If That’s What It Comes Down To – Leanne Heyward

If That’s What It Comes Down To Leanne Heyward

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Leanne Heyward

I love my children. I love my home. I love cooking. I love cleaning.

Well, okay, maybe I don’t love cleaning but I am a good cook and

what I suppose I’m trying to say is I’m a very homely sort of person. I

sometimes think how good it would be not to work, to just be a fulltime mother. I’m probably the sort of person who would have been better off in the sixties, a stay at home mum that cooked meals and did all those things that I like to do.

I was brought up in a strict catholic family, all girls, no boys. I went

to an all-girls high school and had real trouble relating to boys as I grew up. Found it quite hard to talk to boys, to men. I can still be

quite shy. I think I’m a kind person but I don’t have a lot of confidence.

Yeah, my dad was very strict with us. I’m a middle child that got used

to letting things ride. I don’t take issue with things. I wouldn’t, for instance, get into a discussion on politics with someone—or religion— I’m just middle of the road. I do what I have to do now.

These earthquakes, having to deal with the insurance and all that

sort of thing, they’ve probably they’ve made me a little bit more

confident. I still get nervous ringing places but I’m not as bad as I was.

I’m closer to people now too. Yes, it’s definitely made me closer to my friends. Made me appreciate people more—the time I spend with my

family and friends. The kids and I have always been close, but also my

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girlfriends, we catch up with each other more often these days, make sure we are all okay.

We’ve all aged, or at least, I’m sure I have. Looks, hair, wrinkles, all

that, but you know, in some ways it’s made me worry less about what

we’ve got, and think more about what’s important. I’d rather have my

family than the best TV in the world. My ex bought me a brand new

forty-two-inch flat screen TV, it was kind of him and I thought well, yeah, I’ve brought these kids up really well, so I’ll take that, thanks

very much. It lasted six months. It broke in the June earthquake and so now we are back to watching the little fourteen-inch job because it’s

the only one that works. Things are all very well; it’s nice to have them.

Particularly when they have some sort of meaning to you, but in the end it’s all just stuff, isn’t it. It’s not family, it’s not friends.

Something else, I’m definitely more cautious. I take my phone

everywhere and the kids have got to have their phones. I tell them

where I’m going to be and how long I’ll be there. If I’m going for a walk I’ll tell them which way I am going for a walk. I do worry about it

all. It’s a horrible thing but at least twenty to thirty times a day I will be doing something and suddenly think to myself, what would I do right now if there was an earthquake?

That first one, back when we didn’t even know what they were, that

was scary. I was out of bed before I was awake. Jumping out, screaming and yelling at the kids, ‘Get out of bed, get out of bed!’ I got to the

doorframe of my bedroom and saw Matt coming out and then Emily

came around the corner. I was leaping across to them, wrenching across, and then just holding onto the doorframe for dear life. I could hear

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popping from outside; the fence along the side of the house, it was the

nails popping. And I could smell sewage. I thought maybe it had come up out of the toilet and I could see a light going on and off through

the bathroom door, I couldn’t believe it was happening. Emily sat there

on the floor and Matt’s yelling to me, ‘I can’t hold on, I can’t hold on.’

I was telling him he had to when it finally stopped. It took a moment, we were all shaking and then I grabbed a couple of sweatshirts I had

hanging on the door handles and got them on the kids, then I put my dressing gown on and we made a kind of train through to the lounge

here and under the table. I don’t know who was leading, Emily or Matt, but all I could think of was we’re walking through here in the dark; I was worried we’d trip over something. We made it to the table—found

the table—and got under it. I pulled the chairs in after us and a rug I’d got hold of. Moments ago we were all happily asleep and now we are

cowering under the table and it’s all starting to shake again. I didn’t even know where my phone was.

Emily knew hers was in her bedroom so I went to get it and at

the same time I knew there was a little red torch in there and I found that. ‘Be careful mum!’ I could hear the kids calling out for me to

be careful. On the way back I found my own phone, it was up there on the table we were under. My ex mother-in-law and her husband

live in Nelson and they’d been trying to get hold of me, they finally managed to get through on Emily’s phone. They’d felt it way up there and were worried for us.

By then we were all getting pretty cold, actually it was freezing so

I was glad I’d got the sweatshirts and we had that rug. We just sort

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of sat there and started to fall back to sleep. I don’t know how much later it was that I heard the neighbours, heard noises outside, but I was too scared to go out. Then my friend Chris came down, must have

been about half past five and I heard her calling out so I went to the

door. She said they were all okay and that they had been having a look around outside.

