The road past our place is tar-sealed now. There are new big milk-tankers that pick up from the farms. We’ve got TV — though not colour. But it’s still a sleepy place, most of the time. I want some excitement in my life.

Some people like living in the Waimoana Valley because it’s peaceful. A family from South Vietnam came here about the time I was born. There’d been a long war in their country — even New Zealand soldiers were fighting there for a while — and they arrived in our country as refugees.

I didn’t know that Tranh — he’s about my age — was from Vietnam when I first met him. ‘Is New Zealand very different from China?’ I asked him. Tranh got quite wild. ‘We not China! We from Vietnam!’ His family used to be farmers, and they’ve started this huge market garden, with all sorts of vegetables.

Tranh comes on the bus to high school. When we were at primary school, he used to do this little bow whenever he saw me, which was embarrassing, but quite cute. He doesn’t do it now that he’s become a typical rude Kiwi guy! But he wished me good luck when I said why I was going to Auckland.

The day before we left, I walked a long way up and down the riverbed. The Waimoana had a huge flood a long time ago; Dad and Tipene nearly got drowned being silly. For ages after, the river flowed up against the other bank.

It was amazing, their finding that carved panel. It’s famous: Grandad Robert has lots of articles from newspapers and magazines about it. It’s kept in the meeting house on the marae. I like looking at it whenever we go there.

One article has a photo of Dad and Tipene and Tipene’s sister, Finola, holding the panel. ‘Stupid boys!’ Nana Florence said once. ‘They’re lucky they didn’t end up in the river.’

They made up for it later. The new bridge I was walking under yesterday had to be built because of what happened to the old swing one.

I was about six. My father and Tipene were sorting out our hayshed one morning soon after Christmas. I was ‘helping’ Mum in the kitchen — getting in her way, in other words. We’d picked a whole bucket of peas from our garden, and we were going to take some over to Nana Florence and Grandad Matiu, in their little cottage just across the road.

I heard a truck start rumbling across the bridge, but I didn’t take any notice. After Christmas is when most farmers cut hay for their cows’ winter feed, and trucks are always carting bales from one place to another.

Then a different noise made Mum and me freeze. A bang!, followed straightaway by a cracking and splintering. Silence for half a second, then the walloping sound of something heavy hitting water.