‘She’s OK. She was heading home. We lost a sugar-bag, though. It fell in the river. Sorry. The rest are still in the orchard.’

My mother smiled. ‘I think we can manage without the sugar-bag.’

‘Huh!’ grunted Angus. ‘I was looking forward to some plums. Girls are useless!’ He gave me a wobbly grin.

The shakes were further apart now, and less powerful. The trees and hedge had stopped swaying. Blackberry or Raspberry gave an ‘I’m all right; how about milking me?’ moo from the paddock.

Dad stood. ‘I’d better check the fences. Let’s have a look inside the house first.’

We can already look inside a lot of it, I thought. The rest of us followed my father as he limped towards the back door. He turned the handle, pushed, and the door fell flat onto the kitchen floor. Total silence for a second, then we were all gasping and laughing.

Every shelf in the kitchen had collapsed. Broken jars of fruit and jam lay everywhere. ‘Oh well, the stove still looks all right,’ sighed my mother. I remembered that column of black smoke rising down the valley. Whose place was it?

Dad put an arm around Mum; nodded at the splintered walls. ‘We’ve certainly got plenty of firewood for it.’ The ground shook again; Angus gripped my hand.

More time passed. I helped Mum make a pot of tea. ‘I hope the chooks aren’t too scared to lay eggs,’ she muttered. Nana Aggie’s groping hands found a loaf of bread. ‘I baked that just yesterday,’ she announced, blowing dust from it.

Dad stood in my parents’ half-wrecked bedroom, chopping at the beam that lay across their bed. He lifted the axe, wiped its gleaming blade with his palm. ‘Knew I was right to hang onto this. I’ll have to tell Hahona.’

He and Angus and I lifted the bed out onto the lawn. Mum came through the gate from the paddock, holding half-a-dozen speckled eggs in her apron. ‘The hayshed’s all right. Just one bale fallen down, and Blackberry’s already eaten half of it, the greedy thing.’

Nana Aggie was peeling potatoes at one end of the kitchen table, where it stood with the summer sun glowing down on it. ‘We can sleep in the barn, then. That’s what John and I did, the first few years we were married.’

Horses’ hooves scrunched on the road. A voice called. Whina.

She came hurrying through our front gate. Wrong: she came hurrying through the gap where our front gate used to be. It lay flat on the ground, just like our kitchen door. The fence on either side was a buckled line of leaning white pickets. Her mother Ahorangi followed close behind.

My friend hugged me. ‘Told you we’d find you.’