The paper is yellow and frail, number four in a thick pile of records and minutes stored among twenty boxes of Elsie Locke’s papers in the Canterbury Museum. It’s all there: democracy at work in a grey box. The threat, the petition, the meeting, the bruising encounter with the law, the rapid acquaintance by volunteers and laypeople with the process and language of legal dispute, the victory that in time proves to be not the end but the beginning of a long campaign, a Thirty Years’ War of inconclusive skirmishing, internal dissent, interruption, change, alliances made and broken.
It’s there in the records of bring and buy sales and the raffle of three cooked hams to raise funds for legal expenses. It’s there in the letters to and from other groups in the city fighting similar encroachment by expressway or high-rise. It’s there in the records of working bees to clear the river of broken bottles and the undertaking by a committee member, Janet Moss, ‘to record all the notable trees within the Loop’. In the letters of contact with the city council as the Avon Loop morphs over the next couple of decades from a CURA (Comprehensive Urban Renewal Area), to a NIM (Neighbourhood Improvement Area) to a SAM (Special Amenity Area). In the bunch of flowers presented to the parents of Baby Tutty and the minutes of hope and plans: that ‘cheap housing for young people’ might be built in the Loop. Or that a park might be created on the site of the old plumbing warehouse on Bangor Street, ‘an open space in the heart of the block’. It’s there in the planning for riverside carnivals that take place every summer during the 80s, with canoe races and food stalls and decorated bicycle competitions to raise funds to purchase a community cottage for ‘women’s group meetings, playgroup, drama group meetings and Community Crumbles’, the last an event where the residents of the Loop have taken to gathering on a Sunday evening for talk and bowls of stewed apple topped with organic oats and brown sugar.
The minutes record it all: the realisation of plans or their failure. The open space comes into being as Walnut Tree Park with its swings and slides, though successive tribes of children prefer the patch of weedy poplars by the fence that they call The Forest, and a heap of spoil — The Bumps — left behind by the builders, perfect for forts and bike jumps. The community cottage is bought and does indeed house a playgroup, and meetings and parties at Christmas, while the housing project dwindles from an ideal of communal garden and pooled resources to a standard block of Housing Corporation flats, and meeting by meeting, year after year, there’s debate, there’s disappointment, there’s delight, there’s the echo of tension between individuals. Democracy can be a painful business, betraying its Greek origins in passionate argument. As the chair reported in 1978, ‘The 138 households in the Loop have nothing in common — except that we live here.’
It’s a neighbourhood.
THE INNER-CITY WARD OF WHICH the Loop forms a part has always been one of the city’s lowest income areas. In 1996, the census records its median income as $25,295, well below the city median of $32,913. It also has near double the unemployment rate (8.6 per cent to Christchurch’s average 4.8 per cent). But at the time of that census, the population of the Avon Loop is more diverse than that broad-brush statistic might suggest. In the 90s, the inhabitants of Bangor and neighbouring streets include, alongside students, retirees and the unemployed, teachers, artists, lawyers, a Jungian analyst, a television cameraman, an IT specialist and café workers.
People want to live here. They want the river, the walk into town, the manageable human scale, the playground for their children, the unhurried streets, this intangible quality of beauty.
The hotel, too, is changing. In 1995, it acquires the old Star and Garter hotel, which it pulls down to leave a blank slate, a stretch of ground quickly dubbed ‘the Star-and-Garter-Carter-Park’. The hotel’s incinerator smoke stack marks the flagpole on the redoubt, its pennant of smoke waving constantly over the surrounding streets, as the hotel itself switches name and franchise from the Avon Motor Lodge to the Christchurch City Travelodge to, in 1998, the Avon River Centra, promising ‘mid-market leisure and business travellers’ the comforts of one of its 131 rooms, ‘a well-balanced fat-free breakfast’, the Chatz Bar and the Willows restaurants, all in ‘an extremely picturesque tranquil setting’ just ten minutes’ walk from the Square.
