Another figure landed beside me. Dad. He wrapped his arms around me, and clasped me to him while people stumbled past. ‘Up!’ he grunted. ‘Can you?’ He began struggling to his feet, yanking at my jacket. Another hand pulled at my shoulder: a woman I’d never seen before, hair all over her face. Then I was standing, clutched in my father’s grip, shaking and sobbing.

The men got us away. I hate to admit it, but this was one time girls couldn’t do everything. They held our arms, gripped our hands, and slowly we started pushing back through the jostling, shouting ranks behind us. Others were leaving as well. There were white, shocked faces; angry faces; weeping faces. Ordinary people who’d never been in anything like this before. And I was one of them.

Dad clutched Mum’s elbow. Uncle Mac grasped mine. We picked our way among the cram of figures. A girl a few years older than me sat on the ground sobbing, while two others bent over her.

Chanting started again, back behind us. ‘Move! Move! Move!’ Grandad Matiu grunted ‘Watch out, everyone!’ I snatched a look back, and a double line of police were advancing from the rubbish skips into the protestors. ‘Move! Move!’ Long batons jabbed at anyone in their way.

We kept retreating, as fast as we could. The road and footpath were strewn with broken signs, jackets, a couple of crash helmets. By a lamp-post, as we hurried past, a guy in white overalls, with an arm-band reading Apartheid Sucks, was dabbing at the forehead of someone in a black and yellow jacket. He reached down into a First Aid box on the ground beside him, pulled out a bandage.

I jerked to a halt. ‘Come on, Ailsa, love!’ Dad urged. ‘Keep moving!’ But I was staring at the weeping figure on whose blood-smeared head the First Aid guy was now fixing the bandage. It was the bumble-bee girl I’d seen hugging and smiling at the policeman, two hours ago.

The crowd was starting to thin out. A few stood holding signs, gazing back towards the park where the chant of ‘Move! Move!’ still rose, while yells and cries sounded around it. But most people were heading away, like us. A couple nursed hurt arms; another was limping. One man shouted ‘Bloody rugby thugs!’

In the houses on either side of the road, people stood at gates or on verandahs, while the crowd hurried or stumbled past. A middle-aged woman ahead of us sat down suddenly on the low wall she was passing, put her head in her hands, and burst into tears. ‘Serves you right!’ a man on the garden path inside the wall went. ‘Sticking your nose into other people’s business!’

I glared at him, tried to think of something to say. Nana Whina and Finola moved over to the crying woman. Nana Whina took her hand; Finola sat on the wall beside her.