sister Dorothy, who obtained a job as secretary with the Tokyo YWCA. She was a delightful girl, ten years Mother’s junior, who had driven ambulances in France in the First World War. I have a lovely photo of her with kimono-clad one-year-old me (see pl. 5), taken in June amongst the hydrangeas of our garden just four months before the Great Kanto Earthquake which took place on 1 September 1923.
CHAPTER 5
The Great Kanto Earthquake
AUNTIE DOROTHY DID not have to work that Saturday morning of 1 September, but the YWCA telephoned and asked her to go in by tram to the Yokohama post office to send an important cable to their headquarters in America. Apparently, at the post office she met a YWCA colleague, who was there to pick up a fruit cake her mother had sent her for her birthday, by sea mail from the USA. Edith Lacy was a very young widow. Apparently, the two girls then took a rickshaw to a new confectionery shop called Meidi-ya (still spelt that way although it is pronounced Meiji-ya!). They may possibly have wanted to buy some chocolates for Edith’s birthday, as well as for a tea party Dorothy had planned for some Tokyo colleagues that afternoon. But just as they got to the Main Street shop, the shaking began, and the rickshaw man, his vehicle and two passengers were crushed beneath the tons of heavy masonry of that handsome modern building. It would be weeks before my father finally found their remains.
Having estimated that a big earthquake was due, Frank had carefully studied the effects of small ones. He had particularly noted their whiplash effect on a brick wall. So he had strengthened his factory walls, buildings and chimneys with steel bolts and bands, as well as the chimney of his home so it would not fall and injure the neighbours.
I was only sixteen months old when the earthquake struck. Frank and Alice had originally been planning to leave Yokohama that morning on a sort of delayed honeymoon in the mountains of Hakone. However, the previous night, after dining with friends at the illfated Cherry Mount Hotel, situated part way down a road called Sakura-yama (cherry-tree hill), leading from The Bluff towards the Motomachi shopping street below, they were sipping their coffee and liqueurs on the terrace facing away from the harbour towards the hills. Suddenly, a strange phenomenon caught Frank’s attention: he witnessed bolts of peculiar ‘upward lightning’ coming from the ground and branching out into the sky, like trees. It worried Frank so much that he insisted they leave, although it was still early. At home, their bags were already packed and ready at the front door for the early morning start they intended to make, but fortunately he cancelled the planned trip.
Next day, Saturday, Frank Britton and Tom Chisholm, his Scottish accountant, were together in the office having closed the safe early, a little before twelve. Noon was the normal time for closing safes, and consequently most companies lost all their documents. Frank said: ‘When the earthquake comes that is going to destroy Yokohama, I propose that we hang onto the gantry crane. The stairs will go, but the crane will stand.’ The words were no sooner out of his mouth than the shaking began, with a great roaring, at exactly two minutes to twelve. ‘I didn’t know it was coming so soon,’ said Chisholm, ‘I’m going down the stairs while they last.’ Frank lost faith in his own plan and followed suit, more or less thrown down the stairs, for it was impossible to stand. Once down, they could only crawl. At the gate Frank turned and saw that a cornice had landed over their path like a protective cover from the flying debris, placed by a guardian angel. They carried on across the road to Frank’s house and stood up, facing each other. ‘There goes Yokohama!’ said Frank looking across Tom Chisholm’s shoulder at the great cloud of dust enveloping the city. ‘And there goes Yokosuka!’ said Tom, looking in the opposite direction. In spite of his slight limp, Chisholm hurried off on foot towards Negishi and The Bluff to see what had happened to his wife and young son. They were killed, and his home demolished.
Frank went into our house to see if Alice and the baby were all right. Alice had been in the kitchen where the stove had broken apart, setting fire to the tea-towels hanging above it. They put out the fire as soon as she and the cook could stand, and Alice struggled up the stairs to the nursery, which was a shambles, with heavy globs of wall plaster jumbled in a heap where the baby’s high chair had been. To her great relief she heard the voice of Kin-san, my nanny: ‘We’re here Madam, under the bed.’ Kin-san told Alice she could see out into the garden as the space between walls and floor kept opening and shutting. The frame of the house had stood, thanks to Frank’s reinforcing. As aftershocks kept coming, Alice’s first words to Frank were a frantic, ‘Find sister Dorothy!’ as Frank disappeared.
There was a strong wind, and soon Alice was aware of an ominous crackling as a high wall of smoke and flames headed their way. It was terrifying, and she wondered if it was the end of the world. Fires had broken out all over the city. It was lunchtime, and thousands of broken charcoal-burning stoves had set the wooden houses alight. After what seemed an age, the wall of fire miraculously stopped advancing. Eventually, Frank returned, exhausted, clothes singed and reeking of smoke, too tired to explain. It transpired that as a result of Frank’s courageous example and efforts, the fire had been brought under control and finally put out after only fifty houses had burned. He had climbed up himself onto burning roofs and organized bucket brigades with water from the nearby canal, and they had managed to demolish enough houses to make a wide path across which the fire could not leap.
Almost the whole of Yokohama burned to the ground, but thanks to Frank, Isogo was saved, and became a place of refuge for thousands. Later, the grateful citizens got together a petition to have his efforts appropriately recognized, but he was so modest that he stopped them, saying, ‘I did no more than any Englishman would do.’
After spending a few nights in the garden, rushing into the house in between aftershocks to get necessities, they decided to try and leave. Frank hired a fisherman to row him and Mother and Kin-san and me around the headland of Honmoku into Yokohama harbour, where several steamships were standing by. The P&O Dongola was just about to weigh anchor. Frank called up to a man in the bow: ‘Can you take us aboard?’ They agreed, and we managed to climb up the remaining narrow gangway. We found that it was mostly the badly injured foreigners who were on board, but Alice’s sister was not among them. Frank had hoped against hope to find her there. Landing at Kobe, Frank settled us at the Miyako Hotel, in Kyoto, and returned to Yokohama by train with medical supplies and food for his men. He quickly got the factory going again so that the workmen could have employment. He also persuaded the Japanese navy to bring up timber by destroyer from Shizuoka, and with this he organized the speedy building of a temporary British Consulate.
Frank never stopped looking for his sister-in-law. After weeks of harrowing and gruesome search, he finally found her unrecognizable remains – with those of her friend Edith Lacy – crushed flat together in the rickshaw under tons of masonry, identifiable only by Alice’s bank book and Edith’s hat, which were found nearby. The two girls are buried together in the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery, and since war’s end the YWCA have held an annual memorial service at their grave on 1 September.
For those weeks after the earthquake, mother and toddler and nanny found comfort in beautiful, historical Kyoto, where famed missionary, Mary Florence Denton, one of the founders of Doshisha College, and its first president, so kindly took us under her wing. During that time, Frank, together with the now widowed Tom Chisholm, lived in our house, shaken but standing, which they shared with a contingent of military police – kempeitai – on security duty in view of the nearby prison whose criminals had escaped, and the spreading, though unfounded, rumours of rioting Koreans.
CHAPTER 6
Hayama
WHEN MY NANNY Kin-san – whom I called Ten-ten – and Mother and
