Kaiapoi

In my innocent years—all eleven of them before lust visited—I had a healthy respect for authority. Authority meant my parents, my teachers, Community Constable Jack Highstead and everybody over the age of 12. Of course I was brought up in Kaiapoi where innocence and respect were the norms and a rebellious streak in me meant I soon lost mine. But Kaiapoi never did. It retained its innocence and its naïveté through decades and generations. People who were conceived there stayed there, made love there, married there, had children there, and not necessarily in that order. Generations of families attended old schools there—and even, nowadays, the brash “new” secondary school. Employment was mostly mundane—Kaiapoi is not exactly replete with hit men and theatrical types—and a man could rise to prominence as a pharmacist. That was Kaiapoi’s charm and its innocence, but almost fifty years after I lost mine, it lost its. The earthquake of September 4 destroyed literally and figuratively much of what Kaiapoi stood for. Ironically it wasn’t the epicentre of the quake but it was the centre of devastation and the people of Kaiapoi have a right to be aggrieved at the unfairness of it all. I am told that many of them are still in shock and the television pictures don’t do justice to the injustice. But if Kaiapoi has lost its innocence and temporarily its charm, it has not lost its resilience. The people of Kaiapoi are bouncing back already, determined to rebuild their town and their lives. And if Kaiapoi is now to be forever remembered for its quake rather than its woollen mills, I hope it will also be remembered as the little town that rocked, then came back.

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