My Speech for the Hilmac Speech Competition

The Napier Earthquake, 1931

Imagine a calm summer’s day, an innocent breeze whistling through the trees. Everything seems peaceful, perfect.

I climbed the hill, closely followed by my loyal flock of sheep.  When I reached the top, I stopped to admire the view.

Napier was spread in front of me, a buzzing hive of activity. Everyone was moving, busy, purposeful, going about their daily business. I watched an old man sitting in a street cafe sipping a coffee and reading the New Zealand Herald.

I was so lost in my thoughts that at first I did not hear the rumbling coming from deep inside the earth...I twisted around, trying to see what was happening. Dizzily I realised that that my sheep had run off the meadow that I was standing in. It didn’t take me long to see why… I was surrounded by trees, tall macrocarpa and they were swaying to and fro, about to fall any minute. I gasped and sprinted after my flock, just as a mighty tree hit the ground where I had been standing, with a terrifying thud.

My flock of sheep were running in the only safe direction, towards the house. As I leapt the fence into our garden, I saw mother peering up the hill, searching…for me.

“Mother, I’m here!” I called but my voice was drowned out by the deafening sound of another tree crashing to the ground.

Upon seeing me, Mother ushered me into the sitting room where my brother and sister were huddled under a coffee table, looking stricken. I crawled under the sofa and stared up at the mantelpiece where the old mantel clock was sliding up and down, but never quite falling off the end.

The floor felt like the ocean on a stormy night, it rose and fell making me feel seasick.

As I crouched under the sofa, hypnotised by the sliding clock, I heard crashes and thuds as houses nearby were reduced to rubble.

Waves that weren’t really waves rolled around me. My stomach lurched with fear as a light shade swung into the roof and smashed.

“What’s happening Mummy?” I whimpered.

“It’s just an earthquake Mason, honey,”She replied, but she sounded terrified.

The  little boy in that story was my grandad who was only seven when an enormous earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 hit Hawke’s Bay and shook his family and community forever. My grandad, Mason, is now 93 years old and he lives on a farm in Havelock North, next to the Tukituki river. Grandad is always full of stories, fictional as they may seem, they all happened. Really and truly.