Trivial tales from someone who’s always in it

These are quotes from conversations I’ve had with family members following the Christchurch earthquake. They’re not verbatim but they’re as accurate as I can remember:

I lived through the War. I lived through air-raids and the Blitz but this is worse.
– Dowager Empress (mother)

 There was a woman running around screaming. She was completely out of control. She wouldn’t stop. I had to grab her arm really hard and yell at her to sit down because I was scared she’d run outside on to the road and be hit by something.
– Jo (sister)

We all made our way out of the buildings and crossed the road to Latimer Square. People were just milling around. Everyone was so quiet. You know how you can get large groups of people together, like at rugby matches, and you can feel that everyone’s a part of the excitement and they’ve all got it in common? Well, this was a large group of people and the thing that they all had in common was terror.
– Ciaran (brother)

I walked home and I saw a crowd of people down by the corner shops, so I thought I’d go over and see if I could help. The shops were all destroyed. When I got there, I heard someone yelling for anyone who knew first aid. I went to the front of the crowd and I saw some guys pulling a girl out from the rubble. I knew her. She worked at the fish shop and I used to talk to her sometimes when I went in there. She’d been crushed when the building collapsed. I tried to find a pulse but she was dead.
–Steve (brother)

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It was the morning of Tuesday 22 February and we were in lockdown. Cyclone Carlos was heading down the coast towards Karratha and we’d been on Red Alert for seven hours.

I’d spent the night at the radio station where I work. Once Red Alert is called, where you are is where you have to stay. I’d said I’d be available to work during the cyclone, so on Monday evening I’d packed a bag, grabbed an inflatable mattress and some bedding, and left a flu-ridden Dreamboat at home.

On Tuesday morning we went to rolling cyclone coverage. My program was going to start an hour earlier than usual. Ninety seconds before I was due to go on air, I had a call from the Dreamboat. He was crying.

“There’s been a huge earthquake in Christchurch. It’s bad… really bad and I can’t reach anyone on the phone.”

It took a few seconds to sink in. All of my family live in Christchurch.

“Stop that! Stop crying!” I snapped at him. Some primitive part of my brain had the notion that he’d jinx things with his tears. What I hadn’t yet realised (and he had) was that at that time of day, everyone in my family — mother, sister and two brothers — would’ve been in or near the Christchurch CBD.

That three-hour broadcast I did was the longest of my life. Every news break, I’d ring the Dreamboat and ask if he’d managed to contact anyone. The answer was always no. He sat, like many other people stuck at home during the Red Alert, and watched the horror unfolding on the TV — shattered buildings, broken and bewildered people, sirens and dust and blood.

Everyone in my family made it. We were so lucky not to lose anyone; during the quake, all of them were in buildings that suffered damage. It was a miracle my mother wasn’t killed. She’d just been to Mass at the Holy Cross Chapel in Cathedral Square (completely destroyed) and had made her way to the Bus Exchange in Lichfield Street to catch a bus home. She was there when the quake struck. It threw her against a wall, injuring her shoulder. Part of the building collapsed and killed a woman and her child.

Only minutes afterwards, a guy living in a CBD apartment took a camera outside and started filming what he saw. He took some footage of people making their way down the middle of Lichfield St. My Mum, the Dowager Empress was one of them. You can see her coming into the shot at 1:50 — a little, white-haired old lady, utterly dazed and frightened by what she’s witnessing. It’s here:

My sister told me about this footage. It had been picked up by one of the TV channels and screened on the News. She had no idea what was coming. I had prior warning but I still found it very distressing.

You can read my youngest brother’s story here.

Like every other ex-pat Christchurch native, the first thing I wanted to do was jump on a plane and get over there. Then I thought about it and realised I’d be just one more person using up precious resources. I briefly considered going to our farm, buying food and inviting my family up there to be cooked for and fussed over and cosseted. There was talk of my youngest brother taking up the offer with his family and the Dowager Empress but at the point, they couldn’t bear to leave. Everyone’s still in Christchurch and although I can understand why, I wish to hell they weren’t.

So, back to Carlos… well, Carlos was a bit of a fizzer, really. He came and went. At 6pm, we were taken off Red Alert. I packed up my bedding and headed home to the Dreamboat. We watched the rolling TV earthquake coverage and cried.

