After Grandmother Oriwia and I finished looking through the photographs, we returned to the house and, while I was standing on the stool returning the album to its place on top of the wardrobe, Oriwia asked me to pass down a cardboard shoebox tied with green ribbon. I found it – though the only green left on the ribbon was in the knot where the bow was tied – and handed it down to her. ‘We’ll look through it when there’s time,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’ll be of interest if you can make head or tail of any of it.’ She placed the box on the cabinet beside her bed.

A week or so went by, and one Sunday morning we took the box out to the garden, where my grandmother opened it, explaining to me that all the time Grandfather Chappy had been making his garden, he’d been communicating with a landscape professional in Japan. It was someone he’d known, who had grown up with him in his village and who was from a family that was expert in the making of gardens. ‘Apparently you can’t just make gardens any old how in Japan,’ Oriwia said. ‘I had told Chappy “let it be you, let it be you”, thinking of flowers.’ She flung her arms. ‘So all this is what he came up with. It’s himself, his expression of love. For always. His secret self, a discretion of flowers, perfumed and not perfumed. Some of it is his own interpretation, depending on what trees were available.’

During the war the garden-maker’s family had been displaced from their village. Chappy met his friend again in his travels after the war and so knew how to contact him. That’s all Grandmother knew.

In the box was a pile of letters and addressed envelopes interspersed with drawings. The drawings, I could see, were of the garden or sections of it, with little notes written here and there. It was the notes and letters, none of which I could decipher, which gave me heartbeats in my head as I realised they could be the link to the early life of my grandfather.

Standing, with a bunch of pages clutched so tightly in my hand it’s a wonder they didn’t disintegrate, I experienced a moment of self-definition, epiphany. I knew right there, right then, that I would make contact with the master gardener or his family, that I would spend time learning the Japanese language, and that I would continue to research the life of my grandfather. It could take years, but I knew I would return at intervals to present my findings to the people. I would discover the origins, find a life, the first half of a life of a man who would nevertheless remain in the shadows. Kei te pai.

‘You look like a stunned mullet,’ my grandmother said. ‘Sit down before you conk.’

‘I’m going to Japan,’ I said.