Like I say, Mum’s still interested in ideas, and in protest causes. She keeps telling me that you have to do something, not just complain. She also reckons women are better at getting a message across. Though Dad says that on some protests, she carried the carved walking stick that was part of Great-great-(pause to count)-grandad Duncan’s axe, and she’d wave it in the air, which always made people listen very carefully to her.

There’s a story about the stick in Great-etc-uncle Robert’s book: how it saved Duncan’s life and my Grandad Alan’s life, too. I sometimes take it with me when I go for walks, and make up stories to myself about the things it’s seen. I guess that’s one way writers learn how to write.

Dad and Mum split up about four years after I was born; Mum says they probably married too young. They’re still good friends, and he visits us as often as he can. He works for a charity that helps villages in the Pacific Islands get fresh water and things like that. If I become a doctor, I’d like to work in those places.

My parents lived in the city for a while, because Mum wanted to. But sometimes they didn’t have enough money to pay the rent, so they came back to Waimoana. I was just a baby; Mum reckons I used to cry all the time in town. As soon as we arrived here, I stopped!

Dad built us a small place just across the road from the farmhouse. The new farmhouse, Nana Beth and Grandad Alan call it; the one before it got wrecked in a big earthquake, about sixty years ago. Uncle John and his family live there now; he’s taken over the farm, and he does all sorts of new things with it.

You want to hear something amazing about my Uncle John? He married a friend of Mum’s; someone she got to know on protest marches. Auntie Kate says the first few times she met my uncle, she spent all the time arguing with him, because he was pro-Springbok Tour, pro-American nuclear ships — the exact opposite of all the things she and Mum believed in. Auntie Kate reckons the only way she could get my uncle to think sensibly was to marry him.

Anyway, we’re just sixty steps from their front gate, and just forty steps from the other cottage, where Nana Beth and Grandad Alan live, along with about twenty fruit trees, now that the ones in the old orchard don’t grow much fruit.