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the farmsteads and orchards and tall king willows, the slashes of macrocarpa against the maples and claret ash staining the sky. It was autumn when I arrived.
    “This is a land of wonders,” I wrote in my diary (me, who had never seen the sea or a mountain until the war when I was evacuated to Devon). To Tom I wrote about a hinterland filled with the resinous smell of trees and the crackling sound of the wings of strange birds with hatched markings. I described fields of maize in the valleys and vistas of white pine cheek by jowl with wooden houses painted in many colours. “If you ever come out here,” I told my brother, “you will wonder why our Pommie forebearsplanted oaks in straight lines, now trimmed to shoulder height like bare-legged soldiers in kilts, and God help your nuts if you get chased over a barbed-wire fence by a Maori pig.”
    These were the days when I fancied myself as a writer. I saw mirrored around me what I had learned growing up at school in England, a model state of race relations between white man and brown man, conqueror and conquered; I knew nothing of the creeping confiscations in the Ureweras and the scorched earth policy adopted by my compatriots in the Land Wars. Since my new home was said to be a paradise without aliens or borders except for the surrounding sea and the fish in it, I accepted these truisms at face value.
    One day I drove out from Cornford to interview the parents of one of my charges, a young delinquent who had assaulted a warder and then tried to injure himself with a bicycle chain. I entered a valley I had not known existed and came to what passed for a township. I drove by a rugby field with, I swear, rising above menacing hills, the highest goalposts in the world. Wild horses skittered across the road in my path. I crossed a railway line, parked and walked up to a house once painted yellow but now overgrown by wind-shorn pines and guarded by a collection of hens and pigs and a lone calf, tethered, with an ugly gash matted with blood on its neck. Dogs barked. A girl came to the door when I knocked—she was perhaps nine or ten. But instead of the usual “Kia ora” or “I’ll get my Mum”, she turned and fled inside calling out, “Man coming!”
    Eventually a huge fellow with a baleful stare emerged on the step. He wore socks, one bright red, the other pale green, and a football jersey. He stood on the verandah, chest out, arms folded and stared past me into the hills while I explained my business. Apart from a few words tossed to someone inside, spoken in Maori, he said nothing. Finally I told him in plain English that unless he put on his shoes, pronto, and came back into town with me, his son Jack, or John, was likely to be placed in an institution. I probably said “looney bin” to make sure he understood. (We used words like that then, also wog, mick, nigger, darkie, fuzzy-top. Happy days!)
    “What’s he been up to?” the man said. And then, softening: “Has John hurt himself?” He wasn’t slow, the father.
    “He’s a good lad,” I said. We talked in the car, driving back. I discovered that the father whose name was Fred (but baptised Isaac) had been brought up by his grandparents. His son, John, had also been farmed out to a grandparent at the age of three. I told him I too had been brought up by my grandparents when I was small.
    “What do you like to be called?” I said to him. “Isaac or Fred?”
    “Go-Go. My mates call me Go-Go.”
    “I’ll stick with Isaac,” I said.
    After some fiddling on my part, the business with the son turned out well. I was able to get him off the charge of assault and sent home on bail with a form of communityservice. Isaac’s gratitude almost broke one of my ribs when he embraced me.
    “Sir, you have given me hope,” he said.
    “In what, Isaac?”
    “I don’t know, my friend. But you have given me back my son. May your blood be bottled and preserved for ever.”
    Isaac’s thanks did not end there.