A couple of tourists pose inside a giant sequoia in the Yosemite National Park

Watching the stars with Henry

And so that was the aunts. They had arrived in the States in the 1920s with their mother, by some accounts a harsh woman, and we know where they lived in 1930. Yet after that the trail peters out. On their mother’s death did they continue to cling to the disciplines of the Plymouth Brethren and eke out a living making children’s clothes? I like to think they broke away, changed their lives for ever, started a commune in the desert or created a magic elixir that would make everything beautiful, or met up with a traveling man that their mother would never have countenanced. We are still looking, however, and there may be more to come. The Alameda Historical Society is trying to trace the missing years. Jessie and Martha may yet surprise us!

But now we are in Yosemite National Park, bigger than Wales, not so big as Belgium but big. It’s our first day and we have paid our $20, which allows us to drive around the park for a week. We are walking to a grove of ancient sequoia trees, the largest living objects on earth as the notices proudly proclaim. They are bulkier than redwoods but do not grow so tall – up to 250ft rather than 350ft. It is still morning and rays of light filter through the forest. Jane is emoting like she was making an Academy Award acceptance speech or responding to a Lottery jackpot win. “I can’t BELIEVE this is happening. In a million years I never believed I would see all this! This is so special. I’d just love all my friends to share this moment with me. If my mother could see me now!!! [Don’t worry, Alison, you will. At least in pictures, a lot of them!]” And so on.

As usual I’m taking it a bit more quietly. “Looks a bit like North Wales to me, except with bigger trees,” I say. Later I tell a group of ooohing and aaahing visitors crowding round a viewpoint with their Canons and Nikons that the Dolomites are much grander as a spectacle. But they brush off such talk and return to their cameras. Many Americans we meet have an almost religious fervour about Yosemite and tend to use biblical terms to describe the area as if it was an Eden before the Fall. “Awesome! Totally!!!”

On our second day we visit Yosemite Valley and I have to admit that its scale is pretty impressive. I start recanting. We climb to Glacier Point, 2,000ft or so above the valley floor but the huge mountains still loom around us and stretch to the horizon. Waterfalls tumble many hundreds of feet, even though this is high summer, and the meadows are still blazing with wildflowers though this is August.

Elinor Brompton-LeFage greets us on our return. Behind her is a small woman who silently approaches us. “I’m Glanna,” she says. “Glanna?” says Jane. “Grandma,” she says. “Oh, Grandma. Hello Grandma!” says Jane. Grandma is in her nineties and will later approach us with a coffee pot. She slips silently through the house, her face a quizzical mask. For an old person she doesn’t speak much and when the does it comes in a sibilant croak – a bit like Golum. But it is getting dark and the crickets are packing up. Henry Brompton-LeFage, the stargazer, is about and padding across the dry field outside, binocular round his neck. “Ah yes, the sleep of the unjust,” observes Elinor Brompton-LeFage inconsequentially as if she was referring to her husband’s ascent from his daylight sojourn in a closed coffin. “And that is Henry’s right surely. He always has his head in the stars and last night the stars were plentiful enough.”

Henry has invited me to gaze at the night sky, which will be full of a shower of Perseids. Shower? Yes, it’s the right word! He pulls a comfortable upholstered chair out of the

house and places it facing northeast and a distant mountain. Henry is a great talker and he starts to tell me all about the way he looks at the night sky, and all the cameras he has set up that automatically track movements of stars, and the film he his to load into his cameras and technical stuff like that. Not that the stars move. It’s the world that moves, Henry tells me as if he suspects I’m a rather backward pupil. Every now then, he waves at a point in the sky and says: “There’s one” or “That’s a big one right there.” But I always miss them. It’s a bit like when R and D said, “Look there’s a pelican diving” or “See, that’s another humming bird”, and I’d look around but always miss the interesting thing they were pointing out.

So Henry goes on and soon he tires a bit and doesn’t actually say anything but just waves his hand in the general direction of a passing bit of heavenly rock burning out in the Earth’s atmosphere. But still I don’t see them. Then I also tire and shut my eyes tight. And soon I start to see things. Little pinpoints of light start darting through the dark. I’m seeing so many. They must be the showers. “I see them,” I tell Henry. But there is no word from Henry. Perhaps he does not believe me for he just goes on sitting there gazing up at the night sky.