Water gushes down the front pathway of NZ author Stacy Gregg's home in Auckland 27th of February.
Video / Stacy Gregg
At just before 5pm on Friday, best-selling Auckland author Stacy Gregg wrote the best two words that any author can ever write: THE END. She had finally completed her latest novel. She sent the manuscript to her agent in England, and opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
“I wasactually crying tears of joy because I was so happy with it,” she said on Wednesday. “It had taken me a year and a half to write because it was completely different to every other book I’ve written. It doesn’t have any ponies in it.” Her first book in the Pony Club Secrets series was published in 2007 and she’s since gone to write more than 20 middle-grade pony novels that have sold around the world.
The 56,000-word manuscript, with the working title Nine Girls, is set in her home town of Ngāruawāhia. She revised the epilogue on Friday afternoon. “I was so thrilled.”
Gregg always was a very good storyteller when she worked as a magazine journalist, and her years as one of New Zealand’s most successful authors has seen her achieve a mastery of narrative. She talked about a lunch on Friday on Ponsonby Rd, when her friend, the painter Judy Darragh, cracked everyone up when she said, “I reckon this rain’s going to ease up soon.”
Water gushing down the steps at the front of the home of Stacy Gregg. Photo / Supplied
Gregg said, “We laughed and laughed because it was clearly not going to ease up. It was raining hard. And it kept raining, and it kept raining.
“The water started coming onto our front section at about 5.30pm. There were giant, giant cockroaches swimming in the water. We were fascinated and amused, really. There wasn’t any sense of real concern.
“I ordered pizza from Toto. I was trying to decide whether to get spinach mushroom or the Doro ham. In the end, I got the spinach mushroom and a spicy pepperoni. And then at about 6.40, the water suddenly just rose up so fast. I swear it was doing 10 centimetres every 30 seconds. It was just gunning it.
“We looked around and we suddenly realised there was no doubt it was going to come in the house and yet we stood around like a bunch of stunned numpties, doing nothing. So then we decided to go up our newly renovated stairs and hide out with our puppy and our kitten, and then we all went upstairs, but I thought with the weight of water on the property, the house could collapse, so that’s when we decided to evacuate.
Stacy Gregg was forced to evacuate her home after the heavy rains. Photo / Supplied
“It got quite real quite fast. It was coming from every direction except the west. I tried to go first with the kitten in the cage, but I wasn’t strong enough. It had become a raging torrent and I couldn’t ford myself through the water. It was too powerful. So Brin [her partner Brin Beachman] said, ‘I’ll go ahead of you and break the tide.’ Which he did with the dog in his arms - it’s a Borzoi, and weighs 23 kilos.”
They are going to rent for at least six months. Their house is uninhabitable. Their wardrobe was being refitted so all their clothes were on the floor; Beachman got out with the shirt on his back, and Gregg had one box of clothes above the waterline. They lost everything. That includes the foreign editions of her books, in Arabic, Polish, Italian, French, German, Czech, Spanish and Chinese.
“All gone. Floating. Destroyed. And it wasn’t water. The point when it really started to overwhelm me on Friday was when the toilet started to bubble and I realised we were standing in sewer waste. Not rain water. Filth.
“But the really terrible things were happening to all the houses around me. We live in a street with a lot of state houses and I don’t know if any had insurance. So we’re fine. When I phoned up the insurance company on Saturday it took three hours to get through because of the weight of calls but they were so kind. The next day when I called I got a guy called Mike Richardson who was so lovely I cried. He said, ‘It’s alright. We’ll take care of you.’
“And he was just everything I didn’t expect. I expected to be messed about and ‘oh we’ll have to see about that’, but they put money in my bank account to pay for the rent for the new house. They’ve been so kind and so practical and just not dicks.
“Everybody has been so lovely. The insurers, our new landlord, friends - we’ve had so many offers for a place to stay. It’s just been revelatory how kind people are. I feel like I got quite a lot out of it. I’ve lost everything, really,” she said, and began to weep for the second time in our interview; the first time was when she talked about Richardson, the kind insurer, “but it’s certainly shone a light on who I can rely on and who I can’t, and how I need to live my life in the future. I just really hope the agent likes that novel.” Her flood story ended with a cliffhanger. “She still hasn’t got back to me.”
