'Were we mad?' A Christchurch writer remembers the earthquakes

Michael Palin and Margaret Mahy encouraged Rosie Belton to publish an earthquake memoir. Philip Matthews reports. 

Earthquake ambassador? Yes, that sounds about right, says Rosie Belton. Earthquake ambassador. 

While Christchurch suffered from earthquakes in the years after 2010, much of the rest of the country suffered from something else; earthquake fatigue. That was especially true in Auckland, Belton feels. She is heading up this week to deliver a kind of reminder, a wake-up call. She is the ghost of earthquakes past rattling her chains.

Officially, Belton is launching her third book, Living with Earthquakes and Their Aftermath. In Auckland, that includes an appearance on The AM Show with Duncan Garner and Mark Richardson. How will that go? Anyone's guess.

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"I'm really hitting Auckland hard because I want them to understand it wasn't just one event and we're not boring," she says. "How dare they tell us we're boring! I'm very interested in how it is received, if at all."

Good old earthquake fatigue. Media companies outside Christchurch would talk, although rarely openly, about how no one cared about the earthquakes after about the first week. The city sounded like a stuck record. Suffering, suffering and further suffering.

There were more than 11,000 aftershocks in the two years after September 4, 2010. There were floods, heavy snowfalls, power cuts, closed schools, ruined roads, abandoned suburbs. Unless they read The Press or watched Campbell Live, people outside Canterbury missed most of it. 

Retired judge Justice John Fogarty will launch the book in Auckland. A Cantabrian who relocated after the earthquakes, he represents the perspective of those who left the city. In Wellington, Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister Megan Woods will host the launch at Parliament. ChristchurchNZ​ boss Joanna Norris will do the honours at home, with the current Mayor of Christchurch and the three surviving ex-mayors all likely to be present. There will be further launches in Cambridge and Nelson, which have family ties.

This is the Rosie Belton earthquake tour. The big names speak partly to personal goodwill and lasting connections. Belton is a well-known and much-loved figure on the Christchurch arts and culture scene. She taught a couple of generations of Christchurch children how to act when she ran the Christchurch Drama Centre out of the Peterborough Centre and then the old Girls' High building on Cranmer Square. 

She was very attached to and identified with that older Christchurch, the one that was lost forever in early 2011. The Girls' High building was especially beautiful: "It was so dreadful the day I watched the big machinery pull that apart." 

Those and other horrors are a long way from the gentle slopes of Governors Bay on a warm, clear morning in early autumn. Eight years have passed since February 2011. After the EQC hassles and nightmares that were so familiar to so many in Christchurch, Belton's house has been elegantly rebuilt. The garden looks fantastic. Around 25 white doves lazily make their home on the property – they were there before the earthquakes and they remain. 

She was thinking about this just the other evening, as she drove back from the airport through the leafy suburbs. People were out walking and running in fine weather, "and yet inside every one of those houses," she thought to herself, "there are people who are affected". 

So, why go back? Why revisit that dark period? Belton kept a diary throughout, which she embellished with emails and more recent reflections on the earthquake experience. It feels raw but well-crafted. The emotional weight of that time is in the pages. 

SUPPORT FROM MAHY, PALIN

Friends encouraged her to publish. One of them was writer, TV presenter and former Monty Python legend Michael Palin. He contributed some superb endorsements for the front and back cover; the book reminded him, he said, of the World War II writing of Harold Nicolson. As in London during the Blitz, there was "the same uncertainty as to what horror was going to happen next," Palin said. 

Belton met Palin when an author tour took him to Christchurch and she and her husband Mark stayed in touch with Palin and his wife Helen. On another visit, Belton slipped Palin the earthquake manuscript; he soon emailed from Sydney urging her to publish it. "He's an enthusiastic encouragement to me all the time." 

Scientist Rebecca Priestley was another fan whose feedback spurred Belton on. While Priestley had read plenty about the science of it all, she told Belton that she "suddenly realised what it felt like" after reading her account. 

A third guide was her friend Margaret Mahy​, who died in 2012. 

"I miss her," Belton says. "She was a fantastic friend to me. She used to sit with me and my grandchildren on a rug outside while it was shaking and feed them licorice allsorts." 

You can picture it. The image does a lot of work – it summarises one of the themes of the book, which is about holding onto normality and routine in the most extraordinary of situations. And related to that, the worry that parents and grandparents had about protecting kids, both physically and emotionally. We were so desperate to ensure they would not be harmed.

Belton, who turns 70 this year, makes a telling comment in the book about losing her "credibility" as a grandparent when the ground refused to stop shaking. She remembers throwing herself onto her grandchildren in case a window shattered during a violent aftershock. 

"As a grandparent, I am trying to prove to them all the time that I am managing things." 

We lived parallel lives in those times. On one hand, "we were little creatures being punished by the earth", full of fear and adrenaline. On the other, we got dressed up, went to our jobs and tried to act like everything was running as usual. 

What strange times they were. The Ng Boutique, a fashion shop fighting to stay open on Madras St, is another image that sums up the earthquake years. 

"Everything around it went," she says. "People would drive in the back over gravel and pools of water and women would get out in nice clothes and go in there. It was like a cocoon, an oasis. I had such respect for people still doing that. But were we mad? I don't know." 

If we didn't record it, who would ever believe it? That signals another prompt. Back in early 2011, Belton heard a radio broadcast of nurses' journals from the 1931 Napier earthquake. The need to keep a diary for posterity became even more obvious. 

It all seems like such a long time ago now. The eighth anniversary of the February 22 earthquake came and went with less fanfare than in other years. Tūranga and the Christchurch Town Hall, the new Anglican Bishop – it can feel as though the city has finally turned a corner. Belton wanted to wait until she felt positive before she published. But how did she mark the eighth anniversary? 

It was the first time she did not go into Christchurch, she says. She was ill. So she and Mark stood in the lounge, where a brick hit her on the day. They did their one minute of silence and "then we told each other things about how it had been for us. And that was very meaningful because he doesn't talk about it a lot, and he talked to me about the horror of realising later that he was opposite the Durham St Methodist Church and people were in there.

"He said, 'I would have gone and dug. I didn't know they were in there.' He's still guilty about that. We also talked about the sadness of our family's changes."

Then the next day, they went into town and looked at the memorial and the flowers. 

Living With Earthquakes and Their Aftermath, by Rosie Belton, is published by Renaissance Publishing, $34.99.