But I shall never forget Mother’s face as we came through the back gate into our garden, me carrying Janet. She’d been sick again, but now she was awake and talking.

Mother dropped a pail of milk, and ran towards us. ‘Janet, my bairn! What happened?’ Her eyes were wide and full of fear. One daughter had lost her sight on the journey to this new land. Had the other lost her life?

No. Janet was soon well again, and the news of Aggie’s feather spread up the valley. The next time Hahona led her to the pa, people patted her hands, said ‘Kah-pai, Aggie! Good, good!’

‘The womans — they can do things, yes?’ Ngaio laughed to me. I said nothing. It’s safer that way.

Oh, and I never found my magpie feather again. I don’t think I wanted to!

The ‘pa’ of which I speak, the Maori village, looks simple. A few huts with walls and roofs of reeds; a fence of high wooden stakes and a ditch to protect them from any enemy. Haare’s people journeyed to live here, just like us. Hahona told Aggie how they came here after losing their old land in fighting with other tribes, and after the Pah-kay-hah (their name for us) took away more of it. Father shook his head when he heard. ‘Puir souls. Driven from their homes, as we were. They are so good tae us; we must be good tae them.’

Have we been? I wonder, sometimes. We have given them spades and hoes for their gardens. They now raise cows, just as we do. They have candles and blankets, and warm woollen clothes for the winter. Haare’s and Hahona’s young sister Ngaio (not so young now: she is growing into a woman) has become a fine spinner, making clothes from the wool that her brother shears on nearby farms.

Yet we have brought terrible things with us as well. Diseases that their bodies have never known, and cannot fight. Two of the children born on our voyage from Scotland had measles when we arrived. Soon, many Maori people caught the disease. Four of them died; Haare’s father was one.

Some of his tribe wanted to drive us away, take up their stone weapons against us. It was Haare’s mother, Areta, who stopped them. She spoke of the friendships growing among the children of both races, said words like those my father Angus had uttered. ‘These Pah-kay-hah have lost their homes, just as we did. They have suffered like us. Let us live together, not against one another.’

So we have stayed. Father and Mother and me, and now Janet. And poor Aggie.

Poor? You will know from what I have written. Aggie is blind.