It was eerily ironic that the storm swept the country 50 years to the day after the Wahine foundered.
I can remember that day well, getting off the school bus and racing up the drive with my sisters to get into the house out of the wind and rain.
Our parents were painting the kitchen with the little transistor radio giving a running commentary as the disaster unfolded.
We had made that trip on the Wahine ourselves from Wellington to Lyttleton return to visit grandparents in Christchurch. It was part of Kiwi travel arrangements in those days to do that overnight trip up the South Island’s east coast and across the Cook Strait.
The stewards would bring cups of tea and cocoa to your bunk to wake you up so you had plenty of time to get up and going and be ready to disembark.
The coverage last week of some of the stories highlighted what a terrifying experience it would have been. Many stories of survival and heroics were retold or surfaced for the first time as some survivors had kept their stories to themselves for half a century.
Many of those survivors have remained in touch from a seminal event in their lives.
Fifty-three people lost their lives in this tragedy but 676, including children who are now in their fifties, survived.
The most heartening thing to come from the coverage were the stories of Kiwis helping Kiwis. Not just passengers assisting each other to survive but the many Wellingtonians who took to the water in that appalling weather, risking their own lives to save others.
As last week’s storm swept the country we got the thunder and lightning storm that had hammered Taranaki a few hours earlier.
I was up at the dog kennels giving the dogs a run and watching the lightning light up the sky as the rain poured down. We have had more thunderstorms over the last six months than any period I can remember back to the 1970s when they seemed more common .
I put the dogs away and thought it was probably unwise standing there holding an umbrella consisting of a light wire frame.
No sooner had I thought that when everything flashed into a sheet of white brilliance and the thunder followed immediately with a most impressive and concussive effect.
I dropped the umbrella and sprinted for the same house I’d sought 50 years earlier for sanctuary.
Jane stood wide eyed on the doorstep wondering where the lightning had hit.
We’ve all known of people hit and sometimes killed by lightning and later that day I heard of several cattle that had been struck and died.
The rain we have just had will finally strike the grass seed that has been drilled for two or three weeks. My contractor was blaming me for the dry spell because I’d been telling everyone I wanted it to stay dry during my forestry harvest.
Well that had just finished so it was now okay for it to rain. I wish I had that power over the weather all the time.
