His parents, Maraea and Tere Terewi, milked cows on their 40-hectare farm, and, as was common practice in those days, the children helped. They also walked a considerable distance to school every morning, and, when time allowed, made their own entertainment. Sliding down the steep hill across Whangape Road was one youthful pleasure Pike was looking forward to enjoying again, although Sandra seemed unlikely to join him.
Pike left home in 1955, at the age of 12, to further his education at St Paul's College in Auckland. He left early, he said, to earn a living by doing "all sorts," until 1963. Those were the Teddy Boy days, when police officers didn't mind offering sound advice when they encountered potentially wayward young men. One such policeman advised Pike to join one of the services or go to jail. He chose the Army.
That career lasted 25 years, during which time he rose to the rank of Warrant Officer Class 1, was appointed Regimental Sergeant Major, and served in Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam. He was also involved in the retrieval of bodies from the 1979 Mt Erebus disaster, on behalf of the Army.
He became a highly competent driving instructor (which didn't save him from a speeding ticket some 20 years ago), a qualified parachutist and air dispatcher.
His military training has left its mark on him - Sandra was happy to attest to his undiminished passion for a high degree of organisation - Pike saying he had left the military but the military had not left him. And he had no difficulty recalling all sorts of detail.
One Sergeant Toto Thompson, now living in Kaitaia, was the first to formally charge him with a breach of protocol, confining him to barracks for seven days in Malaya in 1963 after he broke out of camp without his ID card.
Meanwhile Pike and Sandra met in Wellington, where he was the RSM at Trentham and she was tutoring prison officers. The latter did not have a mess of their own, and plans were made for them to use the Army NCOs', a proposal that occasioned a visit by Sandra to Trentham.
RSM Terewi rebuked her for not wearing her full uniform, Sandra replying with a comment that suggested she was not especially interested in his views, Pike deciding on the spot that "she was my kind of woman".
Sandra has since received the Queen's Service Medal for services to the community, her extensive CV including management of a community law centre in Wanganui, a time as president of Prisoners' Aid, chairing the Schizophrenia Fellowship, chairing Safe and Free (an organisation working with sex abuse victims), providing her legal expertise to a number of Maori organisations and chairing the Community Organisations Grants Scheme (COGS) for six years.
Pike first showed Sandra the Far North in 1987, and when he was discharged from the Army the following year they bought a business in Wanganui. In 1993, asked what he wanted for his 50th birthday, he said he would like to get married.
"Who to?" Sandra asked. "You, he replied." They did, on June 12, which makes it very easy for him to remember their anniversary.
Sandra has stories of her own to tell, including that her mother worked for Winston Churchill at the family's summer home, and as an upstairs maid at 10 Downing Street.
"We received a telegram from Winston and Clementine when she died," she said. All a very long way from a family home on Whangape Road and declining an invitation to slide down steep hills.
