Grandmother, armed with a chocolate cake, took me to meet this uncle, who lived about eight kilometres up a gravel road in the middle of a forest. There was an old weatherboard house there. It was without electricity and running water. He had one tank to catch rainwater, which piped into the kitchen, and another that provided water into the wash-house, an old shed at the back of the house. Cooking was done on a wood stove in the kitchen, or sometimes over a fireplace in the yard.

Aki was seventy-one, tall and thin. He hadn’t always been bony, my grandmother said, but she mentioned that he’d always been stubborn, ‘hard in the head’ was how she put it. When we arrived he made a pot of tea and cut the chocolate cake into large pieces.

He was pleased to be asked to talk about my grandfather, whom he referred to as his brother. We arranged that I would visit him later in the week, and he agreed that I could bring a tape recorder with me.

My grandmother complained about him all the way home. ‘He’s silly,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t have to live like that, stuck up in the bush all by himself, patching up his roof, chopping wood, making bread, growing corn so he can feed his pig. You have to move on in life. It’s not as though he hasn’t seen the world.’

There were things I had to do before I could begin my interviews. I needed a car and a recorder. Oriwia advised me to buy overalls, a Swanndri and gumboots. ‘It’s no use wearing good clothes up there,’ she said. It turned out to be good advice. I spent more time out of doors mucking in than I did recording.

Grandmother and I went to Wellington by train. I soon found a car that I liked and went shopping for what I needed. The reason Grandmother had insisted on coming with me was she knew I’d never driven on the left side of the road before. Also I didn’t have a New Zealand driver’s licence, which she said wouldn’t matter round the small town where she lived, but to be without it in the city could mean trouble. I took her word for it. She’d left her tearoom in charge of farmer friend, Dulcie.

Arriving at the house on the arranged day, I set up the recorder and sat down at the table opposite Uncle Aki with my notebook and pen. I had a list of questions, which I didn’t get to ask because when I pressed ‘record’, and before I’d had time to draw breath, Aki began talking.

He spoke four sentences in English – intriguing sentences they were, too – before breaking into a language that I never remembered hearing before. There were two words I recognised as he continued. He ran them together. They were ‘moon’ and ‘face’.