We’re flying over at the end of the month. We were always planning to do that anyway because the Dowager Empress is celebrating a Significant Birthday on 2 April, but we’ve changed the flights so we’ll arrive a few days earier than originally planned. This will give us more time to spend with everyone before we head up to the farm for a week. We’ll be taking anyone who wants to go with us.

It can’t come soon enough.

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A summary of shit I’ve been up to in the last seven months, presented in list form because I’m just too busy and important to write it any other way:

France trip (every bit as good and bad as I’d expected)
Good bits: meeting a new cousin. Hanging out with lots of old nuns. Helping out in the convent gardens. Speaking French and realising my accent had improved ten-fold. The kindness of French people generally. Seeing my aunt again (on her good days).
Bad bits: The length of the journey. Having luggage lost at Charles de Gaulle airport. Sharing a room with the Dowager Empress (mother), who is a somewhat voluble sleeper. Seeing my aunt again (on her bad days).

Getting a part-time office job
Good bits: scoring the job with no questions asked, despite CV saying “Feb 09 - present: being mental”. Having money that the Dreamboat didn’t give me. Meeting nice people.
Bad bits: crap money. The original ‘two days a week’ agreement going out the window after the first week, with work creeping up to full-time and totally taking over my life — hence, finishing up before Christmas. Which belongs in the ‘good bits’ section.

Casual work in radio (never say never)
Good bits: being back on air. Remembering how much I love it. Getting nice messages from listeners. Making more money. Only doing it occasionally, so no burn-out.
Bad bits: none yet.

Freelancing feature-writing work
Good bits: seeing the France story in print. Lots of ideas for other stories. Finding great talent to interview for two of them.
Bad bits: not enough time to pitch or write the damn things.

Medical matters
Good bits: lots of tests earlier in the year delivered up nothing more sinister than a hiatus hernia. Officially downgraded to “low risk” at the oncology clinic. Ongoing physio for damage caused by radiotherapy.
Bad bits: have pretty much given up hope that the damage will ever be fully/permanently repaired.

Yuletide etc
Good bits: spending first Xmas on our farm in NZ with wonderful family (nuclear and extended) and working our arses off for three weeks. Getting to know my 2-year-old neice and becoming her willing slave forever. Picking our own raspberries, strawberries and currants. Watching redcurrant jelly being made at the speed of light. Witnessing the construction of an exceptionally beautiful compost heap. (Yeah, you read that right.)
Bad bits: having to leave. Having to leave in order to return to Karratha. Having to leave in order to return to Karratha in summer. Having to leave in order to return to Karratha in summer and then immediately coming down with a bug.

2011 will be the year we leave Karratha (and Australia) to start a scary, wonderful new life on our farm in New Zealand. It will also mean the end of this blog… and the beginning of a new one. None of this will be happening for months yet, though, and I’ll try to step up the posts here in the meantime.

Happy New Year to anyone and everyone who still visits this site. I hope 2011 brings you plenty of the right sort of adventures. If not, come and visit us later in the year and we’ll happily acquaint you with the Zen of cow-shit shovelling.

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… You’re walking the dog, a ute drives past containing two guys,  the bloke in the front passenger seat leans out the window and checks out — the dog.

Actually, it was 5:45am and I was wearing a very ugly hat. Official hotness rating of “Extreme” still applies, thank you very much.

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Of all the stories told by My Aunt The Nun when I saw her in France, this is my favourite. The event in question took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I’m not sure how long ago it happened but it would’ve been 30 years at the very least.

One day, word went round my grandmother’s neighbourhood that one of the residents had witnessed a genuine miracle: she’d seen Jesus’ disembodied head looking serenely up at her from inside a nearby drain.

“Jesus Christ!” exclaimed my Aunty Cassie. (A different aunt again. She had a temperament to match her fiery tresses and a colourful vocabulary that regularly scandalised the rest of the family. I think I inherited my love of swearing from her). “That’s a hell of a place for him to turn up.”

Her avowed skepticism did not stop her lining up with the rest of the neighbourhood to peer into the Blessed Drain, however. She didn’t see anything remotely resembling Jesus’ head and neither did anyone else. But for weeks afterward, people procured and poured vast quantities of Holy Water down their plugholes, presumably to make him feel more comfortable in the sewers.

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