1942 earthquake memories

Frank Mills Part 2
Biking down to Jellicoe Street I noticed how all the chimneys were down. What a smell was coming from Charlie Poulter’s the Chemist shop where all the bottles of medicine had fallen on the floor and broken.  His windows and all the other windows in the block were smashed.
There were bricks and rubble all over the left hand side of the road and I had to ride right over on the other side to get to the Square. At the Martinborough Hotel was another big smell as all the bottles of booze had fallen and broken.

Bill Shore, the other delivery boy and I waited at Adam Wright’s, the newsagents next door to the hotel for the papers to arrive from Featherston.
The Post Office clock had stopped at 16 minutes past 11 and stayed that way for weeks, a reminder of when the quakes started.

Bill and I started quite late on our deliveries. I did the north side of the town and everywhere chimneys were down, some power poles were leaning and people were still wandering around in nightclothes wanting to stop and talk.
 
Although it was midwinter, it was cold but fine with no rain or wind for several days. Jim and I built a small fire in a drum so we could heat water for tea making and heating babies’ bottles but the power came back on only a day or so later.
We made do with things like using an electric bar heater turned upwards with pots balanced on it. Also in a couple of weeks and our chimney was repaired, the stove pushed back in place and things got back to normal.

One or two days after the earthquake soldiers arrived and took over guarding the town. A chap I met at Wellington Teacher’s College in 1947-8 told me how he had joined a New Zealand Scottish Regiment and was in a temporary camp at the Carterton showgrounds in Belvedere Road in Carterton when the earthquake struck. He said they were quickly deployed to guard towns in the Wairarapa.
Fifteen or so of them were billeted in the Town Hall Supper room and were deployed around the town. We got to know one young chap posted as a guard outside the Post Office and I think he enjoyed our company as he was doing a very boring job.

The army had a hand clearing rubble off the road and placing empty 44 gallon drums down Jellicoe Street, red kerosene lamps on them shone as warning lights.

A couple of days later they brought in a 4×4 army truck nicknamed ’The Blitz’. Parked with its nose pointing at Pain and Kershaw’s they threw a rope around the masonry tower on the corner. The rope was tied to the front bumper of the ‘Blitz’. Half of the town watched from Jellicoe Street as the driver put the truck into reverse, revved up and jerked backwards, lifting the front wheels off the ground. He did this about three times before the tower finally tumbled down.