Let me tell you about going down to the old people’s place at Waiari to look up some of the family, especially uncle Tu. You remember, he was one of old Hone Tawa’s grandsons who was living there at Waiari just before Hemi died in that motor accident. When he was up in Auckland for the Queen’s Birthday races he talked a lot to me about his young days. “Charlie,” he said, “you should come down where you people belong. You young fellers don’t keep in touch with the old folk.” But you know how it is with a job like driving the buses, you don’t get anywhere.

This stopwork in the city give me the chance, so I think now’s the time to go and visit uncle and auntie at Waiari. But it was all wrong from the kick-off. I say to the wife, “The long distance buses are still running and one takes off down the coast early. Grab the baby and let’s go.” Well you know, she says there’s the two school kids she can’t leave and she promised help with the school lunches this week and so on and so on. She’s half a Pakeha in more ways than one, if you see what I mean.

In the end I’m so mad I go alone. That’s not the Maori way where you take the family too. But that the way it goes now. I got down to Waiari pretty early in the day. Nice sunny morning and the sea looked good and I began wondering about the chance of a load of pipis and mussels, it was a great place for those. But when I tried to get my bearing, golly, it all looked somehow different. I nearly forget where the people live because last time I was down there was grandpa’s tangi, old Hone Tawa’s youngest son, and I was only a bit of a kid then. Lots of places seemed to have gone and there were a lot of new places like Pakehas live there. Looked like someone was trying to turn it into a holiday place. All used to be Maori land round the old marae.

At last I see on the little hill above the beach the old place I remember where uncle lived. Only now when I look at it it’s somehow different too, newer looking, and I see that it’s a newer place with a bit of a garden around it. Anyway, up I go and there’s a two or three year old playing on the door step and he says hullo, and then he calls out, “Mummy, there’s a man to see you.” And this young woman comes to the door.

Now as for me I can’t speak Maori, can’t even understand what they say, the old people. But there was me in the old home kainga, in the middle of Maori country, and there was this young woman that looked real Maori, so the words just came naturally. “Tenaa koe, e hine,” I said to her. I do know that greeting and a few of the old words, you see, not that I’d ever come at old Maori greetings to anyone anywhere in Auckland. But there at Waiari, my people’s kainga, it just came natural. And what do you think that young woman said, eh?

She looked puzzled. “Pardon, what did you say?” she asked, a real Kiwi accent too, not a trace of Maori. But she looked more Maori than me, and I think she don’t know one word of Maori. There was me, I look near enough Maori allowing for one or two Pakeha ancestors, and I know how to say tenaa koe and so on. She surely must have heard those Maori words sometime. It got me wondering. Anyhow, I quickly kept to good old plain English from that on.

She turns out to be the girl young nephew Henare married. She wouldn’t know me of course. But where was uncle Tu, I asked. Didn’t he live there anymore? Oh yes, she says except when he was away at his cousins’ place in Rotorua. But today he was away at work “Not the work on the farm here, eh?” “No,” she says, “the bus comes every morning at six-thirty and take the men to the Metal Industries factory in Pinewood.” He wouldn‘t be home till late—overtime.

I looked around and think well, well, well! “Tu must be getting on in years now,” I say. “Getting a bit old for hard work, eh?” “He’ll get the pension next year,” she tells me, “but now he’s got no land or anything—well, he does what he can.” I remember when I was a kid, uncle talking about his farm. I could think of him happy on the land, his own boss, eh. It’s turned out a bit tough for him.

Was I staying? Well, things weren’t the same with uncle not there, and one thing and another. “I better get back to Auckland tonight,” I said. “The stopwork’s over tomorrow and I might lose my job.”

“Oh yes,” she said, “the job. What do you do in Auckland?”

“Oh, I drive the city bus.”

“Oh,” she says, “lots of Islanders, aren’t there, driving the buses in Auckland? Lots of Islanders. The Islanders might grab your job.”

“Yes, the stopwork ends tomorrow, I better get back.”

“It’s last year since Tu had a stopwork. He might have been here to meet you if only he had a stopwork now. But he goes to work every day.”