I said, ‘I’m too scared to go outside.’

She said, ‘I think there’s sewage all up your drive.’

It made me realise we were all getting to the point where we had to

go to the toilet and by then there was nothing for it but to go out on the grass. When we came back in we all snuggled up under the table again

and tried to fall off to sleep. It must have been about half past seven

when it started getting a bit lighter and we got up and went through to the front room. I opened the curtains and just burst into tears. Seeing the devastation, just seeing it like that, I couldn’t stop crying.

It looked like they say. It looked like a war zone. And it had been

such a beautiful place. Now it was craters and lamp posts all over the

place. The one by our neighbours had come down on our fence, the one outside us was on an angle, the one on the other side of us was lying on

a fence as well. We got dressed and went outside. People were around, I just kept crying, for some reason I found it hard not to cry.

When I was a young teenager we lived in a two-storied house and

there had been an earthquake, I’ve been petrified of them ever since. It

had always been in the back of my mind, long before these earthquakes

now. I’d be in a supermarket thinking what if there was an earthquake now, what would I do? It must have been something that really affected

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me. Even so, another part of me never imagined we’d have one. I always thought okay, if the house burns down, we’ve got insurance. There

might be a flood. Okay, we’ve got insurance. But I never considered an earthquake. That was a shock; yeah, I guess that’s what happened, I was in shock.

Outside, the driveway that had always been straight and flat was

now on a downhill slant. Even the front lawn was on an angle, slopping down towards the river. The garage had tipped backwards and was

flooded. The house had moved but I’m not sure how badly at that stage.

And what we all now know as liquefaction was there too, bits and bobs

of it around the garden. We walked down to the bridge and took a look at that, then we decided to walk over to St Pauls School and see

how it had fared. Matt was in year eight at the time and I’d once been a pupil there myself. I took some money with me to see if we could get

some bottled water from the dairy on the way. As we crossed over the bridge I couldn’t quite believe what had happened to it. At St Pauls the

church was broken in half; the inside was all lifted up. It really was just unreal. It felt like we were all kind of numb, or at least I was.

Later we trudged back, sloshing our way down the street through

the silt and water. When we got to the bridge the police were now

there and said we couldn’t go across it. I told them we lived on the other side and needed to get home, but it made no difference. By then

it was about half past ten and we’d had no breakfast. The footbridge was closed as well and we were about to walk to the Swanns Road

Bridge when the neighbours rang and kindly said they’d come and pick us up.

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Later my sister-in-law and her kids turned up to see if we were

all right. We’re not together anymore; my ex-husband, the children’s dad, but we get on well enough. At the time he was in Europe and

he’d heard there’d been an earthquake here so of course he was really worried about the kids. He’d been trying to get hold of us but hadn’t been able to, so his sister came to make sure we were okay.

Strange the things you think about, the things that get to you at a

time like this. There used to be the path there alongside the river. The Council were building it and each year they did another section. It

meant a lot. We watched that path get built. I used to walk along there

with Matt in the pram, the kids would ride their bike to school on that path and we were thankful for it. It was so lovely. The year Matt was going to school, the year he was five, they were just finishing the last

section and I’ll always remember him saying one day, ‘Shall we go and

tell the man thank you for building the rest of the path mum.’ It wasn’t a little thing to us and now it’s gone. It’s not just the cracks in the roads is it, not always the obvious things.

Matt was just a boy when the first one arrived. But from that time

on he’s grown from a boy into a young man. I guess it was his time to grow but not only his body, beyond that, the maturity that has come about, I can see these changes that have come, right through all the earthquakes. Not just Matt either, Emily too, and me.

In February we stayed the first few nights in town, me in a caravan,

the kids inside. During the actual earthquake I thought I was going to

be decapitated. I was at work and having my lunch and all of a sudden these cabinets started moving in and out and I froze. I just couldn’t

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move. There was another lady there with me, Shirley. She’d dropped to

the floor but I just—I can’t believe it—I just froze. My hands shook. My phone hit the floor and all I could think of was Emily—Emily’s home

alone. Where’s my phone. I couldn’t find my phone. I was panicking, then Shirley said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ All the children were in another building and so we helped get all the kids out and took

them to sit outside. I was still trying to text Emily but my battery was dying. We kept having aftershocks and had to move our little posse

three times because of how the water, the liquefaction, was coming up.

