from Bill Forbrigger and Coastal Schooners
Bill Forbrigger:
Oh God, the flu in 1917 was Canada-wide. Terrible. Oh, it was bad at home. There was nobody but my youngest sister, Gladys - everybody was knocked out. One couldn't get off of it to help the other - all in bed. She was the only one. She trained for a nurse in Sydney, after. She was only a young girl then, fifteen. She looked after the works. Cooked, and cut the wood out of the woodpile. We had no wood. We had all kinds of wood in the woods when we got sick. But none at the door. We had a great big ox. Snow, God, the snow must have been three feet. Talk about snow. So she hitched up the big ox and went ahead of him out to the wood, and got a load of hardwood and brought it home and sawed it up at the woodpile, and brought it in to keep us from freezing. Only for that, I don't know what we'd have done. Nobody could move. We all got flu - father and mother, all hands. Terrible. It was that way - everybody was the same, all over the place. Everybody had it, everybody, everybody.
I never was so sick in my life. Couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, you couldn't sit up, you couldn't do anything. Just lay there....
(And your sister...?) She never got it. She did everything. We'd have all died in a pile if it hadn't been for her.
Bill Forbrigger's story appeared in Issue 38 of Cape Breton's Magazine (out of print.) It is now available in the book Cape Breton Works
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