However, it wasn’t all straightforward after Oriwia and Paa tidied up the site and she took her cart there. The farmer leasing the adjoining land thought that his entitlement included Paa’s land and had been grazing cattle there. He came and asked her to move, and when she refused, he arrived with the policeman, Gary Couper, who seemed embarrassed. He’d been to school with Oriwia. The matter was eventually settled in a council office when the plans were produced and proved Paa to be right. The farmer withdrew his opposition under Paa’s threat to charge him for many years of free grazing.

Gradually people’s shop debts lessened, but this was not entirely due to Oriwia’s enterprise. As Dulcie had predicted, times were becoming better and contract work easier to come by. Pākehā farmers were able to obtain finance for developing their land, which enabled them to employ Māori who were not.

It wasn’t long after Oriwia set up in the new site that her father died.

After his death, loneliness was like a needle that entered somewhere at the base of her throat, was how she described it, a rod of steel piercing heart, lungs, stomach – bleeding them.

It was about eighteen months later that the world returned Aki to them. It was the first time he’d been home since he’d come bringing Chappy with him. One day, Oriwia asked him if he remembered the day she’d told him she didn’t want to marry him, and that muscle on the other side of the world was of no use to her.

‘You see, we’d had this understanding since he first proposed to me out of the side of his mouth during arithmetic one morning at school, when he was ten and I was going on for twelve,’ Oriwia said. ‘In our own language of course, even though it was strictly forbidden at school. But Aki would never speak English apart from Yes Sir, No Sir, Thank you Sir and when he had to read aloud from a class book. He hardly spoke at all, only surreptitiously to one of us. “We should get married one day,” he said. “All right,” I replied in English, “don’t forget.” I always thought he should have asked Moana-Rose, who was the same age as him, and prettier than me.

‘Grandson,’ Oriwia said to me as she locked the shop door and we set off along the road to the house, ‘you should’ve seen his face. His mouth was lopping open and popping shut as if he were blowing smoke rings. He thought I was about to hold him to our childhood agreement. “Well I still don’t,” I told him. “I still don’t want to marry you, but I do want to marry Chappy. You have to go and ask him for me.”’