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CHAPTER 2

My Mother

MY MOTHER, ALICE Hiller, was born in San Francisco, granddaughter of a former Prussian count. Like Prince Chichibu in Japan, Count Johann Friedrich von Hillerscheidt was greatly distressed by the hard lives of the poor German people, and at the time of the 1840 and 1841 uprisings known as the ‘bread riots’ he tried to help them. This got Friedrich into trouble with the Prussian authorities. They banished the young nobleman and confiscated his property, which led to his emigrating to the United States of America with his family.

Johann Friedrich had studied medicine and surgery at Heidelberg University, and while serving as a surgeon to Kaiser Wilhelm in the elite Black Hussars during the Franco-Prussian Wars, he married Hortense Parisot, the daughter of the mayor of a town in Alsace Lorraine. The vineyard-owning Parisots were a noble and ancient Provençal family descended from the Counts of Toulouse.

Johann Friedrich became a US citizen in 1849, and as Dr John Frederick Hiller MD he ministered with great popularity to the gold diggers of early Nevada. His son, Dr J. Frederick Hiller Jr followed in his footsteps as a general practitioner in San Francisco, where his daughter Alice, my mother, was born. She was a motley European mixture of German, French, Dutch and Scottish, and, when she travelled abroad, she used to complain that there was never enough space on the required form in the place for ‘ethnic background’, and she used to wonder how long it would be before one could just put ‘ American’! She longed to know the details of her grandfather’s Prussian experience, but he refused to speak of the people who had angered him so much. ‘I’m American now,’ he would say in heavily accented English.

After years of gazing out across San Francisco Bay quoting to herself from Tennyson’s Ulysses: ‘My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset,’ Alice, when still quite young, had briefly visited the Philippines, and also spent a year in China with her best friend Alice Baker Richards, whose husband was working there. To join them in Chungking, she had to make a long but fascinating trip up the then magnificent Yang Tse River, which she describes in an article she wrote for the May 1918 issue of The Record, the San Francisco YWCA’s magazine, one of whose editors she was. It is entitled ‘Fifteen hundred miles on the Yangtse Kiang.’ In it she writes:

Much of the charm of China lies in the mediaeval walls which enclose so many of the cities, the gates of which are closed at sunset and opened at sunrise, with the noisy beating of tom-toms and gongs.

And she goes on to say:

In the interior of China, things are now exactly as they must have been in the time of Marco Polo, and everything seems age-old. As we neared Chunking in the province of Szechuan, we were almost in sight of the Tibetan Hills, as they call the Himalayas. In Chungking one goes about in chairs carried by four bearers. There are no streets or roads, only paths, and miles of crowded stone steps. It is bewildering to have the coolies run up a steep flight of steps, with you almost falling out of the chair backwards on your head. The flowers of Szechuan are lovely, and golden pheasants lend color to the landscape.

Alice’s interest in the Far East had already begun with her friendship with Suzu Numano, the wife of Yasutaro, the extremely handsome, Spanish-looking Consul-General of Japan. They gave wonderful parties, at which Suzu sang fascinating old traditional Japanese songs, accompanying herself on the koto, the long horizontal plucked instrument with a harp- like tone whose place in the Japanese upper-class home is like that of the parlour piano in the West. It was at one of the Numanos’ parties that Alice met Opal, a talented pianist from Texas who was studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Alice thought Opal Perkins would be just the right girl for her favourite youngest brother Stanley, so she invited her home to meet him, and to her great joy, they fell for each other and ended up getting married! Opal was a fine pianist, and often played with the city’s leading string quartet. It was thanks to her that I studied in later years with the French composer Darius Milhaud.

Alice had become interested in Chinese art, and later when she was left some money, she thought she would use it to go back to China to study. Her hidebound elder brother Henry, however, tried very hard to stop her. ‘You’re forty,’ he said, ‘and you’re obviously not going to get married, so you must put that money in the bank so that you will have something to support you in your old age.’

But Alice persisted, and her Christian Science practitioner not only prayed that God would guide her, but he also asked an American couple he knew in Yokohama to meet her ship when it stopped there for three days en route to Shanghai. The kind couple were waiting at the pier when the ship arrived, and took Alice for a drive to show her the sights, including Yokohama’s Sankei-en, the beautiful park whose name means ‘Garden of Three Glens’. On the way back, via Zenma village in Isogo on the town’s outskirts, they approached a small Western-style house, and the husband said: ‘It’s tea-time, and Mr Britton’s an Englishman. Maybe he’ll give us a cup of tea!’

‘Mr Britton’ not only gave them a cup of tea, but it was love at first sight! He had a delightful little garden, and Mother told me that when she greatly admired a bed of Canterbury Bells, he started to pick her some, then realized it had rained and they would be muddy. But Alice said ‘Oh, that’s alright, I’ll wash them,’ which touched him deeply. Frank and Alice had much in common. They were both amateur musicians, loved travel, and had read lots of the same travel books, and were getting along so famously that the couple, who lived up on The Bluff, invited Frank to join them for dinner, after which they all had fun around the piano singing while Alice played the accompaniments.

Next day was Sunday and Frank invited Alice to go for a drive to Kamakura. While they picnicked, he proposed – having known her only four hours! And before the ship sailed for Shanghai two days later, she said ‘Yes’!

Alice had to go on to Shanghai, not only because of her luggage on board, but she had been commissioned by Gumps, the well-known San Francisco gifts and home décor store, to buy some Chinese artifacts for them, and so she was obliged to carry out at least some of that commission. The early twentieth-century Chinese rosewood set of quartetto tables here in Hayama in my drawing-room, were bought by her for her new home at the same time!

Besides that, Alice had been invited to spend some time in Shanghai with her childhood friend from Alameda days, Ruth Shreve, whose husband, Benjamin Haile, was there as manager for the Far East of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. When they found she was to be married, and after Frank duly arrived, they arranged for it to take place in the English cathedral on 15 July 1920, after first registering the marriage at the British Consulate. After the service Ruth strewed white gardenia petals in front of the pair as they came down the cathedral aisle. ‘It was beautiful,’ wrote Alice as well as describing the lovely reception given to them by the Hailes. When Frank and Alice returned together to Yokohama, and Alice’s elder brother heard the news, he cabled his sister: ‘Have you lost your mind? Marrying a foreigner in a heathen land!’ But to Alice, it was a dream marriage, in a fairytale land.