A couple of weeks ago, I got raked over the coals by a few MinnPost readers for taking the PBS Masterpiece mega-hit "Downton Abbey" to task for not accurately depicting the 1918-19 flu pandemic.

I had particularly criticized the show for not having its characters, “stiff upper lip” or not, portray the fear that was rampant during the pandemic.

That fictional portrayal just didn’t ring true.  

I’ve read a lot about the 1918-19 pandemic over the years, but my first and perhaps most chilling exposure to the fear that permeated that period came from Mary McCarthy’s 1957 memoir “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.” I read the book in 1980, soon after I moved to Minneapolis and long before a string of authors, including the New York Times’ Gina Kolata, wrote best-selling books on the pandemic.

As MinnPost’s Andy Sturdevant pointed out in “The Stroll” on Wednesday, McCarthy immortalized Minneapolis’ Whittier neighborhood in the opening pages of her memoir, and not in a positive way. I remember being so struck by her account that I hopped on my bicycle and rode over to Whittier, seeking out both the house of her hated great uncle (for which she provides an address in the book) and that of her paternal grandparents (for which she does not). Like Sturdevant, I was disappointed to find an apartment building at the address of one and no clear clues as to the identification of the other (other than a reference by McCarthy to a wrap-around porch).

But it was how McCarthy came to live with her great uncle in Minneapolis — the suddenness of how her life was forever changed by the 1918-19 flu pandemic — that both moved me and sent a shiver up my spine as I read “Memories.”

Here is her description of what happened during and after her family’s doomed train trip from Seattle to Minneapolis:  

My [Minneapolis] grandmother … accommodated us all during those fatal weeks of the influenza epidemic, when no hospital beds were to be had and people went about with masks or stayed shut up in their houses, and the awful fear of contagion paralyzed all services and made each man an enemy to his neighbor. One by one, we had been carried off the train which had brought us from distant Puget Sound to make a new home in Minneapolis.

Waving good-by in the Seattle depot, we had not known that we had carried the flu with us into our drawing rooms, along with the presents and the flowers, but, one after another, we had been struck down as the train proceeded eastward. We children did not understand whether the chattering of our teeth and Mama’s lying torpid in the berth were not somehow a part of the trip (until then, serious illness, in our minds, had been associated with innovations — it had always brought home a new baby), and we began to be sure that it was all an adventure when we saw our father draw a revolver on the conductor who was trying to put us off the train at a small wooden station in the middle of the North Dakota prairie.

On the platform at Minneapolis, there were stretchers, a wheel chair, redcaps, distraught officials, and beyond them, in the crowd, my grandfather’s rosy face, cigar, and cane, my grandmother’s feathered hat, imparting an air of festivity to this strange and confused picture, making us children certain that our illness was the beginning of a delightful holiday.

Only it was anything but a holiday, of course. When Mary and her brothers and sisters “awoke” from their illness in their grandmother’s Whittier house many days later, they were orphans.