I’d heard from Matt, he was at school and so I knew he was fine.

I managed to get a message to Emily’s father, I said Emily is home alone you need to get her because I knew I couldn’t leave work. We couldn’t leave these little children of course. Half an hour later one of the dads ran in from town and told us that the city has been really

badly damaged. ‘There’s people dead, he said.’ That was hard because we all knew the husband of one of our teachers worked in town, at

the same time we were trying to be calm for all these crying children.

Trying to comfort them.

And then the parents started turning up and we started letting

the teachers go one by one as well. Vanessa went first because of her

husband, she still hadn’t heard from him and then me because they

knew I was on my own and they knew Emily was home alone. I left the car at work and ran home but when I got there the back door was

wide open and they were gone. Apparently she had run out onto the

back lawn when it happened and my next-door neighbour heard her and comforted her. Her father had managed to get there and pick her

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up and then gone off to get Matt. There wasn’t much I could do after that except hang with the neighbours. It was hard not being there with her, that panicked me knowing she was home alone. And knowing I

had to stay with the young ones. I couldn’t—I wouldn’t have left them.

They were so scared. We got some of them to stop crying but as soon as their parents turned up they burst into tears again. Except, there is one little boy who’s always full of smiles and when he saw his mum come

in the gate he ran over with this huge smile and it just kind of made things lighter for all of us.

I had some trouble getting hold of my family. I couldn’t get hold of

my sister, I wasn’t sure where she was working that day but I thought

it was somewhere in the city. My mum had actually left that day for

Hamilton which was a blessing, she’s seventy-five this year and so yeah, it was a relief to know she was all right. She actually got hold of me

about 5 o’clock and let me know about Manda, she’d been working at

AMI when they’d had to evacuate and she’d had to leave her phone.

It was good to know she was all right. There were four of us sisters, all

growing up together in Dorchester Street. Primary school was okay

but later, being so shy, I hated high school. In the beginning I hardly knew anyone but eventually I did make some nice friends. When I left I went to work in the Post Office, mum got me a job in tolls and I was

there for quite a time. I met my first boyfriend at eighteen and he later

became my husband. My parents were divorced about that time as well.

We lived together here in Christchurch for a while, split up, then

we got back together again and went to Auckland. We must have been

up there nearly three years before we came home and got married.

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We brought this house, got ourselves a dog called Molly and a year later we had Emily. She was eight weeks early and came in the middle

of all sorts of renovations to the house. That was all quite traumatic

at the time. Later Matt arrived. When he was about twenty months old my father died. My marriage didn’t last either. We kind of drifted

apart and separated at the beginning of 1993. It was a mutual thing.

I mean I was really unhappy but I would never have done anything.

I would have just carried on for the children’s sake. I didn’t want to

have a broken marriage, not like my parents, but life isn’t always what you want it to be, is it. Afterwards I just decided my children were

top priority. Looking after them and doing my best to bring them up properly, that became the most important thing.

Being on your own, having to deal with the insurance and make

all those decisions with no one to discuss it with, it’s hard. When my husband and I were together he did it all. I’ve learnt. I learnt to do it

on my own because I’ve had to, but that doesn’t mean I like it. And

while I’m having a moan, the other thing that’s driven me mad is the roads. Getting the kids to and from school, I feel like I need a fourwheel drive. If I won the lotto I’d buy a four-wheel drive. They’re all in

fashion now, perfect for Christchurch. God, who wouldn’t like to win Lotto right now, but that’s not real life is it. No… no… in real life you don’t win Lotto.

In real life around here, we just kept having earthquakes. In June it

was Emily’s sixteenth birthday. I started work at 11 o’clock that day so

I asked her what she wanted for tea. Lasagne. Okay, so I had made the lasagne, it was all done bar being put in the oven. We still had half a

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chocolate cake because we’d been out the night before for her birthday

with her Dad. So that was in the fridge, I figured I had it all sorted.

I was at work by the time the first one hit. I wasn’t worried about Emily because I heard from her straight away. At that stage Emily’s at Marion, and Matt’s at St Bedes. Turns out the boys were allowed to go

home pretty well straight away but Emily had to stay. She was going to get a ride home with another parent so that was fine. Matt had no

phone—no credit on his phone, we’d been having a few issues with him spending his money and wasting it on his phone. So, I had no idea where he was.

