Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service.

And today we're going back to the autumn of 1918

and the worst pandemic of the 20th century.

The Spanish influenza, which killed more than 50 million people around the world

at the end of the First World War. I'm Lucy Burns and I've been listening back

to eyewitness accounts of the flu. I went to bed and certainly felt more ill than I felt in my life, terrible ached and so on.

I just remember being totally prostered with fatigue and high fever.

Alistair Cook, the British broadcaster, who later became famous with his letter from America on the BBC, was 10 when he came down with the flu in the autumn of 1918.

He remembered the experience in a BBC interview in 2004.

What I now recall most vividly is the fact that my mother,

North Country woman of Irish blood, but the North Country was most impressive.

It was not demonstrative people.

They do not go around hugging and kissing and saying, I love you ever.

But for those few days, I don't know probably,

four or five days when I had the fever before it relapsed,

she was extraordinarily concerned to the point of being tender

just for those few days.

And of course what it meant was they were really concerned

that I'd had it.

Aida Darwin was seven when her father caught the flu after nursing soldiers in a military hospital,

and the whole family fell ill.

I remember ancedental standing by me looking down and looking worried.

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