My mother's family lived in Coromandel Street in Wellington at the time of the epidemic. She told me how there was a seemingly endless procession of hearses going past their house from the hospital at the end of the street. They could not travel fast out of respect for the dead and the slow-moving vehicles seemed to take forever to go past. Her family also got the flu with the exception of her father. She and her younger sister, having recovered, were sent by their father to buy a shilling's worth of stewing steak so he could make beef tea for her older sister, little brother and mother who were still sick. She said that one minute she was standing in the queue at the butcher's shop, and the next she was sitting on the footpath with her feet in the gutter and a kind lady was getting her to put her head between her knees. Her sister was crying. The same lady bought the steak and handed her the parcel, not letting the girls move of until mum was sure she could walk home. All the family survived.