At work I was in the baby room. I had a little one on my knee and

a little girl standing beside me when it hit. I had trouble sitting on the wee stool holding this one and I grabbed the little girl. The water came

flying out of the fish tank and it struck me as funny for some reason, I don’t know why. As usual we took all the children outside and we sort of worked out what was going to happen. Because we didn’t lose power

we thought no, we’ll be fine. We’ve got power. We’ve got water. We’ll

just carry on but then the children were going. Some parents rung, others came and got their children, some stayed on. Sometime before the second one hit one of the teachers said, ‘Look who’s coming in the gate Leanne,’ and it was Matt, he’d turned up at work. I was so relieved to know where he was.

He got busy helping us around the place, cleaning up the sandpit

and putting all the toys away because by then we were packing up.

We still had a few children there but their parents were coming. I was just in the laundry when the next one came. I looked up and saw the

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doorframe moving side to side. I got thrown onto the couch and that

was it, I thought I’m out of here. I’m not staying in this building and I know that’s the wrong thing to do, I should have just dropped and

covered but my head but I didn’t, I went through that door and outside I saw Matt still in the sandpit and all the liquefaction starting coming

up under the sand. It was just bubbling out and he went running on

to the wee hill we’ve got there. He was standing on the path when the

concrete rose under him and snapped. As I went to him I could see the look on his face, I won’t forget it.

When I was able to leave, Matt and I started walking home. We

left Gayhurst Road where I work and headed down McBratneys Road across the other side of the river. From there we could look over and see

all the flooding. I yelled to one of my neighbours and said we’d wait to get Emily before coming home. I wasn’t worried about Emily because I knew she was at the school and that she’d be getting a ride home with

another parent and that could take a long time. I didn’t want to cross the bridge until I’d got Emily so we walked down to my boss’s house

and stayed there till 4 o’clock when Emily turned up with another

birthday cake one of her friends had made her. She won’t forget her sixteenth birthday in a hurry.

Veronica, my boss, had just made us a coffee and so we had a bit of

cake and coffee and then I thought, right, we have to try and get home.

I didn’t think we’d get across the Dallington Bridge so we went right

round to Stanmore Road and we came in that way. It was flooded right out in front of the house and both the kids were in their uniforms so I left them three doors down and said I’ll walk through the water and

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get some gumboots. But then a man who lives down the road turned

up in his four-wheel drive and when he saw the kids he told them to jump on the back and reversed them up the drive. That was really

helpful, I didn’t want them getting mud all over their school clothes and shoes. Then I looked in the house and I burst into tears. The house was trashed.

In September the clothesbasket had gotten broken because

something fell on it. In February nothing fell except a few picture

frames, but they didn’t break. But this time the inside of the house was just trashed. The whole kitchen was out. The stove was out. The fridge was out. Everything was out. The TVs were down. The bookshelf was

down. It was trashed. And in May we’d adopted a cat and she was inside and her kitty litter was covered in books from the hallway.

We cleared the books. Got her kitty litter out. Climbed through to

the fridge. Got my lasagne, the chocolate cake and a bottle of wine and made our way to a friend’s place where we stayed for the night. We had a nice birthday tea, a very memorable one I guess you’d say.

You know, I love this area. It’s my place. I’ve known this area all my

life and this house, it wasn’t just any old house to us, this was our home

and I worked hard to get it to where it was. The year before I borrowed

a bit of money from the bank and started to make it a really nice place for the kids and me to be.

We got a ceiling replaced and all the walls painted. New drapes

and a new window put in where the sunroom door had been. I worked

really hard sanding and painting and that was all finished in December.

Then in March I had the whole living area done. New fire, underfloor

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insulation, we gave up a lot to do all that. I said to the kids, there’s just the spouting needs doing now and we can get back to doing things again. We’ll have a little bit of money left over for fun.

Then it all hit, September, February, and everything we’d done, all

that money, had gone down the drain. Not at first. After September I

thought, okay, they should be able to repair the house, that’s fine, so they’ll fix the land and we’ll be all right. After February I started to

think, hmmm, I don’t know. Maybe they’ll take the first lot of houses from the riverbank. What am I going to do? After June, I knew then

we’d be gone. I wanted it to be the same as before but by now it was obvious it would never be the same again. At that moment I knew I’d

be on a pretty strict budget and also that I didn’t know where I wanted to go or what we could do.

