NEWS : my new book — a standalone — is now with the editor. Not long to wait…

In the meantime I’ve been digging into family history, and today came across a newspaper cutting pasted into my mum’s 1988 diary — a reprint of something written Feb 1919 at a time when my dad was trying to get home from a war in France, and my mum would have been 15 years old, living in Melbourne.
She wrote in her 1988 diary: “How well I remember this!” and described how several of her classmates died at 14 y.o. and everyone was wearing masks soaked in eucalyptus oil — and her family all went and got the innoculation against pneumonia. She says, “It seems to have worked with us, though we were all very ill, none of us got pneumonia. This I think happened when I was 13 or 14.”

I HAD NO IDEA UNTIL TODAY THAT SHE’D EVER HAD THE 1918-19 FLU.