Ordinary People Like Us

by Kelly Ana Morey

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The stunning final novel from one of New Zealand's finest writers. Ambitious, funny, wise and deeply affecting, Ordinary People Like Us calls to mind the immersive narratives of Elena Ferrante and Isabel Allende.

'And here I was thinking we were just ordinary people.'

From the landscapes of the Far North, through inner-city Auckland and to London in the 1970s and 90s, Ordinary People Like Us follows five generations of Māori women through a century of profound social and cultural change.

Bird. Kaa. Annie. Lorna. Jen. Pax.
Where should we start?
What is there to know?

Some fall in love easily, while others wait half a lifetime for their person. One walks a thin line between the land of the living and the call of the void. Some listen to the ghosts of the past, and each forges their unique way in the world. Gifted with an otherworldly instinct, in their most ordinary lives, they are all extraordinary.

Expansive and intimate, exploring the bonds that endure through generations, Ordinary People Like Us is a celebration of family and a powerful reminder that no matter how far we travel, it is the people who love us that keep us whole.

Release date: September 1, 2026

Publisher: Hachette New Zealand

Print pages: 416

Sample

Kaa: So, here we are.

Bird: Āe. Where should we start?

Māhina: With you, Māmā?

Kaa: Yes, with you, Māmā.

Bird: What is there to know?

Māhina: Tell us about your husbands.

Bird: Funny how that all worked out.

Kaa: Start at the beginning.

Bird: The beginning, well … in the beginning was Billy, though he was the last of my husbands. Billy Te Parenga, who I always loved best, ever since we were tamariki together, running around the gumfields, getting into mischief. We always promised we would marry each other, but Billy’s mother reckoned he was better than the likes of me and the other gumfield rangatahi, so she sent him away to St Stephen’s School in Tāmaki Makaurau to learn how to be a gentleman. He hated it. He told me he would dream about coming home to Te Hāpua in the holidays to be an ordinary boy again. We thought nothing would keep us apart, but we were no match for his mother. When he finished his schooling, a job was found for him in the Kaitāia Dairy Factory offices because he had been singled out as promising. One who could do better than kill himself on the land.

Next his mother found him a wife, a Te Rarawa wahine from Pukepoto. A family of mana, not like us. I remember the day he came north; he said to see his family but really to tell me about his forthcoming marriage. I remember this as clear as anything, even though it was so long ago. I was coming home from a hard day’s digging for gum when I saw him, my beautiful Billy Te Parenga in his fine clothes and shiny boots, talking to one of the Tararā diggers, that Inky Novak who your no-good husband Andro comes from, Kaa. My heart sang because it had been months since I had seen Billy, and that last time we had been together he had promised that when he returned it would be to take me back to Kaitāia as his wife.

That was the day the Pākehā took my picture, the one of me on the whakapapa wall when I was a girl. Little did I know that Billy was about to break my heart. But there was nothing to be done. Back then, we did as we were told. He did what his family wanted and married the wahine they chose.

My Billy was gone, and that was the end of it, so a few months later I married Rewa Hokianga, who didn’t mind my broken heart, and I moved on with my life. Rewa wasn’t Billy, but I liked him enough. He gave me my three eldest, and we would have grown old together if he hadn’t got sick and wasted away. We laid him to rest in the urupā up on the hill at Te Hāpua to wait for me. With three small tamariki to raise, I didn’t have much choice in the matter when Dani Yelavich, the Tararā widower, started sniffing around. I didn’t love Dani, but I didn’t dislike him either, and he had the means to take care of me and my tamariki. Dani had a small run-off and inherited his brother’s farm at Kāingaroa, which ended up yours, Kaa. He was a good father, and that counts for a lot, adding another three children early in our marriage and that seemed it. No matter, I thought; but just as the older lot were leaving, I became hapū again. That was with you, Māhina, born at the turn of the century. Apple of your father’s eye, you were. Poor Dani. He wouldn’t last much longer: in 1902, I think it was, burst appendix. We buried him at Te Urupā Tapu o Te Aupōuri, next to his first wife. So, there I was, a widow for the second time. Even with Dani’s landholdings that had become mine with his death, and Rewa’s and my house at Te Hāpua, it would have been a brave or foolhardy man who would even consider taking on an old, cursed woman like me and her many children.

Kaa: Except one did.

