The aunts remembered: Jane puts a pot of rosemary on the porch for the new tenants who are moving in to the flat at 1309 Santa Clara Avenue, Alameda, once occupied by Jane Bishop, her great grandmother, and Jane Bishop's unmarried daughters Jessie, born in 1878, and Martha. Robert Bishop, Jane's husband, killed himself in 1904 after his bankruptcy. Santa Clara Avenue is a broad and quiet street lined with camphor trees. Lavender, rosemary and Livingstone daisies adorn the front gardens. The centre of Alameda with its market, many churches and places of worship would have been a ten-minute walk away for the sisters.

The house of

flickering light

It’s just after 6 in the morning and I’m sitting in the porch of Yosemite Rose, a large wooden, white-painted house surrounded by American oaks and tall pine trees. The American flag hangs over the front door. Expectations about America are often dashed. We had thought the approaches to Yosemite National Park would be like the Peak District on an August Bank Holiday. But we drive through miles and miles of California and hardly see another vehicle or house. It’s that big and that open: you could make your own atom bomb and blow it up here and no one would notice.

Soon after we arrived at Yosemite Rose yesterday evening Jane rushes up all excited and asks me: Do you know what a thread count is? I never like admitting not knowing things – and I know that’s a fault too – so I say: “Well it’s something to do with the quality of cotton or linen, isn’t it?” And she says: “You’ve got it! And do you know what the count of the sheets we’ll be sleeping in is?” I say cautiously: “I’m not sure.” And she says: “Seven thousand!” Or it may have been 700 but it’s a figure, I get to understand, so out of the way of normal human thinking that one could meet such a thing only in a dream. Women are funny about things like that. I think about what Jane has said and I then say: “Awesome!” Because that’s how young people hereabouts speak and I like imitating their voices. But that strikes a wrong note with my wife and she looks at me as if I don’t really understand.

But Yosemite Rose is a dream. And I’m sorry if you find it tiring this cornpoke style of mine – you know, like I was speaking with a straw in my mouth all of the time. Because it’s not really right for Yosemite Rose. I’ll tell you what I mean.

When Mrs Elinor Brompton-LeFage greeted us last night she gave me a special look and said I just want to tell you one thing. If you want to get in to the house after dark you need to key in this number 1-7-7-6. And she pointed to a lock on the door. Now, that number meant something to me because that was the date they threw us out of this country. I better mind my manners.

In the polished wooden hall many portraits hung on the walls. “All my boys. They served in foreign wars,” says Mrs Elinor Brompton-LeFage. "That’s my great granddaddy there. He was on the Western Front. Uncle Jim he was at Guadacanal. That’s my Pa. He was also in the Pacific. Served in the ambulance corps. Never the same again. My bother Ned was in Korea. And that one’s Jim too. He’s my grandson. He’s just come back from Afghanistan. He went there when he was 19. He was too young. They should never have sent him there at that age. It’s affected him badly too.” We are speechless.

Mrs Elinor Brompton-LeFage shows us the dining room. Crystal glasses pick up the flickering light from candles grouped on the long polished redwood table. On the way through another room heavy with damask and old velvet I notice a portrait of a young woman of such startling boldness that I want to inquire who she was. Last night did I dream of Manderley? I start moving Mrs Elinor Brompton-LeFage away from the world of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Was this a portrait of the first Mrs Brompton-LeFage. But her husband is not Max de Winter, the man with a terrible secret. He is a scientist who spends much of his time looking at the stars. His particular assignment is to stop satellites crashing into each other. He invites us to join him that night to spend an hour or two looking at the Perseids. The sky over us is so black that we will pick up every single sliver of darting light.

What of the aunts of Alameda? Yes, we did find their house at 1309 Santa Clara Avenue. The same wooden building, put up before the 1906 earthquake, is still standing. An electrician working in the house shows us around and we imagine how Jane Bishop and her daughters, Jessie and Martha, lived their lives there. We drive round Alameda and it seems to me a pretty God-fearing place. Within a short distance we pass the First Presbyterian Church, the Church of the Nazarene, the United Methodist Church, a building devoted to Christian Science, and a Masonic Temple. Jane Bishop and her daughters were Plymouth Brethren apparently. Perhaps they would have been at home in Alameda and happy at times to look across the bay to the bustling city of San Francisco ever embracing waves of people seeking a fresh life.