Ahorangi meanwhile was embracing my mother and Nana Aggie. The little green pekapeka bat around her neck glowed in the sunlight. I looked, and yes, Mum was wearing her bracelet.

‘We rode across the river just up from the pa,’ Whina told me. ‘There’s a whole lot of willows fallen and blocked the old bed. But we managed.’

My mother held Ahorangi’s hand. ‘You’re women! Women can manage anything, remember?’

‘They can’t manage to bring the plums home,’ Angus piped up.

My father shook Ahorangi’s other hand. Then he shook Whina’s. I’d never seen him treat her so like an adult before. I guess she and I had both grown up a fair bit in the past couple of hours.

‘Rawiri?’ Dad asked. ‘Hahona? And the pa?’

‘They are safe,’ Ahorangi told him. ‘So are most of our whares.’ She nodded towards our wrecked home. ‘They are not as heavy as your pakeha houses. They do not break things if they fall.’ She placed a hand on my sore forehead. ‘Whina has said how you crossed the bridge. Brave girl.’

‘Two brave girls.’ Nana Aggie’s unseeing eyes smiled at me.

‘We came to see if you need anything,’ went Ahorangi. ‘Is there—’

My father was laughing. He shook his head as we stared at him. ‘My grandfather — Big Angus — used to tell us stories about how they would all have starved when they first landed in New Zealand, if it weren’t for the Maori people helping them. Half a century on, and it’s still the same. What would we do without you?’

Whina and I wandered across the lawn, and stood staring into my ruined bedroom. ‘It looks like a bomb went off.’

The ground shuddered once more. Our house’s (our half-house’s) side wall sagged further towards us, and we both jumped back. From the paddock, Blackberry or Raspberry gave another ‘Mooo!’

Mum made more tea, pushing broken bits of house into the stove. She and Ahorangi and Nana Aggie began sorting through the mess of spilt things on the kitchen floor, Nana’s hands searching expertly through the rubble.

The rest of us carried clothes and blankets to the hayshed. ‘It’s going to be like a picnic!’ Little Angus exclaimed as he staggered along with a tin basin of soap and toothbrushes. ‘Bags I sleep on the bales up under the rafters!’ Whina and I rolled our eyes at each other.

We’d drunk our tea, some potatoes were boiling on the stove, and a few mutton chops that Mum had saved from the smashed meat safe were cooking in a pan. She and Dad were planning to take Nana Aggie up to the cemetery, to see if our great-grandparents’ graves were all right. ‘And to show them we’re all right,’ said Nana.