"These wretched peacocks squawked: ‘help, help, help' and you froze in your bed and waited to feel a quake.”

Joy Macgregor is describing one of the many aftershocks that rocked Hawkes Bay on February 3, 1931.

Her family were staying in a camping trailer and tents and the peacocks were in an aviary next door in Hastings' Cornwall Park. The peacocks always warned of an upcoming shake.

Joy's two storey family home on Fitzroy Ave was unlivable as the roof continued to shed tiles, chimneys toppled and a fireplace took out the hall.

'It was like looking into a dolls house.”

At six-years-old, it was Joy's second day at Mahora Primary School, she was getting a drink from the water fountain when she was thrown to the ground.

At first she thought she'd tripped but as the ground continued to shake beneath her feet she realised it was an earthquake.

The 7.8 magnitude quake hit at 10.47am and 90 years on Joy remembers it vividly. It is New Zealand's deadliest natural disaster with 256 deaths and thousands of people injured.

On her walk home from school along Tomoana Road she could see the ground rolling like an inland sea from the aftershocks.

Joy's dad Albert says he broke the four-minute mile running home from his dental surgery that day.

Her mother Maude's leg was badly damaged by a falling chimney and she went to the temporary hospital at the racecourse, then on to Wellington.

That night, families from the street got together and had grilled chops, peas, potatoes and fresh fruit for dessert – all cooked outside because no one dared to go inside, recalls Joy.

The family camped until March then when the nights got colder they moved into the garage, they lived like that for about six months and Joy wasn't allowed into their home until it was repaired.

Joy never went into Hastings to see the damage but knows it was extensive.

She recalls the fate of the nearby boot maker when his small shop collapsed on top of him.

'All that was left was his feet sticking out. It always gave me nightmares to think of that.”

To this day the slightest shake will have Joy freeze to the spot.

Having lived in Tauranga for 30 years, she's glad she didn't feel Monday's earthquake because she would have panicked. The 4.9 magnitude quake occurred 20km east of Rotorua and was felt throughout Tauranga and the Bay of Plenty.

To her relief, Joy and her husband George were on holiday in the South Island when the Edgecumbe earthquake hit in 1987 and it took hours to get through on the phone to her two sons in Tauranga.

Although afraid of quakes Joy isn't afraid of heights and in her later years, she has been zip lining, in a hot air balloon and she jumped out of a plane to celebrate her 90^th birthday.

'I've done a few reckless things in my life but if you don't do it now you never will.”