So I just had a few more words before I go, about how things changed.

“The Pakehas want to get the seaside places,” she tells me, as I noticed. “And the government people took Tu’s land for the big tourist hotels sometime. It isn’t the same here anymore.”

Ae, it isn’t the same anymore.

So at last I said so long, maybe see you some more. And the kid shouted goodbye as I go out the yard.

Maybe you should never go back. I felt sort of sad and lonely. Down in the settlement by the beach I wondered where the old people were. Not a soul! Surely not all at factory work, or shut up in the house like Pakehas. But I see a big sprawling new motor camp where the old-timers used to sit in the sun and yarn. A cool breeze sprang up, south-east right off the sea and the sun disappeared behind clouds. There was the meetinghouse where I remembered being taken at the time of grandpa’s tangi, but of course it was shut up now, and it looked a bit more dilapidated. I felt quite cold. There was time before the bus back to Auckland so I think I’ll have a drink or two to warm me and cheer me up.

The old wooden pub’s gone and there’s this new fancy brick place for the tourist. Anyway, I go in the public bar and get me a beer. There was two middle-age Maori men at the far end of the bar and I hear them talking in Maori, but I don’t try that trick and make me feel the fool again. And there’s one or two Pakehas together. But anyway, I don’t feel much like talking to anyone. And the beer don’t cheer me or warm me. I knock back a whisky or two. But I still feel chilled and sickly. Not sick, mind you, just sickly, like I might have got on the wrong side of tapu or something like that. But cut that out, I say to myself, don’t you go getting like the old people. And anyway, bloody lot you know about tapu.

I listen to the Maori voices of the two men at the other end of the bar and try to make out what they say. But it’s no use, I understand only one or two words here and there. What it is, the sad beer or something, I don’t know, but it makes me mad when I cannot understand. In Auckland, in the big city, I never get mad when a few times I hear some man speak Maori, but here in my own home kainga, in this Maori place, in all this Maori country I am shamed that I cannot speak my people’s language, that I cannot even understand, and it makes me mad. It is because of what the Pakeha did to my father, and to all the other kids’ fathers, when they were youngsters. My father told me the teacher strapped him when he was a little boy going to school the first time, and how could he know better. The teacher strapped him, a little Maori boy, for speaking Maori, and then he made him wash out his mouth with soap and water, wash the dirty Maori off his tongue. So my father stopped speaking the Maori. And I never learn.

Golly, that cold pub give me the shivers. I stretch my nerves to understand the words of the two Maori men at the other end of the bar. What the heck! Their words flowed around and about them with a big warm friendly sound. The men look into each other’s eyes, and they laugh a bit and they put an arm around the other’s shoulder. You can tell they’re never alone and cold there in that place where the words warm the heart. Then I think of the bus load of young Maoris I drive up to a marae way up north to talk about the treaty of Waitangi—was it for good or the saddest day ever. And I begin to see what they mean. One time I never had much patience with such people, but I begin to see. They’re mad because of what they’ve lost, everyone pushing them around to turn them Pakeha, and they wake up to find what they’ve lost. And they get mad. Some things you lose, you can find them again, but other things you lose you know it’s forever, and you mourn, you tangi. And for them that’s Waitangi. And for me, the day of uncle Tu and the things dear to his heart, all lost. What the use me coming back to my people that I cannot speak to? And the young woman and her husband and kids lead another kind of life in that old place, something I don’t know of. But their talk is what I hope I’d left behind—the stopwork, factory shift, the overtime, the sack.

I wished the Auckland bus comes soon. It was all wrong the way I came down to see uncle. It was because of the stopwork, a Pakeha thing. When a man goes back to his people’s old kainga it ought to be because of a Maori thing, he mea Maori, if those the right words—you see, somewhere in the back of my head or my heart the old words kind of whisper, they keep coming up trying to get out, and give me no peace. Anyway, coming back should be because of a Maori happening—such as a tangi. Ae, a tangi for one of us departed, like grandpa when I was a little kid. Maybe it’s only death that can bring us city horis back to the heart of our people now.

Then the bus comes. I know I never see my uncle Tu again.