I started looking for somewhere to go after June, or perhaps a little

later, probably more in the spring. I started looking once I knew—as

soon as I got my thing from the insurance. The good news is I did have insurance; the bad news is it had run down. At the time my husband

and I split up we had insurance for the house and when he left I kept with the same company but the following year they put it up and at the

time I felt I couldn’t afford it, by then things were really tight. What

I didn’t actually understand so well was that they increase the amount with inflation each year and I’d stopped the increases at the time he’d left. For the last seven years my home had been under-insured. I guess I’ve learnt my lesson from that but at least I had insurance and I knew

then how much money I had. I started looking at maybe buying another

house over in the Bishopdale, Redwood areas, somewhere where the

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land was a bit more stable. It wasn’t far from St Bedes either so at least one of us would be close to school or work or whatever. But

sadly the houses I liked there were out of my price range by forty or

fifty thousand, too much for me. There were some houses that were

under my budget but I didn’t like them and I wasn’t going to go

below what I’d already had. I looked at other places but there always

seemed to be a problem or a difficulty of some sort. In the end I kept coming back to the Sovereign Palms subdivision out at Kaiapoi. I had friends out there too and so yeah, that’s where we are going.

My girlfriend took me out to see the lady she had dealings with,

just to talk to her and to see what there was there. I had in my mind

I needed to make a decision before Christmas because everything was going up and prices were going to get out of my reach. The next lot of places were going to be released in a couple of weeks so I was trying to work out what I needed to do with that and who to call. It

was me that had to make this decision and no one else and I didn’t want to make the wrong one. Then a lady from the company there

rang me and said, ‘There’s a section coming up in stage six. It’s a corner section and we can do something for you with that.’ I thought

when I talked to her she said it would be two hundred and eighty thousand, but then when I went to see her, no, it was going to be two hundred and ninety thousand. I went to the bank and they said they

could give me more money, so that’s it, I’m borrowing about twenty thousand extra.

I’ve been here in this home now for nineteen years come next

April and I never planned to move, not until the kids had left home

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anyway. It’s taken me a long time to get my head around it. If we’d had to leave after the first one in September I don’t know how I

would have dealt with it. Even now part of me doesn’t want to go.

Everything’s going to change I guess but we are going to get a brand new home and now we’re picking colours and so on it’s sort of

exciting. Given the choice though, I’d just want my old home back like it was. Yeah, I’d still rather stay here. Never mind, what I hope is

that in three or four years we have settled in our new home and that it will still be a lovely new home. Please let it be built and stay the way it is, and nothing dramatic happen.

Moneywise things will get a little tight again once the new

mortgage kicks in. I’m lucky to have two such wonderful kids but I

wish at times I had the money to take them out somewhere special, take them for a meal out, or go bowling or to the movies, things like that. The main thing I hope for is that they grow up healthy and happy adults and have the sort of life that they both wish for.

As for myself, I don’t want to be on my own all my life. It would

be nice to have someone to share things with. Mum must have been

close to fifty when she split up with my father. She went out with

a couple of men and then she was on her own for a long, long time.

She met Vince when she was sixty something and she was very happy

then. Sadly Vince died a couple of years ago. They were so happy

together and he was like a father to me and a grandfather to the kids.

If only they’d met ten years earlier. Anyway, I guess it proves it can

happen and maybe one day it will for me. In the meantime it’s my kids that are the important ones and always will be.

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December, that was the last big one and it was the easiest one for us

because we were all at home together. The kids were in watching TV

I think and they dived under the table. I just got under the doorframe and then we went outside. Because they were here I was fine and mum

was actually in Nelson so that was fine also. And by then my sister had gone back to Perth because of all this.

I texted a few friends to check on them and then we went out to

watch the liquefaction rising up and the water coming out of the road.

I said to Emily there could be another one, like after June. Matt was still inside watching TV and the cat had taken off. Okay so Emily

and I were going to go find the cat. We walked out the gate—we were

going to go around to the park—and a police car was coming down

the road. The road was half flooded so we waited for the police car to go pass, we were just standing there in the driveway and then the earth went sideways again.

We held on to each other until we dropped to the ground, it was

impossible to stay upright. From where we sat I’m looking at my car

and couldn’t believe the way it was tipping in the driveway. Next thing I hear this yell, ‘Mum! Mum!’ It’s from Matt inside and I thought, oh God, what’s happened. I picked myself up and rushed in and of course

there’s nothing wrong at all. He was actually stood there looking in the

pantry for food. Looking for something he couldn’t find. Yeah, I know, how unusual for a teenage boy. I had to smile, I thought if that’s what it comes down to, we’ll be all right. We’ll be okay.

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