Bird: Yes. Darling Billy, light of my life. Billy came up for Dani’s tangi, and the thing between us was still there. By then his mother and mother-in-law were in the ground and Billy was free to leave his marriage, which had not been a success. Then you, Ahi Kaa, my little lit fire, arrived. My only child with Billy, though he was father in every way he could be to all my children. Billy had so much love to give. Once your older siblings left, Billy and I, with you two younger ones, moved into the little house at Te Hāpua and, as you know, that’s where we stayed.

Kaa: When was it that Dad died?

Bird: Billy died in 1945, just short of his eighty-first year, and I followed twenty-five long years later in 1970. Impossibly long lives back then, for both of us. Impossibly long lives still now. And our children and their children and their children travelled out into the world, ensuring that our line continued and flourished and survived. Though their hearts, their place in the world, remained in Te Hāpua, even if they didn’t know it.

So, is that enough for you two?

Kaa: Tēnā rawa atu koe, Māmā.

Enamel and silver Queen Victoria School for Māori Girls badge, 1949

Private collection, Annie Devich

Do all new beginnings start with a journey? wonders Annie Novak, just sixteen. She has been travelling south since the day before. From Te Hāpua, where she has been living with her grandmother Nanny Bird, since that thing happened to her back home.

She feels mostly better now and can’t remember the early days as anything other than a blankness, lying in bed day and night after the blood, so much blood, and the cramping that came a few days after Christmas. She had seen the darkness coming but had been unable to comprehend what it was or its enormity, much less stop it from descending upon her. No matter what dire outcome her mother, Kaa, threatened if she didn’t get out of bed, she couldn’t. Not even the lure of Queen Victoria School for Māori Girls down in the city, where she was supposed to be starting in the first week of February, could persuade Annie to shake it off. Then came more blood.

Kaa sent Annie north to her Nanny Bird to be made well again, and although the bleeding stopped, something else appeared as if in its place. It comes as a haunting lament at the edge of hearing. Annie has inherited this ability to listen beyond the ordinary from her maternal line, though this is the first time she’s been aware of it.

Bird’s cure has mostly done the trick for the time being. She hadn’t let Annie lie around in bed. Not one bit of it. Annie was made to dress and eat then pushed outside to hoe Bird’s vegetable garden. And when she was done with that, she weeded the flower beds and pruned the roses that never do well on the sandy coast. And when that was done, she was sent to help all the aunties at Te Hāpua put their gardens in order too. By the onset of the winter, Annie was deemed well enough to take up her place at Queen Victoria and was enrolled in the school’s second term.

The mournful chanting still buzzed inside her head, like a ngaro that she couldn’t swat away, but Annie learned to pretend it was only the wind screeching around the house, even when it was calm outside.

Annie stayed the previous night at Pukepoto with her older sister Caro, before getting up early to catch the bus from Kaitāia to Kawakawa. As the bus comes down the hill and onto the flats of Moerewa, the other passengers become restless. Annie deduces they must be near Kawakawa, from where they’ll be transferred to a train for the remainder of their respective journeys south.

On the platform at Kawakawa, there are a few girls and boys dressed in school uniform. Annie wishes she had a uniform, but that’s waiting for her at school. As the train progresses towards Auckland, the number of pupils returning to their different boarding schools grows, stop by stop. The uniforms aren’t the only difference between them. There are three distinct camps: the Māori girls and boys who attend Queen Victoria, St Peter’s, Wesley and St Stephen’s; the scholarship boys, orphans, poor, potentials and strays, who attend Dilworth College – even in uniform, there’s something less gilded, less shiny about these boys compared to the final group; and this is by far the largest and the loudest, the Pākehā, who go to the other private schools that Auckland boasts, thanks to the munificence, over half a century earlier, of their benefactors, both Church and from the world of business. Māori and Pākehā alike, the pupils ignore Annie. She is invisible in her ordinary clothes.

It’s dark when the train disgorges its passengers into Auckland’s central railway station. The Wesley, King’s and St Stephen’s boys make a run for the southern train for the last leg of their journey to the outskirts of rural Auckland. The remainder of the students trail outside where buses wait.

Annie stands on the platform and looks at the tracks below. She imagines stepping off into the void and being hit by a train. She’s so exhausted that this feels like a reasonable response. The mōteatea is revolving in her head again, rising in pitch and intensity to the whining of a dog or the whinny of a spooked horse. In this moment, Annie can’t imagine picking up her suitcase and pushing on. It’s too hard. She looks hopefully up and down the track, but the southern train is already pulling out of the station, away from her, so she’s missed her chance.