The riverbank along Oxford Terrace is gaining a premium in this era when developers are seeking out riverside and coastal frontages and their uninterrupted views. A property developer opening a riverside bar and restaurant on the fringes of the Loop in 2003 calls the site ‘a prime location’. It’s ‘the only small strip of the Avon that faces north, and it has been neglected and forgotten’.
River view.
North-facing.
These have become a most desirable asset.
In April 1997, residents along Oxford Terrace and the adjoining streets find in their letterboxes plans for a townhouse development on land they presently own and occupy. ‘Avon Loop 4D, a Proposed Development Style’ reads the brief.
In the architect’s drawings all their homes have disappeared. They have been replaced by a mass of townhouses adjoining the hotel. The blocks are densely massed four-storey units with quirky rooflines, built with fortress-like intensity right to the pavement and backing onto inner courtyards. From their rooftops, as from a battlement, there will be, the brief promises, ‘a rooftop view of the Port Hills’. The plans, thorough and professional, arouse in many of the recipients great suspicion concerning the hotel and its owners’ intentions. Houses are continuing to be bought up by the hotel, which is now a Holiday Inn, one of two in the city owned by the Carter family, and cottages on the adjacent streets are becoming the property of some Carter-connected entity: Cavelico No. 5 Limited, Maurice R. Carter Limited.
‘Never trust a Carter!’ Elsie Locke used to say, so often that friends proposed printing it on a T-shirt.
At the opposite end of the Loop, across from the former brewery that now houses a second-hand shop, a boys’ club and a brothel, a new kind of house is rising on the banks of the Avon, endorsing, in its scale and grandeur, the value of that river view. It is a rich man’s house, built by a British businessman, one of a collection of houses worldwide. It is very big, twice as big as anything in the vicinity. It is white. It is double-storeyed. A mansion with a vaguely antebellum air, as if Tara had landed on the riverbank among the dwellings of the field workers.
But it is an exception. At the close of the twentieth century the Loop remains a neighbourhood of small houses, the place I encountered on that day in 1992 when I biked out into confusion, my inner map in pieces.
I returned to the Loop with something like relief. In this little corner of the city at least, things seemed contained. There were shops at an intersection: a wholefoods place with beans and lentils in barrels and brown paper bags, a hairdresser, a dairy for the morning paper and the milk. I biked along the riverbank past houses and gardens, some old, some modern, set companionably side by side. Past the sweep of the willows and a little brick building that stood among them like a Japanese tea house with a scooped tile roof and ornamental ribbons of brickwork. (I found out later that it was a transfer station, built in 1907 to pump the sluggish waste of this flat city through the intestinal pipes to the settling ponds in Bexley. Pumping stations and electrical substations are one of this city’s peculiar little delights: tiny cubes of Art Deco fancy, miniature Egyptian temples or Spanish colonial angularity housing the engineering required for efficient twentieth-century living. One even became the subject of one of the country’s best-known paintings, Doris Lusk’s The Pumping Station, which in 1958 made a stunningly angular Greek temple out of sewage treatment.)
There was a cottage at the end of my new street, some kind of community place with notices pinned to the door advertising a playgroup and yoga classes. Maybe I’d take up yoga, in this new phase. I’d become lean and fit and healthy with magnificent inner core strength. There was a little park in the heart of the block, shaded by an immense walnut tree where some children were playing
on the swings and a couple of mums chatted in that way mothers have, absentmindedly, one hand jiggling the buggy, one eye on the three-year-old.
This place felt kindly disposed. It felt manageable. Small-scale in a wider and more confusing world. It felt comfortable. I knew I could live here. I stayed that year in Juliet’s house by the river and one afternoon in December, when my residency at the university was coming to an end and it was clear the marriage, too, was over, I found the cottage with the verandah and the plum tree and I bought it on the spot.
I DON’T KNOW WHY SOME parts of a city feel right while others feel wrong. Why we slip on one house as easily as if it were a comfortable coat, while another leaves us chilly and feeling deeply alone.
