So, who was this woman, this Ela? A woman keeping a man from his family, a man with obligations who would now be giving his name to illegitimate children. Struck by Hawaiian beauty, the fool. Well, it wouldn’t last. Aki was not one who could stay away from his land, his people, his language, for too long. This woman was a schemer who had taken advantage of Aki’s backwardness. Oriwia felt a resentment towards this Ela, even after Dorothea had dried her eyes and said, ‘These things happen.’

It was a Saturday. The Star Tearoom was shut for business, and while my grandmother and I were having a leisurely breakfast, she told me about Aki’s midnight phone call. Although it had been a busy week, she’d spent many hours translating the tapes from Uncle Aki. I would wake at night to hear the drone of the tape, the playback, over and over, of some sections. From her draft she had done a corrected copy, and finally handed to me perfect pages in her own fine handwriting. Although I told her that roughs were good enough for me to type up from, she would have none of that. Even the word ‘rough’ seemed to offend her, so I tried not to use it.

‘Despite what I said earlier,’ she said that morning, ‘when I complained about Aki not speaking English on your tapes, I’m now pleased he’s doing this in his own language, otherwise he wouldn’t do it half so well. Very good, aren’t they? To tell the truth, I love doing the translations. They’re full of surprises. This latest one was so interesting. Aki’s never talked before about his courtship days. Maybe he finds it easier to say things to a machine.’

I wanted to give the interviews a rest for the day. I suggested we could drive somewhere.

‘Maybe this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I’ve got shelves to wash down. Come with me and bring your notebook. As Aki said, the war came along, and that leads us back to Chappy.’

People reorganised their gardens so that they were growing what they needed for themselves with surplus for sale; they soon learned to grow extra of what sold best. Chappy worked in the gardens, too, loading up the cart once a week with goods for sale. He had now completed the bike – joining a chain, making a pair of wooden pedals, rubbing down the frame and painting it khaki. ‘That’s the colour you get, Grandson, when you mix together scraps of paint from old tins,’ Oriwia said. ‘He bought a new set of tyres and inner tubes. The bike had straight handlebars made from a piece of pipe, both ends plugged with corks from medicine bottles.’