‘Hey, you,’ a voice says. Annie turns around as a girl in a Queen Victoria uniform walks up to her. ‘Are you one of ours?’

‘Ours?’ asks Annie.

‘Queen Vic. One of the matrons says there was a girl in civvies on our train, and you fit the bill.’

‘Yes, sorry. Yes. That’s probably me.’

‘Come on then. They’re waiting for us. I’m Hera, by the way.’

‘I’m Annie. Are you from up north too?’

‘No, Waikato. I was visiting. Come on. We’re almost there. They’ve sent a bus for us.’

‘I need to get my suitcase.’

‘Was it marked Queen Vic?’ asks Hera.

‘It was.’

‘Then the porter would have put it outside with the rest of our luggage.’

‘Oh,’ says Annie, trying to process this new bit of deceptively simple information, but she’s so tired, nothing’s making sense.

Hera laughs. ‘Come on, slow coach.’

‘Will it be all right?’ Annie asks as they walk across the concourse of the station.

‘It will. I promise.’

‘This is like a palace.’ Annie takes in the station’s architectural magnificence. ‘We don’t have places like this where I come from.’

‘Snap. You’ll get used to it. Everyone does eventually.’

Various school buses are parked outside, filling up with students. Annie follows Hera and is relieved to see her suitcase by the open luggage hatch, waiting to be loaded.

Maybe Hera is right. Maybe it will be all right.

Her inner howling quietens to a murmur and is lost amid the bustle of the Auckland night.

—

Annie’s first night at Queen Victoria is a blur of bread and butter, milky tea and a restless night in a bed that smells like someone else, with the muted sound in the background of new girls quietly sobbing themselves to sleep. Annie will never bother to shed a tear. Well, not for home anyway. While she’s at school, Annie will always dread the holidays: arriving home with the best of intentions but, within days, her and Kaa getting on each other’s nerves. Inevitably, Annie spends the rest of the break either at Bird’s up north, or at Aunty Māhina’s up the road if refuge is only required for an hour or two. She can’t stay there for any extended period, even though Māhina is her favourite aunty, because of Māhina’s husband, Johnny, who likes to beat his wife in the privacy and solitude of his own home. But mostly, Annie will be pleased when the holidays come to an end and she can escape back to school.

Annie neither loves nor hates school. She likes the library, where she can read almost as much as she wants. She doesn’t even mind that the texts are mostly allegorical and religious in content, though she hungers for something with a little more excitement. Her reading is over-populated with dutiful and worthy wives, which doesn’t sound much fun. She also enjoys a feeling of being part of something that’s so much bigger than her.

A Queen Vic girl!

This will stay with her, defining who she is, even though it’s a mere eighteen months of her life, which will prove to be much, much longer.

A Queen Vic girl!

She holds on to this identity with both hands, though if you had asked any of her surviving classmates years on, they would struggle to remember her. Annie knows this. She will always feel a fraud. Like she’s playing a part. No one at Queen Victoria will ever truly know her. Only Hera will come close. Lovely Hera, who, simply by existing, pulls Annie back from the open windows, busy roads, expanses of still water and platform edges, whenever Annie wants to follow the keening in her mind. It’s as if Hera absorbs enough of the thoughts that trouble Annie to stop them growing beyond the frame of safety and into catastrophic action. Lovely Hera, who spends hours with Annie down at the water’s edge below the school at Hobson Bay. They sit on the rocks, sharing cigarettes, looking across to Ōrākei on those dark days when Annie feels the pull of emptiness and the prospect of final, blissful silence.

How easy it would be to wade out into the cold, green water, deeper and deeper, until it closes in over my head.

She’s not alone. The senior school always studies Hamlet during the winter term, and there is a shiver of hysteria among the girls infected by Ophelia. Their teachers and matrons are oblivious to the breathless reports of dreams that feature drowning. It seems so romantic, the descent into madness, the watery grave, how they can’t help imagining their own dramatic ends. For most, the feeling will pass when they move on to other texts, the days begin to grow longer, and they return to dreaming about ordinary, rather than doomed, boys.

The senior students are allowed to walk to the Parnell Baths in the last few weeks of the third term – the baths are sea water and don’t open until winter has said haere rā. Sometimes they’re chaperoned, but not always. They attract riff-raff of every type, but without a pool at school it’s the only chance the girls have to swim. The baths are one of the places Hera persuades boys to give her the cigarettes she shares with Annie. Cloistered they may be, but Hera has a knack for finding the metaphorical gap in the hedge.

