The storm hit on Monday night. She said, All my deck-chairs and everything were flying around. It was thundering all night, she said, trees and rubbish crashing against my windows, and I was awake from midnight all night thinking, what the heck?
Pauline is fifty-two. Local cowboy band Puha and the Bandidos, who played at golfer Michael Campbell’s wedding, played at her fiftieth birthday – there are photos of the party on her fridge, including one of Pauline dancing in a blue bikini top. Her house is on Stone Hill, overlooks the Stone Basin, and is the closest home to the oldest house in New Zealand, the Stone Store. Her house is for sale, listed on Trade Me.
The storm rumbled through Monday night. I got up at six the next morning, she said, and decided I better cook some food in case I end up with all the locals again. She meant the floods on March 29. I was getting phone calls, she said, people saying we can’t get home, so I said to them, Oh come down here. People were coming and going all night, she said. I don’t mind, she said, I enjoy meeting people.
That time, she said, I was bailing water out of the rock pools in the back yard, and heating it up so we could have a wash and flush toilets. On Tuesday morning this week, she was prepared: she filled up a great big pot of water, and then, she said, I shot down to the garage and filled up a gas bottle.
The wind was howling. You could hardly stand up. The water in the basin was rising fast. Logs were hurtling down the river. She heard the roads were being closed. A young woman at the garage said, Oh bugger, how am I going to get back home? Pauline said, It was sort of in my mind I should give her my phone number, but I was so busy thinking about everything else. When I got home, I thought, Oh, I’ll just ring the police and say if anyone’s stuck, they can just come here. The constable said he’d pass on the message to the St John ambulance station.
Then, she said, I got a call from Ros, she’s the head lady at the station there, and she said, could I take some people? Pauline said, No problem. They arrived at her door in an ambulance.
There were four of them. They had been trying to take the bus further north, but were stranded in Kerikeri. There was Casey, who worked in a chemist in Paihia; Rebecca, fifteen, who had been visiting her father in Auckland; John, wanting a holiday from the snow and sleet from his home near Arrowtown – the last time he’d been to Kerikeri was fifty years ago; and Edward, a twenty-eight-year-old American, who felt he needed to get out and travel before it was too late, and who had just arrived in New Zealand.
Tuesday was the worst of it. Flood waters pulled back on Wednesday. By Thursday, the sun was out; the SPCA second-hand shop on Kerikeri Road displayed a table of shoes on the front lawn, cheap and delicious bags of oranges, mandarins, persimmons and tree tomatoes lined the roadside, and one spring daffodil had risen outside the pretty Union Church.
Up the line at sodden Kaeo, where the floods did their worst, everything was under mud. Officials in overalls tromped along the pavements. Inside the District Hall, men pointed at maps, and flicked at thick stacks of documents. Volunteers at the Wesleydale Memorial Church wrung out water from teddy bears. Kaeo was earth-diggers and mops and abandoned shops. The talk was of generators, gas bottles, who had power and who didn’t. It was news to one man, trapped in his house for two days, that the prime minister had helicoptered into the main street. He said, Did she?
Pauline poured tea on her porch. Oh go on, she said, let me fix you some lunch. She made ham and tomato sandwiches with mustard. On Tuesday night, she cooked the chook and boiled potatoes on the gas barbecue, lit the candles, brought out cards and Checkers and another game called Balancing Kiwis. There were a couple of bottles of wine. The power was out, the water was off. She put Rebecca and Casey in together, Edward in the cottage out the back, and John took the spare room, which she said was vacated by Eric the Chinaman.
Eric the Chinaman was on holiday. He’s one of her tenants; she took them in to help pay the mortgage. She used to manage the restaurant at Kerikeri’s Homestead Hotel but it burned down. She said, My husband’s business kind of went wrong, then he left, and a week later my job burned down. One, one, one, she said, just like that. I’ve survived it, but it’s been hard yakker. Everybody thinks what a beautiful home, she said, but to keep it going – it was the only thing I had left, the only thing worth anything as in assets. I’m fifty-two now, and I need to come out with something to enable me to go on and make my next life’s choices.
She now works as a supermarket rep for Independent Fisheries, based in Woolston, Christchurch, which specialises in frozen fish fingers, frozen fish cakes, frozen coated fillets, and frozen smoked hoki. Her email is fishnchick. She grew up in Titahi Bay, had lived in Gisborne, Ruatoria, the Hokianga, and moved to Kerikeri twenty-two years ago.
Of course she had heard all the stories
