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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“REMEMBERING
CHRISTCHURCH – Voices from Decades Past” Recorded and edited by Alison Parr,
with Rosemary Baird (Penguin-Random House, $NZ45)
It is
understandable that there have been a number of literary responses to
Christchurch’s big earthquake of February 2011. The urgency of the event
produced Jane Bowron’s intelligent newspaper dispatches collected as Old Bucky and Me, Fiona Farrell’s
reflections on earthquakes in general TheBroken Book, and then Farrell’s angry polemic The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, which is to date the best
piece of writing the earthquake has inspired. All these have been reviewed on
this blog.
Remembering Christchurch – Voices from Decades Past takes the oral history approach. It consists of interviews which
Alison Parr and Rosemary Baird conducted with nineteen long-term residents of
Christchurch. The oldest interviewee was born in 1921 and the youngest in 1942,
which means that Parr and Baird talked with people who were all in their 70s,
80s, and 90s. A large-format book, extensively illustrated with period
photographs, Remembering Christchurch has
a very clear intention. It aims, through the memories and observations of these
nineteen elderly people, to reconstruct a city which no longer exists.
In her efficient
(if not particularly analytical) introduction, Parr reminds us that the city in
which all the informants spent their youth was a small city in which cars were
not king; sexual mores were tighter and extra-marital sex frowned upon; there
was a divide between Maori and Pakeha, and an informal divide between people of
different religions (meaning, in this context, different Christian
denominations).
Nearly every
interview ends with a brief statement by the interviewee on how the earthquake
has changed things, and how the places they remember have gone. Presumably the
placement of these comments was dictated by the questions the two interviewers
asked. Robert Consedine, for example, remarks that the working-class Addington
in which he grew up had already been obliterated by development before the
earthquakes struck. But he adds philosophically “I think we carry what we need in us. My memory of Addington – I have a
detailed memory which will be with me forever.” (p.219) Other interviewees
show considerable regret for what the big ‘quake did. Joan Lydon, living in
Richmond, notes that her own house survived the earthquake, but all the houses
on the other side of her street were red-zoned and demolished. Janice Moss’s
home of 60 years was irreparably damaged, and had to be demolished to ward off
thieves, who would have loved to get hold of its valuable copper fittings. Only one person recounts directly her
experience of the earthquake itself. Says Jan Currie, who was in her house
overlooking Pegasus Bay:
“In February 2011 I was in the pantry and I
was standing on a little ladder, reaching up to get something out…. and
suddenly the whole world seemed to collapse. I was ejected off my little ladder
and everything in quite a big pantry was all pouring onto the floor all around
me, who was still regaining consciousness. I was knocked out. And everything in
the fridge was pouring out into the floor, and my son Duncan who was living
there, was lying on the floor beside me. And he said, ‘Are you all right, Mum?’
and I said ‘I think so – are you?’ And he said ‘Yeah, I think so, but we need
to get out of here.’ And we couldn’t get out because all the bricks had come
down from the chimneys. Heaps of rocks had fallen….” (p.113)
The interviewers
have apparently chosen as their subjects people who will represent as many
areas of the city and environs as possible, from Aranui to Addington, from
Lyttelton to Richmond, from the central city to distant suburbs. Inadvertently
or otherwise, this often reveals to us big class distinctions in the old city
of Christchurch.
At the one
extreme, you have the memories of Richard Cottrell from Fendalton as he
recalls, very happily, his school days at Christ’s College and how he joined
his family’s law firm and later became the chancellor of the Anglican diocese.
A cheerful and positive chap, but in many ways aware of how privileged his life
has been - although, of course, when he
was young, he, like all adolescents, never considered that this affluent life
was anything other than the norm. Also in the more affluent belt there’s Reg
Miller, who inherited the family firm, which owned the impressive and very distinctive
modernist Miller’s Building on Tuam Street. (After the earthquake it had to be
demolished, to the great sorrow of all discerning architects.) Meg Anderson’s
father was a doctor who was often not paid by his poorer patients during the
Great Depression, and the family home was uncarpeted. Nevertheless, that home
was situated on upper-middle-class Cranmer Square, and even in the depression,
when most Christchurchians felt lucky to have a bike, Meg’s dad “liked the American cars because he thought
they started better on a frosty morning.” (p.57)
At the other
extreme, there were hardscrabble members of the working class, like Robert
Consedine’s family in Addington, where life and employment centred on the
Railway Workshops. Or Baden Norris in Lyttelton, going from school to
employment in a boot factory at the age of thirteen, and later making a career
at sea. Or Doug Couch of the Ngai Tahu, one of the book’s two Maori
interviewees, who reminds us of how the poor had to live:
“It was during the Second World War that we
were growing up and I was a young one then. Going back to my time in the ‘40s
we didn’t have electricity, we didn’t have telephones, we didn’t have septic
tanks. You know, we had long drops. We had to boil the copper, do the washing,
have a bath – with the hot water – and Mum would do that with the old washing board.
We had one cold water tap outside our house.” (p.139)
Doug Couch gives
a relatively benign view of race relations in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, saying “Maori were welcomed in the Lyttelton
community, because a lot of people married both ways.” (p.145) By contrast,
the book’s other Maori informant, Alamein Pitama-Scholtens felt the sting of
prejudice, more in expressed attitudes than in exclusion. At the secondary
school she attended, she was the only Maori girl in her class, and became
hardened to some of her classmates’ patronising remarks. She also belonged to
the generation where Maori parents actively discouraged their children from
learning Maori as they thought it would hold them back in English-speaking
workplaces.