Bold as brass!

Cheeky as all get-out!

Such a fun girl!

That’s what the boys say about Hera at the baths and at the new Māori Community Centre on the corner of Halsey and Fanshawe streets that the Queen Victoria girls also frequent. After a while, they say other, less kind things about Hera. She always promises big but never delivers, and eventually that’ll catch up with her.

Hera sings with the choir, which gets her off the school grounds. Queen Victoria is justifiably proud of its choir, which is invited to perform at a variety of venues. With Hera’s encouragement, Annie auditions, even though she can’t sing. She doesn’t make the cut so has to stay at school while her friend goes off adventuring. It’s not so bad. When the choir performs at the Māori Community Centre, the whole school often goes too, their wifely potential on display, their whakapapa discreetly discussed by the aunties. Everyone knows the Queen Vic students are a cut above the other Māori girls. And it’s understood, if unspoken, that they are destined to make advantageous matches with Māori men of importance, unless they don’t. There are stories of girls in the past who squandered their mana to make a love match. Years later, when Annie reads The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it will resonate deeply with her recollections of Queen Victoria, even if she does ever so slightly miss the point of the novel.

Oh, yes. We too were the crème de la crème. Make no mistake.

It’s not until the end of their final term at Queen Victoria that something potentially life-changing happens. Some women, probably from the Māori Women’s Welfare League, though Annie will always be shaky on that provenance, come to school to talk to the senior girls about their futures. One from their entire graduating year is off to university; the pride of her whānau, hapū, iwi and perhaps even entire culture balanced precariously on her slim shoulders. It’s a lot, and Hera and Annie are glad they’re not her. But those are the expectations that this particular girl has come into the world with. She’ll be fine; she’s spent every living moment thus far being given the tools to continue fighting the Land Wars, albeit in an entirely different way to her tīpuna. Same war, though. And the rest of them? What will Annie, Hera and the others do with their lives before they marry? They listen carefully as the two women from the Welfare League speak. Written up on the blackboard are career options that they see as being a good fit for a Queen Vic girl:

Nursing

Teaching

Secretarial

Post Office

Factory worker and domestic don’t make it onto the board. That’s work for an entirely different kind of Māori girl. Not them. Not a Queen Vic girl! The women tell them about a scheme that’s been set up by their organisation to place young, educated Māori women into vocational training.

Hera puts her hand up. ‘Post Office?’

‘Oh, yes,’ one of the women says. ‘Queen Victoria girls are sought after by the Post Office because they are always so nicely spoken. Many have worked a switchboard for this reason.’

That sounds like fun, Annie thinks. Unlike many of her classmates, she’s not consumed with thoughts of career or marriage. Or even the future! Annie can barely conceive of tomorrow. The boys at the Māori Community Centre have told her about life in the outside world, where there’s no one to keep an eye on you, no watchful Queen Vic matrons, elders or Māori wardens who don’t tolerate any funny business. They talk about places like the legendary Orange Ballroom, where rich and poor, Māori or Pākehā, go to dance and have fun. Annie can’t wait to have fun – it’s the one thing that keeps her alive. She hasn’t yet realised that a more accurate word for what she can’t wait to embrace is trouble. And working at the Post Office, well, that doesn’t sound too difficult. If she had a job, then Kaa couldn’t make her go home to slave on the farm before being married off into even more drudgery.

‘Since the end of the war, we have acquired a number of boarding houses around the city,’ continues the woman from the Welfare League, ‘where our young Māori women, girls like you who aren’t from the city, can live while undergoing training or working.’

Oh, that doesn’t sound much better than school.

But what else is Annie to do? She knows she can’t go home to Kaa, nor look after ancient Nanny Bird. There’re only so many stories about gum digging and the olden times that she can bear, and she’s heard them all.

‘What do you think?’ asks Hera as they file into the dining hall for dinner.

‘About what?’

‘What you’re going to do after school. Sometimes, Annie … really.’

‘Oh, that. Probably the Post Office. I’m not clever enough to be a schoolteacher and I’ve had too much blood, guts and shit on the farm to want to be a nurse.’

Hera looks crestfallen. ‘But I want to go nursing.’

‘You do?’ This is the first Annie’s heard of it.

‘My family want me to.’

‘And you?’

‘I think I’d like to be a teacher.’

‘Then be a teacher.’

‘I can’t,’ Hera replies. ‘I have to be a nurse. It’s what they expect. You don’t understand. It’s different for me.’

