Oriwia still looked after the shop and did the baking, but much of her time was now spent on the books, adding and deducting, watching people’s debts reduce, putting in her orders and, little by little, paying off her own creditors.

A year after their marriage, their daughter Daphne was born, and a year later came another daughter, Virginia, known to everyone as Binnie. By then, Oriwia and Chappy had decided to pull down the old house and shop and use the timber and corrugated iron to build a new house and a vegetable stand on the roadside property given to them by Paa.

The land was more than they needed for the little house and veggie stall. Behind the house they planted fruit trees. Taana and Chappy fenced off a paddock and put sheep there, enough to keep them all in meat from season to season.

‘That house we built,’ Oriwia said, ‘you wouldn’t call it a house these days. Just one big room to live in and an open veggie stand out front. Fruit as well as vegetables. But we did have a wooden floor in the new place. There were plenty of homes those days had only a dirt floor. And oh, you know, it was watertight and comfortable and we were happy there.’

Once war began there was a demand for fresh produce. Oriwia and Chappy soon found it difficult to keep up supplies. Adding to the problem of supply was a diminishing workforce as young men left the land to go off and fight. Other men and many women went to work in the cities, in the clothing mills and munitions factories.

The home gardens were left mainly to older people – Paa and Nunu, Taana and Dorothea, uncles and aunts. They needed Chappy’s help. He would leave the vegetable stall to Oriwia and make the eight-k journey each day to work in the gardens, setting out early on his bike, his repair kit wrapped in canvas. Chappy and his bike became a familiar sight going back and forth through the township, sometimes bringing home a load of bamboo, held on his shoulder.

‘Grandson,’ Oriwia said, ‘the main reason he built that bike was because he didn’t get on with horses. I didn’t know that it was this same bike that was going to take my Chappy away from me.