At the same time as the kids were swinging the first gate open, adults had also received the message, radiating out from the air round Jimmy Shop’s store, that Aki was home, and began deciding what they would take to the party. Mostly it would be fry bread, old-man bread, baked eel or rabbit stew. But as soon as the men had gone, Oriwia, an expert baker of cakes, opened the door of the wood range and put her hand inside to test the temperature for duck-egg sponges.

As my grandmother was recounting this – mostly not on tape – she was actually re-enacting the scene of more than forty years earlier. That is, she was mixing sponge cakes but using hen eggs rather than duck eggs. Not that she was doing this to enhance her telling, not at all. It was coincidence. She was making up an order for a reception tea down at the hall and already had trays of butterfly cakes, fruit and vanilla squares, louise cake and ginger drops out on the benches cooling. I was taking notes and jotting my own observations for writing up later, but hoping to catch snippets on tape as she moved about. That was the best I could do. She’d already told me not to expect her ‘to talk to that thing’. Grandmother Oriwia has live eyes like bronze bees.

Also she has a man’s strength and a broad body. The arm that now beat sugar and eggs in a bowl with a wooden spoon was strongly muscled under a meaty surround. Halfway through the flogging, a pinch of salt went in without pause, and soon the mixture was creamy – full of fluff and air.

Flour and raising agent snowed down from a sifter while the spatula folded it into the egg mixture – under and over in large pearly waves. It poured with satisfying silkiness into prepared baking tins and, opening the oven door carefully so as not to allow heat to disperse, Oriwia placed the tins on the middle rack.

On that long-ago morning, the cakes came from the oven high and porous. Oriwia spread them first with jam, then with cream, which she had skimmed and whipped up from the previous day’s milking. After lifting her father into the cart and seating him on a palliasse that had been placed there, she clicked the horse and set out for the home of Taana and Dorothea, Aki’s parents.

The outdoor fires had been boosted under mutton stew. Women in floral or palmy sarongs, handed out to them from Aki’s swag and which they had tied over the top of their dresses, were dancing like Islanders. Aki was strumming a ukulele and trying to sing up high like an Islander. Singing, drinking, laughing, shouting and thumping of feet continued as Oriwia rode up. Paa and Aki left the yard to lift Jimmy and his mattress down from the cart.