Hahona and Rawiri live with Uncle Niall and Aunt Ngaio now. My aunt and uncle have no children of their own. Their mill is not far from the school (a bigger school these days), and Auntie Ngaio used to stand watching the children as they passed by each morning. So my clever mother talked to Mr McDougall, the headmaster, and he invited my aunt to come and teach the classes some Maori songs and games. She’s been doing it ever since, and Uncle Niall says it’s like having fifty children!

He’s a fine teacher, is Mr McDougall. He came in my last year at school, just before I turned fourteen, and he still lends me books. Mother and Father exclaimed when they heard his name. His uncle was the first headmaster, and lies in our cemetery, just across from Hahona’s husband and not far from my grandparents. People are often near to one another in our little district, sometimes in sad ways.

Maybe I can talk to Mr McDougall about whether I should join the Army, I thought, all of a sudden. I had to do something to make up my mind.

The axe blade stuck again. I pulled at it, but it wouldn’t come out. I twisted the handle, braced my foot against the totara, and heaved. The steel head jerked free, and I staggered backwards. I could hear myself panting. Don’t hurry when you’re chopping, Father always says. A calm mind makes a clean cut. But I didn’t seem able to stay calm today.

I wiped sweat from my forehead. Voices rose from the far side of the river. Jess and … Mother, was it? No, Lily. That’s right; they were going to move all the cows from one paddock to another for Father. That’s another thing Jess says: that it’s nonsense to talk of some work being ‘not ladylike’. Women should be allowed to do any job they’re capable of.

She and Lily are reading books on nursing just now. ‘If this dreadful war keeps on, we want to help in some way,’ Lily told me last week. I don’t know what rich Mr Sheffield would think about his daughter being mixed up with blood and sickness.

I snorted suddenly, as I tried to imagine what he’d think about his daughter helping shoo cows out of a paddock. He’s had one of those new milking machines installed on his farm. ‘Does the work in half the time, John!’ he told my father. ‘And only needs half as many workers!’ But Father told Mother at dinner that he likes milking our cows by hand — their warm grassy smell, their soft coats, the silence as he works. And he wondered what the workers whom Mr Sheffield had replaced with his new machine would do to earn a living now.