it—it got us thinking, if we had a place here winter would be a

great rental opportunity. What had started as a trip for our friend presented us with these really good ideas and that’s what we now

want to do. Sell our place in Christchurch and move to Queenstown.

Okay we could go to Queenstown and have an earthquake

there, I know that, but it will be one of their first, right, not some place where the infrastructure has already been weakened by many

thousands of earthquakes already. I mean, how many more can it take? I do want to remain positive about it but it’s a personal thing. We would simply prefer, after having this amount of time in quakeville, to be somewhere else. If I had family here maybe I’d feel

different. Maybe I’d be more resolute about staying, but we haven’t, so why stay somewhere where you don’t need to. It’s really no more

than that. And yes, it’s sad, because I do love Christchurch; I think it’s beautiful, but also just a bit ugly at the moment.

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Where might we be in a few years? I’d like to think we will be

happy and settled in Queenstown and yet who knows. Simon and I

have talked about this and we both feel Christchurch is a wonderful

place and believe that one day it will be the best city in New Zealand.

Perhaps we could come back—perhaps we might want to come back

and not be able to afford to buy the house we are living in now.

It’s all what ifs isn’t it. And you know what, it feels really good to

be that free. Before some of the things that happened in England, and before the earthquakes here, I was fully signed up to a different

sort of life, part of the great consumer way. House, car, job, clothes, looking a certain way, having this done, having that done, keeping

up with the Joneses. In our society it’s almost an inevitable journey

unless somehow you can catapult yourself out of it. You don’t even necessarily know you’re inside it until you find yourself outside and looking back and thinking, God, how did that happen.

I mean there I am, living my life like that, always in competition

or in need of possessions and then a terrible earthquake comes along and in a matter of seconds your home is destroyed. The reality

here is that if your peace and salvation come from what you have, or where you live, then you’re setting yourself up for some major disappointments. Maybe what we have to learn is that you can enjoy it, but perhaps not to make it the most important thing in your life. Kindness, happiness, peace of mind, no matter what the

circumstances, those now seem to be the important things to me and I sure that all sounds a bit hippy doesn’t it but it’s the only way I know of saying it.

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I used to be a reactor. Something would happen and bang, as soon

as someone said anything, as soon as something happened, I would

react, stick up for myself, you know, in boots and all, but not now.

Now I try to live a different sort of life and that’s because of all my

experiences. Earthquakes included. It may sound a bit strange to some but to me it’s a good thing.

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