The reasons why I chose this house and this neighbourhood took shape long ago, in distant childhood. One source was a book: a children’s book, the first I borrowed from a public library. My father had taken me there when I was four and beginning to read. We had walked into town one Friday night and entered the hushed immensity of a room lined with shelves lined with books. Just the rustling of pages from a long table where people sat reading the evening paper, the muted voices of people by the front desk. ‘There,’ said my father, waving towards the shelves. ‘You can take two books with numbers on their covers’, which meant they were true and about real things like animals and planets. ‘And two from here.’ Those books did not have numbers. They were not real. They had pictures instead. I could take out four books, half real, half pretence, and I could do that every week, for as long as I lived.
The Little House was one of the books I took home that evening. It was written by Virginia Lee Burton and published in 1942. It was about a little house that was built by a man on a hill in the country. It had a door in the middle like a nose and windows either side, like eyes. It was built in the olden days, when horses and carriages went by on the road to the city over the hills. The little house stood among apple trees where children played. It could see the sun and the moon. As the seasons passed, the trees turned from fresh green leaf, to autumnal gold, to the snowy twigs of winter and back to spring once more. The city over the hills drew nearer, until the little house found itself surrounded by tall buildings, and then taller ones still, until it could no longer see the sun or the moon. It was sad. Its windows cried. Then a woman found it. She loaded the little house onto a truck and carried it away, far into the country where she placed it on another hill among apple trees where once more it could see the moon and stars and watch the seasons pass. It was happy.
It’s a simple story. A story for little children. But like all good children’s stories it had a profound effect.
What did I learn from it? First, I suppose, was a notion of beauty. I loved the pictures, and in particular the picture of the house amid apple blossom. It remains an ideal of perfection to this day: that particular shade of palest pink, leaf green and white. I learned that there was a relationship between house and trees and hills. The house was small. It did not seek to dominate its surroundings. It was an artefact, crafted by an individual for a purpose as well as beauty. The narrative of the little house also laid down a sense of history, teaching in its effortless and poetic fashion that time passes, things happen, some good, some bad, but there is an overarching seasonal rhythm to our lives, year by year, season by season and over the longer span. It taught a sense of circularity, something that seems more evident the older I become, and it also reinforced optimism: what is wrong or barely tolerable can be put right. Beauty can be tarnished, but it will win in the end.
THE LESSONS OF THE LITTLE HOUSE were reinforced by other things. My own home, for example: the cavernous Edwardian villa which my mother loathed for its inconvenience and its immovable chill, even on the hottest day. But for a child it held such treasure. There were the coloured glass panels around the front door that turned the garden pink and gold and green. There were the fireplaces in the bedroom occupied by my parents and in the room we simply called ‘the front room’, the special place that held the china cabinet and the piano. The fireplaces had tiled surrounds, one a wreath of blue roses, the other a little man in a smoking cap and slippers reading the newspaper.
Some things were concealed. The wallpaper, if picked at, revealed layer upon layer beneath. There was a daisy pattern, then scarlet, then mossy green, all the way down to yellowing newspaper next to the sarking, with pictures, if you picked away enough, of women in big puffy dresses. Under the floorboards, in the kingdom occupied by the glittering eyes of half-wild kittens, lay bottles with marbles in their necks and jawbones and bits of metal and the sound of our mother’s feet clattering over the linoleum of the kitchen above our heads. And in winter, when we woke it was to whole forests of frost on the inside of our bedroom windows: great swathes of icy fern that melted at the touch of a finger. There were layers all around us, visible and invisible. Others had been here in this house before us, we were living on the surface of the past.
When our chimney caught fire I remember the sense of panic, the fear that everything could suddenly disappear, as my grandmother’s house had disappeared, bearing with it the tangible setting for all the stories, the prompt for their repeated retelling. Gone was the bedroom where our uncle had lain for months when he had polio. Gone was the kitchen where my mother’s sisters had cut off her plait. Gone was the smell that belongs to specific places. My grandmother’s house smelled of fresh milk, whereas our house smelled of coal fires and golden syrup pudding and my father’s pipe tobacco.
