Tui is transfixed by the yards of flapping bunting draped between the buildings, while I’m charmed by a minuscule lending library that someone has thoughtfully set up on a small wooden shelf. Peering along the row, I’m jolted by the sight of a familiar book, but before I have time to react, Tui is stretching out a hand to pick it up.

‘Evangeline And … The Angry Queen,’ she reads aloud in her careful, low voice. Then, looking from the drawing on the cover of the book to me, then back again, she says, ‘Evangeline looks like you, that’s all.’

‘How funny,’ I say, attempting to take the book from her so I can have a closer look. But Tui does not want to let it go.

‘Can I have it?’ she asks doubtfully, scanning the instructions pinned to the shelf.

‘I think you have to swap it for another book,’ I point out.

‘Hmmph,’ grumbles Tui, nodding her head and clasping the book tight to her chest. She really must love Evangeline – apparently much more so than I ever have.

‘Is it a good one?’ I ask, and after eyeing me cautiously for a few moments, Tui hands it over. It’s the second in the series, set when Evangeline is nine years old, and follows her back to the Victorian era on her time-travelling train. I finger the lettering on the cover, tracing a path over the pleasant swoop of David’s ‘D’, before stroking the ‘N’ of Nash.

Why shouldn’t Tui have a book that she wants – especially a book that I know is full of adventure and learning?

‘I say we take it,’ I whisper, smiling as Tui starts clapping in earnest. ‘Shall I carry it in my bag for you?’

I have just zipped it away out of sight when Kit reappears, a clanking carrier bag in one of his vast hands.

‘For later,’ he tells me, holding it up.

Having exhausted Oamaru’s town centre, the three of us take our hokey-pokey ice creams – a New Zealand speciality of vanilla with butterscotch toffee pieces – down to the seafront and sit for while on a low wall, dangling our legs and ducking to avoid the huge gulls that hang like puppets on strings above us, waiting to gobble up any leftover crumbs of wafer. The water in the bay is the bright turquoise of a swimming pool in a glossy holiday brochure, the pale gold rocks and shingle beach warmed by a high, ferocious sun. Kit points out what he calls ‘shags’ paddling through murky patches of seaweed, and while I tell him that we find the same birds along the coast at home, I choose not to mention the alternative meaning for the word shag, which he might not be familiar with.