The Villa at the Edge of the Empire
Page 16
Their house remained liveable, though there was liquefaction in the garage. ‘It filled up with about half a metre and it set like concrete. We’d stored some stuff out there and I spotted the toaster. The plug and cord were poking out but I couldn’t pull it out. It took ten people two and half hours’ hard digging to clear the garage.’
For several months, they lived within the security cordon erected round the central city. A weird time.
‘One day, early on, Lex came in and said, “There’s a tank. They’ve got a tank!” I said, “Don’t be silly.” But then I looked out the window and there was this tank, gun and all, coming down Oxford Terrace. I mean, I know they had to protect property, but who were they going to blast away with that big gun?’
There was the curfew. The Loop was for a time without sewerage, water or electricity. Without street lights, the nights were dark, and they had to be home by six o’clock.
‘They never issued IDs so it was awful trying to get in or out. Every time we went to the dairy for the milk we had to go through the routine with the soldiers at the entry point on Kilmore Bridge. They could be really tough. Lex’s brother and niece died just a few weeks after the quake and a friend who had moved from the Loop to a house outside the cordon tried to bring a sympathy card. She was seventy-eight, but they refused to let her through. We wanted to bring in a builder to check that our house was safe but we couldn’t do that either, until after weeks of this, I went out one morning with the dogs. They had begun to recognise the dogs, so I gave the builder one of the dogs and Lex’s hat to wear and the guards let us both through and he was able to reassure us that the house was fine.’
Once the cordon was lifted, life became simpler, but there was the new tension of waiting for almost a year to hear the final zoning decision. They coped by having a Red Plan and a Green Plan. The Green Plan was stay where they were. The Red Plan was move away entirely, 400 kilometres to Nelson.
The Red Plan it is. Today, as we sit talking in the incomplete kitchen, the boxes stand packed in the living room. They are the last of their neighbours to go. ‘We thought we’d be the first, but we’re the last.’ Their home is surrounded by cleared sections and abandoned houses. Alison and Mike have deconstructed the brand-new home they built just along the street. It is stored, undamaged, in a container and maybe, some day, it will be rebuilt somewhere. But for now, it waits and the section is gravel where some of Elsie’s garden plants push through for a final blooming. Doug has gone, and Siobhan and Jen and Merv and all the others. They have left small pieces of their homes with Donna. A number from a letterbox, a little metal sculpture that once hung on an exterior wall, some fence pickets. She is creating a collage for the wall of the Community Cottage, which has escaped red zoning by a few metres, along with all the houses on that side of Hurley Street. The wash of crimson on the assessors’ map did not reach that side of the road.
Donna and Lex have stayed on, having filled in the five-page application required by CERA for those in the Red Zone who need to remain in their homes a little longer than the deadline for removal.
The Chief Executive of CERA may consider
short extensions to agreed settlement dates on
a case-by-case basis, based on vulnerability
and individual circumstances …
Section 5. Please describe the barriers and
obstacles you are facing in vacating your
residential Red Zone property by your agreed
settlement date. Please attach copies of
supporting documentation.
Section 6. Please outline the steps you
have taken to try and address the barriers
and obstacles you are facing in vacating
your residential Red Zone property by the
agreed settlement date, including temporary
accommodation if permanent accommodation
is not available.
Section 7. Please detail any particular vulner-
ability which may affect you or members
of your household. Please include copies of
supporting documentation, such as from
your GP …
Please note that while your request is being
processed you will need to continue to
progress towards your agreed settlement
dates as per your Agreement for Sale and
Purchase with the Crown. If your extension
is not granted you will still need to vacate
your property and settle on the agreed
settlement date …
Donna shows me her application. It’s a little crumpled, having spent a short spell in the rubbish bin. But of course it had to be retrieved and smoothed out and filled in. There was no alternative. They applied along with 344 other red-zoned property owners and received their extension.
We sit in her half-renovated kitchen two weeks before they leave for good. As we talk, a massive shadow crosses the window. It’s a tourist bus. CERA have granted a concession to a company to run tours through the Loop. It lurches off down Oxford Terrace as the dogs bark wildly and scratch at the front window, over cracks and potholes left exactly as they were after the earthquake all those months before, past the cottages and cleared sections, tourist cameras snapping.
Donna has made a sign for the front fence.
THANKS JOHN. IT’S BEEN A WHOLE LOT
OF FUN. YEAH. RIGHT …
And on the kitchen wall she has written over the interrupted undercoat: lists and phone numbers in one-stroke lettering in her assured signwriter’s hand.
RING FN INSURANCE
RING FN EQC
AVON LOOP — PARK OR DEVELOPER’S
FODDER?
DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GET YOU
DOWN
And at the top, over them all:
BROWNLEE SUCKS
Before they leave she plans to cover the entire wall. It’s an ephemeral protest, lasting just as long as it takes the bulldozers to arrive, and of no significance whatsoever to the forces driving the city’s reconstruction. But for now, it’s there.
