I came over a mound which overlooked the slope where they were working – Dad, Grandfather, and several uncles from across the creek. On the flat there was a fire going, also a sledge with wood piled on it. I could see that my cousin Noddy had the job of salvaging any good wood from the pulled-out stumps to put on the sledge. The men were stripped down to trousers and boots – though not all had footwear – and if it hadn’t been for what I knew about the different shapes and sizes of my relatives as I drew near I would not have been able to tell one from another. They were covered top to bottom in fire-black.

I went closer and stood at a short distance from my father.

‘Dad,’ I said. ‘I’ve left school now.’

None of the men had stopped working when they saw me coming. Except for Dad they didn’t stop now, though it was easy to see that Grandfather and others nearby were listening to what I had to say. My father stood straight and looked at me, waiting for me to go on.

‘I don’t go to school any more,’ I told him. ‘I’ve learned enough.’

His head moved to one side a little. He was looking at me as though I were a stranger, his eyes set in his blackened face, sweeping me, beginning from my toes and moving slowly upward. ‘Stranger’ is the wrong word. He was looking at me as though at someone new, as though I had become somebody different he hadn’t noticed before.

‘Thank you, Son,’ he said after what seemed a long time of standing still eyeing me.

I noticed that Paa was smiling at the stump he was working on, whacking a spade through the clinging roots of it. This was not one of Grandfather’s big-grin smiles, just a wrinkling upwards of his smeared face that didn’t let any of the teeth show.

My father handed me the lever he’d been using. It was his way of letting me know that he understood I could do a man’s job now, or perhaps it was his way of telling me I had to do men’s work now and that there was no going back to childhood. Whatever it was, I felt honoured that this implement had been put in my hands.

The lever was a good, strong mānuka pole, hewn to a blunt point at one end. I was to push this down beneath the severed roots and work it back and forth until the stump came free. My father took the spade from Grandfather, who straightened his back and took his pipe from his pocket. I discarded my school shirt and began work.