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with peremptory violence. It occupied her nose and throat, it poured hotly through her bloodstream, and speeded up her pulse to fever pitch. She was the first child in the school to surrender: she had that distinction. Others followed rapidly. By the time she got home that afternoon, her temperature was 104, and she was mildly delirious. She was conscious of a pride in her status. But, though proud, she was very, very ill.
    As this was the first moment in which her private history clocks in with that of public recorded time, we may spend a paragraph or two upon the topic of the outbreak of what was known as Spanish flu.
    The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 was responsible, we are told, for the highest mortality rate of any pandemic since the Black Death of the fourteenth century. According to some authorities, it originated in the spring of 1918—in San Sebastian? in Almeria? The Spanish, who, unlike much of the rest of the world, were not at war, and therefore did not censor their press, rashly admitted the existence of their infection. Thus they had the doubtful honour of giving their name to the sickness and being blamed for it by posterity. Other authorities claimed that the first cases were identified in March 1918 amongst the troops of the United States at Fort Riley in Kansas. Be that as it may, the illness swept across America and Europe, and by July of 1918 had spread ‘in a tidal wave’ to Asia, China and Japan. Chicago succumbed, and so did London, Liverpool and Glasgow. George the Fifth of England, Emperor Wilhelm of Germany and Alfonso the Thirteenth of Spain contracted it, and recovered. Round the world, thirty million died in three months, more than three times the military casualties of the Great War itself: of these influenza victims, two million died in Europe, and 183,000 in Britain. Or so it is said: the figures are hardly likely to be very precise.
    In Britain, schools and cinemas and libraries emptied spontaneously, and some were closed by decree: children drooped at their desks, as one medical officer reported, ‘like plants whose roots had been poisoned’, and died by the end of the week. A single case could infect a whole school. Coffins were in short supply, and so were reliable remedies. Muslin masks and gargling became the fashion. Some tried oil of garlic, and others relied on permanganate of potash or quinine or arsenic compounds. Some doctors prescribed whisky: other doctors forbade it. Dover’s Powder was popular, and so was iodine of lime. Various vaccines proved useless. A good nosebleed or a heavy menstrual period was thought beneficial. Tobacco was proclaimed an effective germicide. Some swore by fresh air, others by isolation in darkened rooms. Despairing doctors of the fresh-air persuasion dramatically broke their patients’ bedroom windows with rolling pins. It was safer to stay at home than to go into hospital, where the mortality rates rose and rose.
    Was influenza connected with swine, or with dogs, or with ferrets, or with pigeons? Was it caused by a bacterium? (Yes, argued Sir Paul Gordon Fildes, who mistakenly backed
bacterium Haemophilus influenzae.)
Was it a virus? (Yes, argued Sir Patrick Playfair Laidlaw, who was right.)
    The course of the disease was as mysterious as its source. In Britain, the second wave of the epidemic, the autumnal wave that claimed Bessie, proved the most severe. It subsided abruptly in November, with the signing of the Armistice—only to swell up again, equally mysteriously, in a third attack, in a final cathartic roundup, in the spring of 1919. To this day experts declare that ‘the extreme violence of the fall wave has never been explained,’ and now perhaps it never will be, though the whole episode continues to arouse curiosity. Seventy years later scientists were still as yet unsuccessfully attempting to analyse the nature of the virus by exhuming the bodies and examining the lungs of four influenza victims, all coal miners, who were