A YEAR LATER, IN SPRING 2014, Donna’s house has gone. And so have the houses of her neighbours, Siobhan and Alison and Mike and Doug and Robin and Jenny and Mervyn. Juliet’s house, the one in which I slept that first night in the city, is about to go, and all the cottages along Rees Street. The house I bought that afternoon will go, with all the houses along that stretch of Bangor Street and all the houses along Oxford Terrace facing the river.
Juliet has been photographing their disappearance. She is an expert at photographing houses and gardens for the magazines, framing images of pergolas draped in Madame Alfred Carrière or finding an interesting angle on designer interiors, but for months now, she has been coming to photograph these houses, these gardens. Hundreds of images of overgrown backyards, smashed doors dangling from their hinges, a teacup on a dusty windowsill, and sometimes I’ve come with her. We’ve walked around. We’ve talked to people.
Flurries of dust rise from cleared sections and it feels like erasure. Elsie, too, has gone. A small park by the Centennial Pool was named for her in 1997 after she campaigned to save the complex when it was threatened with closure and redevelopment. Pool and park and name have been rubbed out by the blueprint’s ‘grunty’ playground.
Trees stand on bare shingle, some tied about with yellow ribbons, for people have been told they can identify trees they would like preserved from their former gardens. I stand by the little Japanese teahouse that ornamented waste disposal with architectural fancy. It perches awkwardly on broken concrete on the riverbank like some wading bird on its rough nest. I look down the length of Bangor Street. Walnut Tree Park is still there, facing cleared space. And behind it is the Community Cottage. The breezeblock units belonging to the hotel remain, and the rich man’s house on the corner.
Through the broken window of her former home, Juliet photographs the curtains she made for the sitting room as they bi
llow up in the draught. There are charred bricks and a gap in the chimney breast of the cottage where I installed my fire surround with its wreaths of blue roses. I find myself hoping that it has gone on, in another stage of its peripatetic existence, to a nice home. I hope it has found another Little House. I hope that all the fire surrounds and timber fittings and insignificant beloved details in all the houses in the Loop have found good homes. I hope all their former inhabitants have found places and neighbourhoods that make them happy.
The wind blows white dust over this small corner of the city, just another in its catalogue of cleared spaces.
Evidently, such Red Zone clearances have not been easy to achieve. Demolition has been piecemeal, according to Roger Sutton, because too many people were hanging on, but now ‘all areas targeted are free of residents’ and work can proceed apace.
‘Free’.
The word betrays the man. It’s the word used of vermin and pests and noxious weeds. An island rid of rats is ‘pest-free’. Those houses will no longer be, as the Insurance Council chief executive Tim Grafton puts it with equal eloquence, ‘a blight on the landscape’, but can become ‘a legacy for the community’.
If the Avon Loop does indeed become a ‘legacy for the community’, that ‘Possible Future Park’ of the blueprint plan, Donna and others to whom I have spoken who have lost their homes do not mind so much. But if the area is developed and built over, they are less resigned to their loss.
There have been suggestions in The Press of a tourist attraction in the Loop, an ‘Eden Project’ that, like the English original, would blend voguish environmental sustainability with a café and retail outlet to attract the visitors. Residential units might also be the future. Intensive housing developments are part of CERA’s plan for this eastern side of the city, part of the vision of 22,000 urban professionals strolling to the bars that are a bit like Fulham, dining in the lanes that are a bit like Melbourne, in the revitalised central city. New housing rules have been approved by the council and will form part of the government’s Land Use Recovery Plan or LURP — another acronym to add to the post-quake lexicon. The owners of between 1500 square metres and 1 hectare of land will be able to build up to sixty-five dwellings on their property.
Already, at the end of Bangor Street, an Auckland developer is building Origin: twenty-two two-bedroom units in a gated community of three parallel blocks, each promising a high-quality kitchen and a private deck. In form, they are like barracks, a simple cellular structure of repeatable units, designed to be efficient: efficient to build, efficient to inhabit. The perfect housing for that itinerant population of young urban professionals who are to inherit the centre of the city. No one will bother to inscribe their initials above these lintels for future generations of the family. Rather, these are places to ‘lock up and leave’, as if going away from your home, not actually living in it, were something to be desired.
The language of the promotional brochure, however, strikes a retro note.
‘BE CENTRED,’ it says. ‘BE SURROUNDED BY LIFE …’
‘Origin is situated on the Avon Loop, an area of natural beauty and historical significance, a quiet riverside retreat from the hustle and bustle of the CBD Rebuild Zone just a block away. You’ll be part of a friendly and tight-knit community centred around the Avon Loop Community Cottage, a historic house and garden where the neighbourhood gets together for events and a weekly playgroup …’
And so the Avon Loop enters another era.
IN THE ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND, sometimes it is useful to peer closely, and sometimes it is useful to step back: to try to take the broad view, to hold something else up by way of comparison: like with like. Like with unlike. Better? Or worse? Same? Different?
L’Aquila in central Italy is similar in some ways to Christchurch. Both are planned cities, taking shape first on paper, one in the thirteenth century, the other in the nineteenth. Both have their backs to a mountain range, and are the centres of rural regions, dependent traditionally on sheep. Historically, wool and mutton have sustained both cities and provided the basis for their wealth. Perhaps because of that rugged rural backdrop, both cities have a strong rugby tradition: since its founding during the Fascist era in 1936, L’Aquila’s team has won numerous championships and supplied many players for national sides. And now both cities share another, less happy link: both have been hit by earthquakes, L’Aquila in 2009, a year before Christchurch was jolted into the present era.
