I don't remember when I was first told my grandparents had died of Spanish flu, but it was a dull grey sort of fact, nothing like the story about their gorgeous wooden house burning down and the piano being carried out on to the lawn. There was no context to the flu statement and no detail, far less any feeling. Later, I began to wonder if my mother had been told anything about it herself.
As a child, I had the bad luck to catch flu nearly every winter. It laid me flat for weeks, so I wasn't surprised to learn that you might die from it. I didn't ask the family for any more facts and no one ever volunteered them. As I discovered when I started to research the 1918 pandemic as an adult, this seems to be a catastrophe that has been wiped from the collective memory. You can open almost any history of the world and find, at best, a paragraph, even though the mortality figures are almost certainly the highest on record.
Deaths from Spanish flu peaked in New Zealand, as they did in most of the world, during November and December 1918. My mother, Meg, was five years old at the time, and from what I can see in the photograph I have of her at that age, a very beautiful, contented child.
During the last years of the first world war, her father, Edric Williams, had been stationed at a military camp near Wellington. Her mother, Christina, who was due to give birth, had moved down from Hawke's Bay to be near him and they became infected within days of each other.
Edric's peacetime work was sheep farming. The family was prosperous and he'd travelled to England in his early 20s, behaved uproariously in London and sailed home with a few dozen shirts from Turnbull & Asser in Savile Row as well as the Blüthner boudoir grand that was saved from the fire. The piano was passed to me and I loved it dearly, imagining him rattling out tunes and laughing his head off – my mother's fondest memory.
Christina is more of a mystery. Her father was a McKenzie from Inverness who had emigrated to New Zealand in his youth and died, coincidentally, of flu, in 1907. In the only photograph we have of her, she looks rather fastidious and enigmatic, but I'm assuming a sense of the comic if she was keen on marrying Edric.
Their wedding, in March 1910, was described in the local newspaper as "pretty and fashionable". The ceremony, with 500 guests attending, was held at the cathedral in Poverty Bay. The bridesmaids carried "wands surmounted by miniature doves bearing sprigs of orange blossom" and the bride wore a "becoming gown of rich ivory satin". According to my mother, there was a whisper that Edric might have married beneath him, but death, the leveller, didn't give a stuff: eight years was all they had.
In the absence of facts about what actually happened, this is how I imagine it now. Edric, like dozens of other men, falls ill and is put to bed in the camp hospital. Christina can't visit him: she's due to give birth and then gets flu herself. Neither of them imagines that they're going to die – why would they? They're young and healthy. Then Christina has a baby girl who's born gravely ill with flu and septicaemia. A few days later, the beloved Edric dies.
Now the family, in God knows what state of mind, has to decide what's best for Christina. Should they tell her that her husband is dead? Or spare her until she's well? Some poor soul breaks the news. Christina, who is barely conscious by now, understands that she has lost her husband and is probably losing her baby. Then she dies too.
While the relatives are travelling from Hawke's Bay to Wellington to deal with these sudden deaths, they're also having to decide who's going to take care of my five-year-old mother. Is she told the truth and allowed to mourn? Or is she made aware, as so many bereaved children used to be, that the dead are not to be mentioned? The baby girl, named Christina in memory of her mother, survives and blooms, and in the end both children are taken in and brought up by Elsie, the maiden aunt.
Baby Christina, who had no memories of her mother and father, grew up to enjoy a good life and a loving and lengthy marriage. My mother, even though she was cared for and given every opportunity, never quite found herself. Perhaps the loss of her adored parents at such a vulnerable age helps explain her failure to make healthy relationships, as well as her eventual depression and alcoholism,
This story isn't one in a million. It's one of 50-100 million who died during the pandemic. Men who'd survived the trenches went home to die of flu or to find their wives and children dying or dead from an unseen enemy. In any normal bout of winter flu, you'd expect the elderly and the very young to be most vulnerable, but in 1918, a generation already maimed, killed and impoverished took the brunt. The most frequent victims were men and women in their 20s and 30s. We can't imagine the sense of alarm in those few short months, or the misery for communities having to endure four years of a war that dovetailed into a plague.
Even if we total the 20th century's extraordinary war casualty list, it doesn't equal the levels of mortality in this pandemic. So how do we explain its absence from our history books? We're more aware now that the death of even one parent can have a pernicious long-term impact on the emotional life of a family, particularly if memories are suppressed. But for the world to lose tens of millions of its young mothers and fathers and to then apparently forget them suggests a striking degree of denial. Was there just too much death?
Remember, this was a time when most people didn't die tucked away in hospital; they died at home. And home is where the body stayed until burial. Which, if you were poor and lived with your family in one room, might mean sharing the space with a corpse for days. For the duration of the pandemic, there were no young gravediggers (they were all digging trenches), wood was in short supply and undertakers were falling ill as much as the rest of the population. Although no victim was left unburied, many had to wait for up to 10 days before the coffin could be removed from the house. In Britain, the government did little to help other than to shut some schools and recommend that people avoid crowds. The Times said, in a contemporary leader: "No warnings were issued, no watch was kept, no adequate steps were taken."
In 1918, medical science hadn't yet understood the true nature of a virus, and because of troop movements during the war, the government wasn't able, or willing, to halt the transmission of disease. Today, if there is a second wave of swine flu, it's unlikely we'll find ourselves as helpless as Edric and Christina. Well, fingers crossed.