‘All this time my husband had been in Tokyo, but I didn’t know it. The girls were growing. They worked alongside me. My ambition for them was higher education. Their father would come home, not only to a new house, gardens and good businesses, but to educated daughters. I was determined that they would go in to the professions, medical or legal. Either that or they would run their own enterprises. They would marry educated men, professionals like your father, Grandson, or men well on their way up the ladder.

‘I had other ambitions too.’ Oriwia stood. ‘But right now I’ve got to go and get ready for tomorrow.’

Something I was used to doing by now was helping my grandmother to set loaves, prepare pies, and make myself useful cleaning down benches and wiping out ovens over at the bakery.

‘I’ll do these dishes and come over,’ I said.

‘Bring your notebook and follow me around,’ she said. ‘I want to keep on talking. About the ambitions. I have to be honest and say that all of what I’ve been telling you, about waiting for Chappy, wanting this and that for Chappy to come home to, might not have been quite … Well, maybe I really wanted these things for myself. Maybe it was nothing to do with Chappy, though I told myself it was. Not that I didn’t miss Chappy. I did want him back. But I had plenty to occupy me in the meantime.’

I thought my grandmother was going off on a tangent when, once into the swing of dough making, she began talking about the Krauss family and their misfortunes.

Mrs Krauss died a few years after the war ended, Grandmother told me. She was Harry’s second wife and Dulcie was their daughter. Harry and his first wife had come to New Zealand from Germany when Herman and Kurt were small boys, but the first Mrs Krauss had died as a result of a fall three years after their arrival.

After Harry and his sons were taken to prison, Dulcie and her mother shut the doors of the garage, the taxi disintegrated in the yard and, with Mrs Krauss in poor health, the two of them struggled to keep the bakery going. It was not just the absence of the men that made life hard; the people of the town had turned against them. Abuse was hurled through the bakery doorway, unfriendly messages were painted on the closed doors of the garage and its side windows were smashed by thrown rocks.