Those things are the same. Other things are very different.
In winter 2014, I went to L’Aquila. I have a friend who lives in Prato, my oldest friend, Kathryn, born a few days before me. We occupied adjoining cots in the Oamaru Maternity Annexe while our mothers, Vi and Gracie, became acquainted. I imagine that Kathryn’s voice, raised in infant protest at this strange, new, unconfined, unwatery, unmodulated existence, was among the first sounds I heard on the planet. Our lives diverged soon after, she in her bassinet to the north of town, me in mine to the South Hill. We met again when we were eleven, paired for cooking classes at our new junior high school. Our scone dough glued itself to the benchtop and it was so funny, we were so hopeless and anyway we were never going to make scones again ever in our lives, we were silly little girls, we were being immature and inconsiderate and we would have to stay behind to tidy properly, scrape and scrub.
So we did, and it turned out we both wanted a pony. And we both loved Nigel Molesworth, a grotesque little cartoon figure by Ronald Searle. We formed a Nigel Molesworth Society. We read a scuffed copy of Peyton Place behind the toilets at lunchtime. We both played the piano but she was much better than me. She went on to study music at university and got a scholarship to study in Florence, where she met an Italian architect and now she lives in Prato and they have a son, the handsome politician, Gabriele. She works at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, near Florence. I love the breathy sound of her voice and the way she purses her lips when she is telling a joke. I wish I saw her more often.
When I was wondering about visiting L’Aquila, I rang Kathryn and asked if she knew anyone from the city. I speak rudimentary Italian — I can ask for a meal, or the way to the station — but I knew that to even begin to understand an Italian city, I’d need a guide. Someone who knew the place with all the little crevices and secrets concealed in those centuries of golden stone. Who knew it the way a child born and raised knows a city.
Kathryn did know someone: Francesco, a musicologist whose family has lived in L’Aquila for centuries. He would be happy to show me his city.
So I went.
THE SIX O’CLOCK TRAIN FROM Terni is a local commuter train, like so many subway carriages making a break for it into the mountains. It rattles slowly along the sides of hills covered in the vivid green of early summer, walnuts with their big generous leaves, acacias heavy with the white blossom Italians eat at this season in perfumed, deep-fried frittelle.
To the west lies a wide valley, sprinkled with houses, and beyond them the foothills and then the distant peaks of the Apennines, still tipped with snow. The train clatters over deep gullies, stops briefly at the foot of hillside towns in those paintbox colours: faded ochre, burnt sienna. Above them loom crags of limestone, some gashed by quarrying. We are cutting across the centre of this narrow country on a rough diagonal from north to south, following the old route to Naples, the Via degli Abruzzi. Today, the traffic hugs the coast, roaring down the autostrada, but not that long ago, the coast was cloaked in malarial marshes and their deadly mosquitoes, and an eleven-day journey by horseback or on foot through the centre was preferable to that.
The land is intensively cultivated, the gardens alongside the railway flourishing. Each little plot has its orderly rows of potatoes, corn and broad beans. There are vines, too, and figs and olive trees, a blend of hotter and cooler climes. Everything is lush and green this early in the season before the desiccating summer heat leaches colour and coats everything in a fine dust.
/> Chattering groups of teenagers climb on to travel a few stations up the line before straggling off to do whatever it is the children of such villages do, in the years before they fledge. It’s a holiday weekend, the Festa della Repubblica, anniversary of a significant moment in the country’s history, when Italy declared itself a republic in 1946. I’m vague about the details, but then my knowledge of Italian history is some fifth-form memory of bearded men in red shirts, Garibaldi pointing the way north — another of those tales we were told of hopeful little bands fighting desperately against great odds for a noble cause, for words like freedom, equality, justice.
I saw him just yesterday, aloft on a plinth on the Janiculum hill surveying Rome and lauded with laurel wreaths. A few metres away down the hill his young wife is galloping wildly on her bronze steed, side saddle, with her newborn baby clasped in one arm while the other is raised aloft, brandishing a gun. Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro di Garibaldi. Anita. Mother of four children, fiery comrade in the struggle against oppression, first in Brazil and later in Italy in the miraculous year, 1848. There she is, one of the few public statues of a woman I’ve ever seen, and certainly the only one on horseback. She flees from her captors, leaping toward the future, hair flying. In her studio portrait she’s dressed in a sharp white suit with practical trousers, jacket and slouch hat. She looks young and pretty and tough. She is buried here, beneath the plinth, dead of malaria in the swamps of Ravenna in a low point in that struggle for the big words: unification, freedom, independence. Dead at only twenty-eight.
Her inheritors cluster by the doors of the train, teasing, giggling, consulting their phones. The train slows, comes to a halt at Greccio, Contigliano, Cittaducale. The doors slide open. They sling their bags over their shoulders and saunter off into their lives. The train moves on, into one tunnel, then out, into another, then out, threading its way through the hills.