But now this thought had hit me. I blinked again, then followed Tipene along the wooden deck. The river boomed past, forty feet below; the bridge trembled. I thought of that dead cow; anything falling in there wouldn’t have a hope. I wondered if there’d been any more slips on the streams further up the valley.

Finola already knows what she’s going to do when she leaves high school. She sat her School Certificate exams at the end of last year. You have to get 200 marks before they’ll let you into the Sixth Form, and she swotted really hard. Typical girl. She’s got a holiday job three days a week at the district council office in town, and she wants to be a teacher. Fancy wanting that!

She said she felt nervous before her job interview. Ever since that milk-bar business, she’s ready for people to snub her because she’s part-Maori. But the council offered her the holiday job straightaway.

Nobody’s ever picked on me for my race, except for a couple of guys at school after Tipene and I told them to stop taking the cricket gear that Standard Three and Four used at lunchtime. One of them went ‘Aw yeah, you Horis always stick together, eh?’ I didn’t take much notice, but Tipene was pretty wild.

Beneath the deck, the Waimoana roared past so loudly we had to raise our voices to hear each other. Just upstream, the big shelves of rock where we like to swim were half underwater. You could see water foaming beneath the ledge that was our secret hiding place when we were little.

‘Let’s have a look, eh?’ Tipene pointed at the rocks.

‘Yeah, good idea.’ I remembered Mum telling us to stay away from the river. But, well, we wouldn’t be in the river — we’d be on the bank above it. So we climbed over the fence, and headed towards the rocks. A gigantic willow branch came hurtling down on the frothing water. It rammed into the bank, and lifted straight up in the air. Then it thwacked back down into the current, and went spinning on.

‘Hey!’ Tipene yelled.

‘Hey!’ I yelled, too; original as always.

We grinned at each other. It’s hard to believe anyone could look down on Tipene and Finola and their family, or any of us, for being Maori. But I’d woken up a bit to some things, especially when we talked at school about the rugby tour.

Last year — 1956 — the Springboks toured New Zealand, and the All Blacks beat them, three test matches to one! It was the first time we’d ever won a series against South Africa. We all listened to the games on the wireless, and when New Zealand won the final test, Mum and Dad and I cheered and yelled.