Now, to return to our visit. We were called on to the marae and, once seated, the speech-making began, alternating between hosts and visitors. Paa, the ear-holder of my boyhood, was the final speaker for the host side. As it happened, the sun was sinking on this occasion, too, beyond the valley, the town and the distant ocean. My Hawaiian family were at once alerted when they heard the names that connected them in time and place with my home family, we of Aotearoa being junior to those left behind in ‘the great, far-distant, etched-on-the-heart, longed-for homeland of Hawaiki’. Beside me, so still it was as though he didn’t breathe, was old man ‘A‘makualenalena.

Though Paa had been the ear-holder when I was a child, this was the first time I had ever heard him doing the recitations himself, ranging far and wide, down, out and along the many branches, to connect our home family to my Hawaiian family. He was the only one left of my home family who could do this now.

‘Except for you,’ said Moonface into my heart. ‘You had your ear held, remember?’

In the field next to the meeting house, the big marquee had been erected. We were taken there for a meal after the formal proceedings, and then back to the wharenui for further speeches and opportunities for the two families to get to know one another.

Something unexpected happened during that time.

I want to talk about Noddy. This cousin was three years older than me, someone I looked up to as I was growing. At fourteen, he sheared his first sheep, and a few years later he was as good a shearer as anyone I knew, including his father and mine. He knew how to kill, skin and butcher a sheep at an early age, how to hunt pigs, for which he trained his own dogs. During the first years of the war, when many others left the land to find work in the cities, and other young men enlisted, he put his back into the land and the market-gardening ventures. He, too, spoke of going to war, but was persuaded that he was needed at home – not so much persuaded as told.

Finally, however, he did enlist, going off to fight in the islands of the Pacific. I met up with him once in Suva, but it was not long afterwards that he became a prisoner of war and I didn’t see him again until he came home.

But this Noddy who returned to us was not the same man who had left us a year earlier.