‘Because, unlike yours, no one in my family is special.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Yes, it was, but don’t worry. I know more is expected of you than me.’

‘My grandmother married and outlived five husbands,’ Hera tries to explain. ‘And with each marriage, she gained more of our land back. She married for the betterment of her family and was pleased to do it. We each have our role to play.’

‘But at what cost?’ Annie knows for a fact that after giving birth to twelve children, Hera’s grandmother’s much-violated lady parts decided to kill her. Possibly in revenge, though self-defence could be argued.

Five husbands! All rutting away on top of her! Ugh!

During dinner, Hera seeks conversation at the top of the table rather than from Annie opposite her. This is followed by Hera sitting at the other end of the common room during the two hours of quiet time when they work on lessons, sew or read before bedtime. Coventry it is then, thinks Annie, who has spent two years watching young women wage war on each other and themselves. It’s unsettling, though. They never fall out. Her and Hera.

We’re forever.

Annie is almost asleep when Hera slips into her bed after lights out. ‘Shift over.’

‘You can’t be here. What if you get caught?’

As seniors, Annie and Hera share a room, but that doesn’t mean the matrons aren’t constantly doing bed checks throughout the night. Being caught in bed with another girl is pretty much the worst thing that can happen, and apocryphal stories abound of girls being asked to leave under an unspoken cloud that looked, smelled and tasted like sex but was probably closer to companionship.

‘I’m not leaving until you promise to come with me,’ says Hera.

‘Come where?’

‘Nurses’ training.’

‘But I don’t want to be a nurse.’

‘Does anyone?’ Hera asks with a laugh. ‘Look, we’ll probably never get to be nurses. Both of us are going to be swept off our feet and married before we know it because we’ll finally be able to meet boys without some stickybeak aunty or matron forever looking over our shoulders.’

‘I don’t think that’s any consolation,’ Annie says, shoving Hera out of her bed.

She might not have agreed that night, or the next handful after that, but eventually Hera’s will, her need for Annie to be by her side, erodes Annie’s resistance. When the day comes for them to choose, like Hera, she writes Nurse on her piece of paper and hands it to the woman from the Welfare League.

At the end of the school year, Annie fails to warrant a mention at prize-giving, so unspectacular her year and a half at Queen Victoria has been. Still. She’s there, and that’s something.

With their bags packed and prize-giving done, the Queen Vic girls say their goodbyes and disperse home for the summer. For Annie and Hera’s year, this is their final haere rā as students, so tears are shed and promises made, even though many are returning to Auckland in the new year to start training.

‘Write to me,’ Hera says at the railway station, which is chaos with all the boarding schools releasing their charges into the wild on the same day. Annie is going north, and Hera south.

‘I will,’ Annie promises. ‘I really will.’ She wonders how on earth she will survive without Hera.

‘I’ve got to go.’ Hera gives Annie one last hug before joining the throng heading towards the platform where the southern train waits. Annie watches until Hera has disappeared on board before walking to the other end of the station, where the northbound passengers, mostly school pupils, wait.

Before Christmas, Hera and Annie both receive letters saying they’ve been accepted into the next nurses’ training intake in the new year and have been allocated accommodation in the Hepburn Street Hostel in Freemans Bay.

—

Annie lasts at home with Kaa until just after Christmas. At the Christmas dance at the Kāingaroa Hall, Annie catches the eye of a man, and vice versa, which doesn’t go unnoticed by her mother. He’s one of the Urlich boys. He and his siblings attended the local primary school at the same time as Annie’s sister Caro, who is twelve years older than Annie.

So, he’s old enough to know better than to chase a girl who’s not yet eighteen.

The day after the dance, Kaa corners Annie in the kitchen and begins the third degree. ‘He’s too old for you, you know.’

‘Oh, Mum,’ sighs Annie. ‘He’s only a friend.’

But Kaa’s not buying it. Not a bit of it. Annie knows her mother will be awake half the night, listening for the squeak of a bedroom window opening or the groan of a tired floorboard beneath a bare foot. She imagines Kaa transforming into a gigantic vengeful bird, alighting on the Urlich boy-who-is-really-a-man, her talons closing around his throat as she pecks out his eyes, then his heart, with her razor-sharp, curved beak.

With the Te Hāpua branch of the family having come down for Christmas, Kaa takes the opportunity on Boxing Day morning to send Annie with them on their return so Bird can keep her under claw and beady eye.

