Amid the rubble of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, Lloyd Jones was inspired to go in search of the foundations of his own family
Christchurch: Lloyd Jones visited the scene of the 2011 earthquake Photo: AP
On February 22, 2011, the earth gave a violent movement “like the snap of a shaken tablecloth”, the air turned electric blue, and the New Zealand city of Christchurch cracked open like an eggshell – to expose some very smelly foundations.
In 1931, Lloyd Jones’s father had cycled 240 miles after the Napier earthquake to help with the clean-up. Compelled by the same impulse, Jones, a prize-winning novelist who lives in Wellington, decided to head for Christchurch. Among his discoveries was that the earthquake was not a random event. When he peered down into the rubble, he saw a pattern, an inevitability. It set him thinking about the precarious foundations of the Jones family. “I began to wonder if I might retrace and recover something of my own past.”
Jones grew up in a secretive working-class household, breathing in his mother’s bruised silence and the resigned air of his stoical father, “who assumed whatever new pile of s--- was dumped on him was all part of the world’s curious design”. Silence was the family trait. If someone “said something”, it was usually an invitation for a broomstick to break over their back. Like smoke from some burn-off, this long-smouldering silence hovered over his childhood.
“Roots are hell to deal with” – as the excavators in Christchurch discovered. In Jones’s case, there were none. “Whenever asked about my ancestry, specifically my grandparents, I say with some relish, 'I don’t have any.’ ” He knew the lineage of his dogs better than his own, he realised. His parents kept no photographs. Their forebears were largely illiterate. In the absence of written records, memories had not been preserved nor meanings attributed. On both sides of the family, the Joneses had not come to official notice, except in the odd death or marriage certificate, or in an outstanding bill to cover expenses at an orphanage. The only shards were oral and related to his father’s father, a Welsh naval officer who was supposed to have drowned at sea in 1917; and his mother’s mother, Maud (“that old ratbag”), who had given away his mother Joyce for adoption when she was four, and who never afterwards admitted having a daughter.
Instead, the images that Jones grew up with were the old watercolours of surveyors and naturalists, which revealed New Zealand as the upended version of an opposite world. The names of local houses and rivers – Herongate, Derwent, Thames – were wistful echoes of faraway places (“as late as 1960, my mother referred to England, where she had never been, as 'home’ ”).
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