A SURVIVOR'S TALE
I was about nine or 10 at the time of the flu. It was a terrible time. People died like flies ... not at the beginning. I have a birthday in October. My birthday fell right in the middle of what they called "Black Week". I don't quite recollect the beginning of it. I do know that I was sick, but they had no name to what was wrong ... I had the symptoms ... Mommy thought it was a cold.
In our home ... I think there were about six in the family then, Mom's practice was if anyone got sick, didn't matter who it was, everyone got a dose of cough mixture. Whether that helped or not I don't know, but it made no difference what it was, that was the remedy.
I was sick just for a little while and stayed out of school. Unless you were falling down, we went to school. You had to be at school, never mind what happened ... I think after the holidays we didn't reopen school.
I think daddy got sick during the course of that, the beginning of it as well. He didn't really stay in bed, he just got doctored up. Work seemed to stop because people were absent. He was building. He had his own building trade. He worked with his men as well. That must have sort of come to a standstill.The next thing I can remember is that the family sort of went down one after the other, including Mommy. I had to see to some cooking. I couldn't cook, but in those days you could go to the butcher and buy soup meat ... I made some kind of soup under mom's direction; but even when it was all over, everyone said they'd never had so much water in all their life!
Everybody went down. At the beginning there were doctors. They would go around. Afterwards the hospitals filled up with people. Some just stayed at home. None of us were hospitalised.
People tied a red rag, ribbon, anything so long as it was red, on a pillar, gatepost or something on the veranda ... and the doctor would come. If you had a death and you couldn't do anything about it, you tied a black ribbon outside and then somebody would come along and see what could be done to remove the corpse.
In the street, the front of our street, a young boy had died, a friend of the family, I think he went to school with us. And his parents and my parents were friends, so naturally they would go to the funeral. Mommy went down with it.
And then after a while, nobody was allowed to go to funerals. You were hardly allowed to visit.At the beginning there were coffins to bury people. Later on they just knocked up anything to make a coffin. Sometimes the coffins were miles too big or too small for the person that had died. People were still buried in separate graves at the beginning, while there were grave-diggers, I suppose.
Men would go round just to help and lay out the corpse and they had to wash their hands. I believe they gave people brandy to shut out the terrible things that happened. Sometimes you'd say: "I haven't seen so-and-so for a while, I'd better go [and] see." And sometimes they were there, sometimes they were sick, sometimes they were dead, sometimes they had been buried already.
I think afterwards there wasn't even anybody to make coffins or there wasn't enough wood. They just rolled people in blankets ... eventually they buried them in trenches, mass graves, common graves ... I remember going up to the butcher shop up the road and seeing the cart. Once or twice it wasn't just one body, but bodies piled on top of one another. You could see a foot sticking out of the bottom because they hadn't been properly wrapped up.
At home all the family were sick, I think my sister ... was not quite the baby ... she had a relapse. That used to be very serious. But everyone recovered. Out of every home in that particular street, which wasn't very long, somebody died except in our house. I always thought that that was wonderful. Dad often said many times after that: "God must have meant us for some other reason. He kept us all alive."
Joyce Kay eventually became a primary school teacher...