I learned about buildings, too, from the huts I made myself: endless huts, everywhere, constructed from boxes and branches and random bits of timber, where I discovered not just what makes things stay up but, more fundamentally, the pleasure in creating a space for yourself, a purpose-built place beyond the reach of grown-ups where you could be truly, freely, uncritically yourself.
More formally, I was educated, I suppose, by the buildings in the town where I was raised: the stone banks on Oamaru’s Thames Street putting on a bold Doric face, all columns and porticos, the Victorian frontages of council offices, the dome and chandeliers of the Opera House. I felt smaller in relation to these public buildings. Unlike a house or a hut, they intended to impress, rather than embrace. They taught me about the impact of scale and architectural fashion, as every place I have ever visited since has taught me.
Some buildings I have loved on sight. That little oratory on the coast of Dingle, for example, like an upturned boat on stony ground. Or the hall where Louis XIV preened before ranks of mirrors, the imagery of power reflected, refracted, to infinity. Or the towers of New York driving all that human energy down, as rivers are channelled through grand canyons of generative swirl and eddy. Or a house glimpsed in some hillside village growing from the parent rock, the initials of its first owners carved above the lintel. Small buildings like that Nissen hut on Orkney where prisoners of war painted Italy and faith over the bones of bare military necessity, or big buildings like those amazing towers at La Défense, arching over infinity.
I have learnt, too, from buildings I have loathed, with a cramping of the gut that is part revulsion, part fear at their owner’s intention. Bleak hotels where the rooms with their glossy veneer and thin coverlets and those internationally uniform black padded chairs force such adamant anonymity that I am overwhelmed by the certainty of my own non-existence. Those towering columns in buildings designed to intimidate, their massive feet way above my head, disappearing into darkness. The indifferent sprawl of some American roadside clutter. Eighties high-rises with those tricksy embellishments that look like the architectural equivalent of big hair and shoulderpads. Twenty-first-century dream houses that co-opt the view for all who walk the edge of the ocean or look up to the summit ridge. A lifetime of neighbourhoods. A lifetime of houses.
So when I came to this city, to this neighbourhood, to this house, I was predisposed to fall in love, as surely as my life’s experience had predisposed me to choose one man instead of another. I moved my
desk into the sunniest room and replaced the burnt-out brick fireplace with a tiled surround from my childhood home. Despite having loathed it all her life, when the moment came to move after my father died, my mother suddenly decided to keep something. The house had been purchased by the school over the back fence and was to be demolished to make way for a playing field. She had been packed for weeks, eager for the move to warmth and more modern convenience in Dunedin. But the day before she finally left, she called in a builder, had him remove both the front-room mantels with their tiled surrounds and then she sent them to me. ‘Just in case,’ she said. ‘They might come in handy one day.’
They leaned against the wall in the garage in Palmerston North for years but when I came down here, to this cottage in the Loop, they did indeed come in handy. I brought them to Christchurch, back to the South Island, and installed the wreath of roses in my new home. And when I moved again to the valley on the peninsula, I brought the other — the little man in his slippers and smoking cap — out here. He’s here right now, as I write this, peering through his spectacles. The roses remained in the Loop when I sold and others moved in and all our lives carried on until that spring morning when the city shook.
All across the city, the region’s underlying identity was reasserted. Within the Loop, where there was a bank of shingle offering firmer footing, houses built on the surface remained relatively undamaged. Where there was the bed of some primeval forgotten creek, silt turned to liquid and oozed to the surface. Where houses had been built on sandhills, the frame shimmied and sometimes slipped from its piling. The subterranean springs that had once fed backyard wells bubbled up as liquefied silt. Along the banks of the river cracks opened. There was ‘lateral spread’ and that unlovely word, ‘slumpage’. The riverbed filled with silt and the water level rose, threatening flood.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 14
