A YEAR ago today, the people in this photograph - all virtual strangers - dug Margaret Neale from a mountain of rubble in Christchurch's City Mall.
On Sunday, they met for the first time at the Carlton Country Club. The mood was quiet. Meeting strangers is hard enough at the best of times. Facing this group also wasn't easy for Margaret. She was pulled from the rubble but her daughter died in it. So while she was the bright point in her rescuers' day, her survival is stained by tragedy.
When she arrived at the bar, tightly clutching a friend's hand, everyone stood with no one really knowing what to say. In the beginning, hugs did the talking. And then there were the hard questions; who had seen her daughter? Had anyone been with her?
At the bottom of one of those piles of rubble, trapped inside a brutal origami of steel and masonry and glass, lay Margaret and Melissa Neale.
Hand-in-hand, mother and daughter had run with just enough time to see other people hit by falling rubble before they too were flung by the force of the quake.
The third-storey walls of 91 Cashel Street collapsed. Its west wall hit 89 Cashel Street and its east wall fell onto No. 93. Red brick and white stone rained down.
Margaret wasn't sure if she was completely knocked out. The best she can explain is that she came to, unable to move anything other than her fingers. She wasn't sure if she was dead or alive, but then terror took over and that was enough to let her know she'd been spared. For now.
''I knew I'd been buried in an earthquake and I said goodbye … I never thought I'd see anyone again.''
Brian Reidy spent the morning pottering in his Sumner hilltop garden and had just arrived in town for his shift at Radar Records, the City Mall shop he'd co-owned with Ross Middlemiss for 24 years.
The 64-year-old ran through the back entrance of the shop, through the mess of CDs and strewn vinyl, shouting his business partner's name. They had the briefest of exchanges before Ross took off to check on his family.
''Then someone yelled, 'there's a woman in the rubble'.''
No one really knows how Margaret Neale was located. But luck or design brought this group of strangers together and they had spotted Margaret at the bottom of a two-metre-high mountain of timber and blocks and glass and glazing, all topped by an enormous slab of aluminium and joinery. A triangle of solid beams prevented her from being crushed.
With bare hands they hauled off what rubble they could and lassoed the huge slab with a rope Andy Murray had bought that morning. Three or four of them pulled it clear.
''You'd get timber and throw that off, and then there was a big concrete block that myself and another guy got underneath.
Margaret was gaining consciousness. Through the rubble, she heard what she recognised as a young man's voice.
It was Finn Brown. He was repeating, ''I know you're down there, I know you're down there.''
The men were telling Margaret they were nearly there, that she'd be right. They could see an arm, a purple dress. The burrowing became more frantic.
There was no clear leader but someone shouted, ''we've found her'' and everybody gathered, ready for her to be passed out.
At 1.08pm, Margaret was carried to a bench seat nearby. Tinaye leaned in to hear Margaret explain her daughter had been with her in the rubble.
People continued digging. Garry Pierce's daughter used some insulation to wrap around Margaret's leg. They put a wooden plank under her body and another along her side and tied her to it all with Andy's rope.
Tafara Chaparanganda remembers feeling confused about how they would get transport. Then Gilford Takavarasha said: ''Let's just carry her to the hospital.'' ''We thought 'women first' so we took her,'' Tafara said.
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