Amit Katwala - Tremors in the Blood

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A yellow car sped north, down out of the mountains towards San Francisco. Its round headlights cut twin beams through the gathering mist. At the wheel, Henry Wilkens risked a glance in his rear-view mirror. They were definitely being followed.

It was the evening of Tuesday 30 May 1922 Decoration Day and the nation had come to a halt to remember its dead, and to decorate their graves. More than 100,000 Americans had perished in the Great War and in the city it had been a solemn, grey occasion. Soldiers laid wreaths for the fallen, the silence broken only by the clamour of gulls circling in the bay and the great foghorn of Alcatraz island booming in the distance.

But, for most people, the public holiday (today known as Memorial Day) was already morphing into a leisure opportunity. It was the era of flapper girls and prohibition, and San Francisco was finally getting its swing back after the devastation of the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Each morning, commuters in sharp suits and hats rode ferries across the bay from Oakland and Berkeley, and piled on to busy streetcars. At night, women in fur coats approached unmarked doors with whispered passwords, hair curled and coiffed into elaborate bobs. But this wasnt the Roaring Twenties for everyone unemployment had more than doubled after the war, and the national crime rate had shot up since the ban on alcohol.

Henry and his young family had spent the long weekend camping with friends at Felton Auto Park, near the San Lorenzo river in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, about 70 miles south of San Francisco. Now, Henry a thin-lipped 36-year-old with intense brown eyes was piloting the familys yellow Premier towards their little flat at 1540 Vallejo Street, on the slopes of the residential Russian Hill.

The cars gleaming wheel arches caught the fading light. Its soft roof was up, and the thick fabric rippled in the breeze. Henrys wife, Anna, sat beside him on the front bench seat. She was 34, with jet-black hair, pale blue eyes and a kind, nervous smile. Their children eight-year-old Henry Jr and three-year-old Helen were asleep in the raised back seat of the vehicle. When he turned his head, Henry could just make out their golden hair poking out from under a blanket.

It had been a successful trip certainly less explosive than some of the couples previous weekends away. In court later, Henry described the four days at Felton as a kind of pastoral idyll. The men fished in the river and played horseshoes, the women sat and talked and sewed with their eyes on the men folk. They swam, and smoked, and lay on blankets in the sun.

Each morning, while Anna slept, Henry walked down to the river with his daughter on his shoulders and his son by his side to fetch water. He returned swinging a bucket and singing. As his children frolicked around the camp stove, Henry boiled water for the coffee and fried eggs and bacon for breakfast. On the Sunday, he whipped up an eggnog and carried it into the tent for his wife.

A photo of the Wilkens family taken around this time shows a beaming Henry in a short-sleeved shirt, brown hair pushed back from his tanned face, and Annas arm in his. Helen who the family nicknamed Dot or Mousie is sitting on his knee wearing a bow in her hair and the dangerous expression of a toddler whose patience is wearing thin. Sturdy little Henry Jr stands grinning in the background, a small arm resting protectively on his mothers shoulder.

Henry and Anna were both born in what is now Germany, and came to the United States separately during waves of migration sparked by ongoing political unrest in Europe. California was a popular destination, particularly after the gold rush of the 1850s, and by the early twentieth century more than one in five San Franciscans were German-born or of German descent. They built churches, formed working mens clubs known as