Summer brought fine and warm days to Kobe and made the daily walk along the streets of Yamamoto-dori pleasant. The community seemed to have accepted the presence of this foreign woman with her pram and her toddler, a woman they had been seeing every day for the last eighteen months, and sometimes the Japanese women would offer Gladys a shy smile. Language posed the greater barrier; Emma had little opportunity to learn Japanese and she lacked the confidence to speak the few words she did know. She had always been an intensely private woman, and she wasn’t given to offering winning smiles and muddled hand gestures to accompany her attempts at communicating; not that she thought it would have made much difference and might even have proven counter-productive. Kobe locals remained uneasy and s