Only one
interviewee makes a general statement about Christchurch’s social
stratification. This is the Anglican city missioner David Morrell (at
pp.188-189), where he speaks of the range of welfare cases with whom he has had
to deal.
None of this is
meant to suggest that this anthology concentrates on complaints or social
criticism. In fact, regardless of their social origins, most of the interviewees
remember their younger years with nostalgia, even when times were hard. They
rejoice in how the hard times were surmounted. In this respect, one of the most
bracing interviews in the book is the very first one, with veteran journalist
Eric Beardsley. He grew up in the Depression with the family crammed into a
bach in Aranui, his father on relief work and his mother often having to go
through the humiliating ritual of applying for food and welfare assistance for
her children. In Beardsley’s world, the gift of a (second-hand) bicycle was
seventh heaven, and being able to sit in a picture-theatre all day for
threepence was luxury beyond belief. Beardsley rose through the ranks at the Christchurch Press to become its chief
leader writer. Like all the interviewees, he is not upset by social changes
that have happened in his lifetime, but takes them in his stride. This includes
the great changes in how newspapers are produced. Of post-earthquake newspapers,
he remarks:
“… they
did a fantastic job, I think. They went out to places out at the back of the
airport and, for the first few months, kept Christchurch alive with wonderful
reporting. And I thought that was the best thing I’d ever seen them do. Nothing
at all – and suddenly finding ways to produce a paper – quite an amazing output
really. It probably wouldn’t have been possible if it had been the old-style
newspaper with hot metal being used, instead of tiddling with a computer.”
(p.31)
What most people
emphasize is the fun they had. The shortest contribution is by the oldest
interviewee, Lois Arnold, and it is entirely about her mother’s excellent
home-cooking and the joys of cycling in old Christchurch. While being very
aware of his social situation, Robert Consedine spends longest on recalling the
large fund-raising dances they had in their Catholic parish in the 1950s and
1960s, with illustrious rock bands of the day. Valerie Heinz, while mourning
more than anyone else the loss of the city’s architectural heritage in the
earthquakes, nevertheless spends most time on the satisfactions of being an art
teacher at Christchurch Girls’ High. Even the social activist Anne McCormack’s
involvement in protests against the 1981 Springbok Tour is something she
remembers with pride and pleasure.
As somebody who
knows Christchurch only from a few brief visits, what struck me most often was
how the lost world this book commemorates is the lost world of all New
Zealand, not just of Christchurch. The past that is recalled is one that
all New Zealanders of a certain age will dimly remember.
For years Jim
Curnow ran the Dainty Inn tearooms on High Street. To his interviewer he says
something that would now enrage Health and Safety – “I’ll tell you confidentially – don’t publish this – we all smoked in
the kitchen.” (p.40) When he lists the goodies they used to serve, it is
almost like a naturalist poem. We are at once swept into Kiwi cuisine as it
once was:
“We made all our own sandwiches. The best
sellers were ham. And club, I suppose. Egg, salmon, egg and chive, corned beef
and as a little extra, baked bean. Baked bean sandwiches. We only sold 16 of
those a day – we just made a plate, but they always went. Ninety per cent of
the time we used white bread. We drifted a wee bit into that coloured bread
towards the end. I think we were a bit ahead of the public, were we? They
didn’t want them, no. They wanted white bread, yeah. Oh that’s right, we had
rolls too. Besides the sandwiches we had ham rolls, chicken rolls, corn. We did
makes toasted cheese rolls, yeah. They weren’t that popular. Bacon was more
popular. That was a slice of toast with bacon on the top and cheese.”
(p.34)
Something
similar happens in the interview with Trevor Smith, who for years ran a coffee
importing business on Cashel Street (all of which was levelled by the
earthquake). After he lists his wares, I have a quite irrational urge to go
into his coffee (and cigar and curry) store and smell all its savoury smells.
It is a recall to the days when real coffee was an exotic substance in New
Zealand, and Trevor Smith’s customers were often affluent people (Lady Wigram,
Selwyn Toogood) who bought his coffee to on-sell to eager coffee-starved friends
and associates.
Quite a
different part of the Kiwi lost world, applicable to most of the major cities,
is Malcolm Douglass’s memoir of university student life in the 1950s, before
the university moved out to Ilam. “With
only 2,500 students… you got to know a terrific range of students.” (p.116)
And it was all procesh and capping stunts and drinking parties and tramping
club. Meanwhile Laurel Small remember children’s games, elocution lessons and
ballet classes and “whooping cough,
pneumonia and measles due to epidemics” (p.175)
So to a personal
confession. There are two photographs in this well-illustrated book that almost
choked me up. They are not photographs of earthquake damage or of anything
particularly venerable. They are the photograph on Page 48 of the ordinary
suburban home that belonged to Janice and Wallace Moss (they took ten years to
pay off the mortgage). And the photograph on Page 180 of Laurel and Bob Small’s brick house in
Dallington. You at once see the Kiwi dream that is now being lost – affordable home
ownership and the happy, if much-maligned, suburban dream.
Do I have any
complaints about this very readable collection? Just a minor one. The compilers
could have got other pre-earthquake memories of Christchurch from people who
were young in the 1970s, 80s and 90s – in other words, from people who are now
middle-aged – as well as from the elderly people whom they have selected. That
might have given us an even broader panorama of the old city.
But that is a
mere quibble. This is a very enjoyable collection.
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