Te Hāpua: the northernmost huddle of habitation in all of Aotearoa. Annie feels the gravitas in that. Ngāti Kurī country. There’s a marae, an urupā, a beautiful Rātana temple with its two dome-roofed towers topped with the crescent moon and five-point star, a school and a wharf from the gum-digger days, with houses in between, strung along the shoreline like strands of Neptune’s necklace. Not all are inhabited, not anymore. Not now the young ones are drifting south, looking for work … and excitement and everything Annie craves. There are no pubs or parties in Te Hāpua. There’re still children here, though, sent home by their parents to live with their koros and nannies, who can feed them now there’s a government pension, and time and room to hoe a vegetable garden and keep a few chooks.

12 January 1951

Dear Hera,

Te Hāpua is as boring as it was the last time Mum packed me off to Nanny Bird’s. Nanny Bird’s working me to death of course because she always does. Up here I am everybody’s slave it seems.

There’s nothing for Annie to do when Bird isn’t ordering her around, except to read and reread the stack of foxed paperback romance novels that her grandmother has accumulated over the years and continue to write long letters full of not very much to Hera, who doesn’t write back.

So here I am, still stuck in Te Hāpua being Nanny Bird’s servant. It’s so unfair. It’s dig the kūmara patch, do the washing, go and clean the kitchen at the marae. She even made me start splitting and stacking her firewood. Though the worst job has to be rubbing her feet and cutting her horrible old toenails. They’re like the moa claws we saw at the museum. If I end up being a nurse who looks after old people, I’m going to die. And it will be your fault because we could have become switchboard girls.

The tasks are endless, but even cowed as she is by Bird, Annie draws a line in the sand the day Bird tries to bully her into dragging the bloated corpse of a dead lamb from the side of the road. Bird wants it to rot down in her beloved compost pile. This is sand country, so without compost her vegetable garden would be but an echo of its productive, carefully tended self. Years, perhaps decades, of decay in the vegetable beds’ soil is supplemented each spring and autumn.

Annie looks at the fly-blown carcass being eaten by maggots, reeking in the heat of another summer’s day in paradise. ‘No,’ she says, crossing her arms. ‘Not doing it.’

‘You’ll do as you’re told.’

‘No. I won’t. And you can’t make me.’

Bird chuckles. ‘All right then. I’ll get one of the boys to do it.’

After that, Bird goes fractionally into retreat in her offensive on Annie. She keeps Annie busy, but the constant jabs and snide comments abate. By the end of summer, with Annie’s departure imminent, Bird’s even patting her on the hand and telling her what a good girl she is.

‘You go and be a nurse, hey. Make your family proud. And marry a doctor. A nice Pākehā one who’ll treat you right and buy you some land.’

‘I’ll try my best.’

‘And then you come back here and look after our people.’

‘Yes, Nanny.’

Not on your life. Once I’m out of here, I’m gone.

‘Good girl,’ Bird continues. ‘I’ll leave you this house in my will.’ Fortunately, Bird interprets the expression of horror on Annie’s face as delighted surprise.

In the final week of February, Kaa arrives unannounced in a borrowed Bedford truck to pick Annie up. While Bird and Kaa visit the urupā, Annie packs her bag and repays her grandmother for her manaaki by stealing half a dozen of her novels. The next day, she climbs into the truck cab with Kaa, and they bump and rattle down the long finger of sand that divides the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean, back to Kaa’s place.

‘Nanny Bird threatened to leave me her house in her will.’

Kaa hoots with laughter. ‘We’ve all been left it at one stage or another.’

Annie starts laughing too. ‘Well, that’s a relief. I don’t want to live in Te Hāpua. It’s the most boring place on earth.’

Annie spends a single night at home with Kaa, who has booked her daughter a seat on the bus south. Kaa presses a £10 note into Annie’s hand as they wait at the end of the driveway.

‘Look after yourself, Annie.’

‘Oh, Mum.’

‘I mean it. This is a good opportunity for you. I know there’s no point telling you to keep away from boys. Just be careful. Don’t go giving it away to anyone who asks or tells you you’re pretty. Because that’s what men do.’

Annie tosses her head. ‘For goodness’ sake.’

‘And steer clear of the mean ones,’ continues Kaa. ‘Because those buggers, they’ll never change. Making you unhappy is what makes them happy.’

Nurse’s watch designed to be pinned upside down on the breast, c. 1940s

Private collection, Annie Devich

Annie loves the way newborns smell: the magical exhalation of milk, soap and the yeastiness of proving dough. Babies