While some lost homes others just stepped in soy

BY JOE BENNETT

OPINION: In time of trouble people's true colours emerge. Mine are a fetching shade of yellow. With a thick varnish of selfishness.

At 4.35 on Saturday morning, along with every sentient creature in Canterbury, I woke up.

The dog slunk into the bedroom. He dealt with the earthquake problem by taking shelter under the bed. Being his intellectual superior I chose to take shelter under a pillow.

As it happened both techniques worked well and the quake soon stopped. There was silence. I turned on the light. Nothing happened.

I groped down the corridor, turned into the kitchen and stubbed my toe. A bottle skidded across the floor. My foot came down in something wet.

It didn't feel like water. It was soy sauce. The bottle was intact but the cap had come off. It was the only thing that had been dislodged.

I went outside. Silence. No screaming neighbours. No sounds of falling masonry. I sat and smoked a cigarette, while the dog licked the soy from my foot and soothed my toe. There seemed nothing that needed doing. I went back to bed.

I woke three hours later to the loveliest of spring mornings. The world is good at irony. The power was still off. The dog had obligingly cleaned the kitchen floor.

Reason told me I ought to check my house for damage, but everything felt normal. And besides, instinct had kicked in. It was screaming for coffee.

A previous owner of this house built a dinky wood-fired barbecue complete with chimney. I had never used it, because I own a stove.

It took half an hour to get the barbecue going and half a tree to boil a billy, but rarely has coffee tasted so good.

When the power came back on, the first I knew of it was the phone ringing.

It was a friend in England. He wanted to know if I was all right. Christchurch, he said, had been flattened. He knew more about it from the other side of the world than I did from the other side of the hill.

I looked out over Lyttelton. It didn't look flattened. I made a mental list of things I needed to do. First was a bit of panic shopping. Followed by rubbernecking.

The car radio was alive with the earthquake. No way was anyone to come into town to rubberneck. I decided on balance that this probably applied to me, so I contented myself with Lyttelton's main street. It was thronged.

The chip shop was doing a fine trade. There was a queue in the dairy for icecreams. Someone said all the milking sheds in Canterbury had been destroyed so milk would soon run out but I doubted that and bought only essentials. Having stashed the cigarettes in my car, I joined the crowds.

Much of the road was blocked with Do Not Cross emergency tape. People constantly ducked under it to get a better look at the Empire Hotel's teetering facade.

There was a lot of laughter in the sunshine. It didn't seem to be the nervous laughter of survivors. It was cheerful, convivial.

A few people had lost chimneys but most had suffered only a fright. Everyone wanted to tell their own story. I told several people about my soy sauce. The details got a little neater each time. Seagulls screamed for morsels of fish and chips.

Back home an hour later I found emails from various parts of the world asking how things were. I replied jokily. Yet I knew already that people had lost homes. I don't pretend it's admirable.

In the short term there is great distress. Long term, the disaster will stimulate the city, and not just economically. It is good to be reminded of vulnerability. But what kept recurring to me was an Auden poem.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along . . .

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster;

. . . And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

- © Fairfax NZ News