A Voice From the Last Pandemic

I came across this article in The Aberdare Leader, 4th January 1919, reproducing part of a letter from a Welsh woman in San Francisco to her friends back home.

Some of the cultural attitudes, e.g. to the Turkish harem, are out-dated, but much of the day-to-day experience of life in a pandemic sounds extremely familiar...

WELSH LADY'S EXPERIENCE.

-

RAVAGES OF THE "FLU" IN SAN FRANCISCO.

-

   A lady resident in Wales until a 

few years ago, and who is now in

San Francisco, writes to friends here

giving details of the terrible rav-

ages of the influenza epidemic in that

far-away city. The following extract

from her letter will be of interest: -

   "Have you got the Spanish flu very

bad? It is terrible here, funerals

going by all day and the ambulance

rushing about at all hours. All pic-

ture shows, theatres, schools and

churches are closed. Our meeting

room is closed. Doctors and nurses

are dying, and we are so short of

them because so many of them have

gone to France. I do not know what

we should do if it was not for the

Red Cross. They have had to let the

women out of prison to help nurse

the sick. We have lost more soldiers

through death in the training camps

than in France fighting. Every man,

woman and child has to wear a mask

of four-fold white muslin, which cov-

ers the mouth and nose, leaving noth-

ing but the eyes to be seen. We all

look as if we had just come out of a 

Turkish harem. If a policeman

catches anyone without a mask, or

one not properly fixed, he runs them

in for 10 days, or 100 dollars fine

(£20.) All soldiers and sailors have

to wear them. They look so funny,

hundreds of them drilling with white

masks, and at night in the street cars

we look like a lot of ghosts, and do

not know our best friends. It is hard

on the girls and men in the stores:

they have to wear them all day. The

schools have been turned into hos-

pitals. All the bodies are cremated,

and the clothes which belonged to them

also.      I think that was has

saved me up to now is my being so

much in the fresh air. I have a nice

sleeping porch in my cottage with

windows all round, of which I always

have one or two open at night. Most

of the windows have been taken out

of the street cars to give us plenty

of air. It is an awful plague. I have

got my clothes all ready in case I

have to be rushed off to the hospital."