Besides asking Jimmy to take the children back to her village, his wife instructed him that if she died he was to remain there. He was to sell some of her land and put the money into a general store. ‘You’re a trader, not a farmer, Jimmy,’ she said. His wife died a month later, and a year after that Jimmy began trading out of a hastily built storage shed next door to a blacksmith’s. With the help of others, he sawed timber and stored corrugated iron to build a house. Oriwia was five and Moana-Rose three by the time they moved away from Dorothea and Taana’s with their few belongings, which included a small suitcase of their mother’s things that had been delivered to Jimmy after his wife’s death.

Now, Moana-Rose said it again. ‘Tell me about our mother. The blue dress.’

Oriwia laughed. ‘Sister, you know I made it all up. We found out what she looked like, didn’t we, once we opened the suitcase? There was the wedding photo wrapped in brown paper. There was no blue dress.

‘Not that the photo was taken on her wedding day. There weren’t any wedding photos, but at some time later when a photographer came to the area wanting Māori subjects to photograph, the people dressed her up in her wedding gown and put her in front of the camera. You know all this, my sister.’

‘Well, tell me about the suitcase.’

‘Nineteen twenty. I was nine and you were seven when Dad gave us the suitcase to open. In it were the embroidered cloths, the photo and the notebook. Although the notebook had the word ‘Recipes’ written on it, what was inside were mainly notes, anecdotes and hints to do with cooking and the kitchen.

‘They were stories about how Aunty Pahemata went about making her blood pudding, beginning from the catching of blood from the throat of a pig, or about how Mrs Calder achieved a perfect set and colour to her quince jelly. There were hints on how to prepare a cloth for a boiled pudding and what a difference a pinch of baking soda could make to tough meat. There were variations on queen cakes and three different fruit-cake recipes with information on what made one suitable for a christening, another for Christmas and a third for a wedding. All sorts of things, my sister, which you already know about. Our mother’s basic recipes, I figured out later, were actually in her head.’