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wasn’t there. He reappeared after about an hour with a trout in one hand, freshly caught, and an eel in the other.
    He said, “We had a visitor in the night.” He showed me where a morepork had alighted on one of the poles and inspected us in the small hours as we slept, then swept down grazing his brow as it flew off. “It was a messenger,” he said.
    “What did it mean?” I said. He didn’t explain that either.
    Isaac was not an educated man. He was twenty-one he told me before he learned to speak English. His first English sentence was, “I must not speak Maori.” At fourteen he was apprenticed to a timber mill; since then he had gone from one job to another, hence the nickname Go-Go. Even though he had lived as a young man only a short ride from town, he had not seen the inside of a shop or of a white man’s house until he was married. His, like mine, was a talking culture and it was only later, thinking about some hints and taunts he let drop that I understood his wailing as a lament for the dispossession of his people. Much of the land we walked over and slept on, linked to his birthright, had been alienated by successive Acts of Parliament; still more land in other valleys had been stolen through sales enforced by government men, using the tactics of intimidation which would later be perfected on the African continent by a man called Robert Mugabe. Walking out ofthe valley, Isaac dropped a few hints. That was all. He was without guile or self pity. He knew I would piece things together later in my own way.
    What remains for me is less a sense of grievance on Isaac’s part than a sense of the strangeness of it all. Sitting out with him on the porch that last night, our faces etched in a pool of yellow candlelight, I remember thinking to myself: I am being initiated into a mystery that will remain for me a mystery. It is said that one sees most by candlelight, because one sees little. But there is a magic circle. In it all things shine. Although I failed to penetrate the circle and came away that night understanding very little, afterwards whenever I came in contact with Isaac’s people, in schools and factories and on farms or in their small houses painted in bright colours, I found myself regarding them differently. I no longer saw them as belonging to a white man’s world. Perhaps that was when I first began to think of myself as someone like them, as an alien. I think Isaac’s grandfather was wrong when he said the hardest thing in life is to survive. I think the hardest thing may be to stay alive and feel like a stranger in your own land.
     
    Isaac, you may think, is a digression. But even psychologists must be allowed their foibles. We cannot be expected always to stick to the point. Isaac said to me once, “I can never leave this place. Even if I was on the moon, I would still be living here.” Which brings me back to Huey and his father. Isaac would have despised Huey’s father.

FOUR
    I SPENT TWO very happy years in Cornford. I only got there because of a man I met in the Navy, Lieutenant-Commander Fox. Hubert Fox taught me to navigate. But more important than that he introduced me to books. He used to do book reviews for a London journal on the long voyages at sea. I didn’t know what a book review was. There were no books in my mother’s house, no room for books. We lived in a two-up, two-down, by the London docks, with a little scullery attached. My father was an unemployed dock labourer. My mother could read. My father couldn’t. My maternal grandparents couldn’t read either. I don’t know when I began to covet books and admire literary people. My parents brought home a book from the market once for my birthday, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. It was miles over myhead. As I say, I didn’t know what a book review was until I joined the Navy. Hubert Fox introduced me to Alexander Dumas— The Count of Monte Christo— and Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad and many other authors I had