March 11th, 1933
Darling Mamma,
Your letter written before Erica’s wedding has just arrived. It does sound pestilential weather to have a marquee in, but the Kayes(?) are a hardy race, so I hope they’ll be none the worse. I’m so glad Rabbit and George have got a flat and that everyone is getting fixed up so neatly.
Of course the latest excitement here is the earthquake. I, having decided to go to bed early to get rid of a cold, was up in my room passing the time of day with 2 of the girls in the team, when suddenly the whole house started shaking and wobbling and rocking about in the most alarming manner, so much so that we all made for the doorways like greased lightning, having heard that they are the safest places in such circumstances, and the tremblings and wobblings went on for a minute and 10 seconds, which is quite a long time when one isn’t quite certain how it’s going to end. As a matter of fact if the house had fallen down I don’t know that even being in the doorway would have helped much because we were on the third floor. I didn’t like the idea of being earthquaked in my nightdress either, so I was quite relieved when it stopped.
About an hour later news began to come through of what had happened in the centre of the earthquake zone, namely Long Beach and Los Angeles. 50 dead, and 1500 injured at the first estimate, fires breaking out everywhere, and fears of a tidal wave. This place by the way is about 90 miles from Los Angeles, and it was the first night of the house party, so all the Los Angeleans rushed to the telephone to find out if their relatives were all right, and I believe a good many people didn’t go to bed at all. It really was rather terrific because of course a special edition of the paper came out and news boys were shouting up and down the streets until quite late “latest news of earthquake” while minor quakes went on at intervals of an hour and half an hour all through the night, and in fact are still going on. It’s now about 2.30 pm.
Well, we then wondered what sort of colour the press would put on it at home, because we knew our relatives know we were in California, and we weren’t sure how far the damage had spread at that point, so a telegram was sent off to Browns assuring everyone of our safety. I’ll try to remember to cut one of the pictures out of the paper so that you’ll see what we missed. Whole fronts of houses fell right out in some cases, and one school caught fire and was completely gutted.
About a week ago when China and Japan were looming fairly largely in the public eye I had guidance (a term which you probably understand by now) to read certain passages in Luke, which started a rather interesting train of thought. They were, in order, in case it interests you
9; v23-26, 57-60
14; v 26, 27
12; v 51-56
22; v 35
21; v 8-12, 25-29
Anyway, the last deals with earthquakes and nations rising against nations. So I thought to myself, “well, nations are rising against nations all right: we only need an earthquake to complete the picture” and lo and be’old the most terrific one there’s been for 10 years in this part of the country. It seems so funny to think of everything at Kimble going on so uninterruptedly, and Val having a birthday party, Erica and Diana getting married, and everything that happens over here is just news and I’m in it. This whole country is tense with a feeling that any moment may be the next. No one knows who may not be kidnapped or murdered next. That poor man Cermak, who was shot instead of Roosevelt, died 4 or 5 days ago after making a gallant fight. Now the earthquake and we’re just waiting to see what’ll happen next. Really if we weren’t always having definite proof that God was backing us up I should feel seriously worried, but after the first surprise and shock yesterday I reasoned that we shouldn’t have been guided to come and stay here if the Mission Inn had really been going to fall down. So I went to bed and slept peacefully all night, although as I say, several of the guests less used to the manifestation of the Almighty, lost a whole night’s sleep waiting for the house to fall on them. The experts say that the quakes will go on for a day and a half still, and they certainly show no signs abating. Well, so much for natural phenomena.
I’m sending you some more curios, chiefly, in fact entirely, photographs, which I hope you’ll treat with loving care. It says on the back of them what they’re about. The other names on the back are, as you will probably realise, people who wanted copies of them, but that’s all been done now. I’m sorry to say that I took absolutely no pictures of San Francisco, which was a most remarkable town. The hills were so steep that the hotel we were in had three levels of ground floor, and it was extraordinarily confusing to take the lift from one ground floor, which instead of bringing you to the second only brought you to the street level of the hall in the top ground floor. Not a very good diagram (in separate file), but to give you an idea, Sutton Bank is a gradient of 1 in 3.9 and the steepest hill in SF is 1 in 4.13, and all the others are rather like it, down to about 1 in 10, I should think.
I wonder when the next mail steamer goes and whether this will catch it. My plans for the remainder of this trip depend entirely on when we have the Washington campaign, which in its turn depends upon the general state of the country in about a month’s time. No, I don’t talk American, although I have acquired one or two Americanisms such as “I guess” and “OK”, but I’ve no doubt they’ll wear off.
Love to you all from,
Maria
English