A man came to our door one day. I was little; I don’t remember it much. He was looking for work. He’d been a clerk in an office, but the firm had gone bankrupt. His wife and two small children back in Wellington were living mostly on bread and any vegetables they could grow. He still wore the suit trousers and jacket from his clerk’s work, although they were thin and frayed by then.

What shocked Mum most was that, although it was pouring with rain, the only thing he had to keep himself dry was a sugar-bag, a small sack, over his head and down his back.

‘A person — any person — in this country, having to live like that!’ I remember her telling my little brother Angus and me when we were old enough to understand. ‘Your Nana Aggie and her parents came here from Scotland, believing they’d find a land of riches. Instead, it’s a land where people nearly starve. Shameful!’

My father smiled at Angus and me. ‘Your mother would show them a thing or two down in Parliament.’ Mum began to speak again, and Dad lifted a hand. ‘I know, Lily, love. It might never have happened if we had more women helping run the country. That’s the truth, and you and Jess have helped me see it.’ Next thing, they were giving each other a soppy hug.

Anyway, the man stayed for nearly a week. My parents found him some easy jobs to do in the garden, and gave him heaps to eat. Grandad Sheffield paid him for a day’s work sorting out the office at the Sheffields’ big farm (‘paid him twice as much as he needed to,’ said Mum, and looked proud). She found him an old oilskin coat from the hayshed, and kept his sugar-bag — it’s the one I’m using now. When he left, she and Dad loaded him up with as much meat from Grandad Sheffield’s place as he could carry, and some of my and Angus’s clothes for his own kids. Mum said he was almost crying when he left.

My sugar-bag was half-full. The ladder wobbled again as I started down. ‘Hold it properly!’ I told Whina once more. ‘I suppose you’re day-dreaming about Robert McDougall?’

Whina blushed. ‘I’m not! It wobbled by itself. And look at the bridge.’

I reached the ground and turned to see. The red swing-bridge was swaying slightly from side to side. We watched, but nothing else happened. ‘Must have been the wind,’ I said. ‘And I bet you were thinking about Robert!’

Robert McDougall is really good at his schoolwork. So he should be, with a schoolteacher father. He may even go to university when he’s older. He speaks Maori well; Great-aunt Ngaio says he’s one of her star pupils.