ALBERT Camus in his 1947 novel La Peste gives a gripping, highly atmospheric account of plague afflicting an Algerian port city. There's heroism, cowardice, dedication to duty, corruption and, of course, a vast body count.

And the history books tell of the self-sacrifice of the people of Eyam when they cut themselves off from the rest of the 17th-century world to stop plague death spreading beyond their village in the Derbyshire dales. The vicar, though, had a guilty secret: he led prayers to encourage the altruism of his flock, yet had smuggled his own children out of harm's way; only a quarter of the 350 villagers survived.

But for the nitty-gritty of life when highly infectious and potentially fatal disease strikes a community, you should turn to the anonymous prose of a D&S Times reporter just over 80 years ago. It was at the height of the influenza pandemic which, as Past Lives told last week, killed up to 100m people worldwide while it raged between February, 1918 and the following January; by comparison, 11.7m died of Aids in 1997.

"Mr Howe said his attention had been called to the fact that in the Hopetown district; the earth closets had not been cleaned out and the conditions were abominable," our man wrote after an emergency meeting of Darlington council in the November.

(It is not clear if this sorry state of affairs in the crowded quarter behind the town's important railway workshops had arisen because the rampant disease had caused over-use of the lavatories or because so many council workers were laid low by influenza that there was no-one to do the unpleasant task - at Malton and Norton, down in Yorkshire, gas supplies were cut off earlier in the month because there were too few unafflicted men to operate the gas works.)

The Mayor (Ald T E B Bates, for whom an avenue in Cockerton was later named) replied "that they could not get men to do the work. Within the last fortnight he had taken upon himself the responsibility of telling Mr Winter, the Surveyor, to get men and pay them what they wanted, no matter what it was, but they could not get them. They had been prepared to pay anything.

"They had also sent in an application to the Army weeks ago for the return of men, but had not yet got them ... Mr T M Hinde suggested that some of the young soldiers quartered in the town might be usefully employed at that work."

(This was nearly three weeks after the November 11 armistice and there were other demands for early releases from the Army, to ease a coal shortage. The same D&S reported that by mid-December, it was hoped 5,000 miners a day would be demobilised to return to the collieries).

In the past five days, there had been 25 flu deaths in the town. The chief medical officer, Dr Mostyn, said: "While the figures for the 96 great towns in the country showed some improvement, in Darlington and neighbourhood they were getting worse." The town's high death rate, said Ald Leach (there is still a school bearing his name), was partly due to the military presence in the town.

Many soldiers were among the 80 pneumonia cases in Yarm Road hospital. Young fellows came into the hospital with temperatures of 105, said Ald Leach: "What hope is there for them - they are practically dead when they come in."

(It was a characteristic of the 1918 virus that, the world over, the young and healthy were most at risk. One theory was that older generations had some degree of immunity because of their exposure to the last similar - but far less severe and widespread - flu epidemic, in 1890. At an American army camp in Ohio more than 13,000 men, 40pc of the total, got flu in 17 days in early autumn 1918 and 1,101 died. The 1918 virus killed 2.5pc of its victims; normally, only one-tenth of 1pc of those who get flu die).

Ald Leach said that although the Darlington situation was grave, to exaggerate the danger would not help. Things were worse elsewhere in the region. Even the 25 deaths so far that week was less than half the average for the surrounding towns.

(Schools in Wensleydale, Bedale, Northallerton and Ripon were closed, this newspaper reported four weeks earlier. In Darlington, only secondary schoolchildren preparing for exams went for lessons. Brompton, Northallerton, had had seven flu deaths. Treatment of cases at Middleham had been hampered because Dr J Cockcroft "was prostrated by the disease, followed by pneumonia." Church services were cancelled at Malton. The owner of Thirsk Picture Palace pleaded that closure would cost him a ruinous £20 a week but agreed not to admit children).

In the North African colonial city of the Camus novel, set in the immediate post-war heyday of the cinema, survivors of the plague reckoned that the closure of all movie theatres was the greatest deprivation of normal pleasures; in practice, only the wealthy travelling classes and visitors "imprisoned" there for the duration were incommoded by the armed guards denying them escape from Oran (in northern Canada during the flu pandemic, would-be arrivals from the outside world were warned off from Eskimo villages at gunpoint) but nearly everyone longed for the now-outlawed escapism of the silver screen.

In that light, it is not so surprising that the Darlington council meeting decided, in effect, that the emergency was not sufficient cause to stop showings of the latest Charlie Chaplin film.

The way councillors put it - even though they had heard from their medical officer that it was of great importance that as far as possible citizens should avoid all gatherings, especially in crowded rooms - was that the permitted length of "entertainments" should be cut to two hours. Locally there was now a three-hour limit, with no children allowed, more draconian than the national emergency maximum of four hours; the meeting resolved to telegraph Whitehall with a plea that this should be halved.

Coun Bentley said "to suggest that places of entertainment be closed was like taking away the living of the people connected with them, but they had to remember that people were dying all about them." He wanted all indoor meetings of every character stopped for a fortnight.

Ald Leach: "Including meetings of the Town Council?"

Coun Bentley: "Yes, every mortal thing."

But his suggestion was not taken up by a meeting which had already heard Dr Mostyn's opinion that the deaths were usually due to chest complications caused by insufficient precautions being taken after the onset of flu: "Patients who went to bed at the beginning of influenzal and catarrhal symptoms and remained there until convalescent greatly diminished the risk of a fatal issue."

FOUR weeks earlier, Darlington council had heard that at a London inquest into a flu death a pathologist had said efficient sanitation was the key to preventing the disease. Perhaps the workers refusing no-limit wages to clean the lavatories at Hopetown had noted that.

He added that although some medical authorities were urging vaccination, the best bacteriological opinion was that this should not be done "at present" and "eminent authorities in America had definitively pronounced against."

In the event, it was not until 1944 in America that there was the first effective immunisation against flu, using shots of viruses grown in eggs then killed so they could not cause infection.

The pandemic came and went in waves, several months apart. In July, flu swept through the Durham mining villages and up to half the workforce was absent on some days - with some malingering among youngsters, it was alleged. This will have contributed to the coal shortage later in the year because stocks had not been built up for the winter.

July reports in The Northern Echo included the deaths at Willington within hours of each other of a mother and her 16-year-old son. The disease could kill at alarming speed. Two inquests on the same day at Newcastle heard that the wife of a soldier serving in France died two days after first noticing a sore throat and that a girl, aged nine, woke with head pains at 5am and was dead within two hours.

In Darlington, where the number of workmen carried by the town's trams fell by 3,000 from one week to the next, a family in Albion Street lost their 14-year-old daughter on the Saturday and son, 15, on the Monday.

PARTLY because the main news pages of the newspapers, including weeklies like the D&S, were dominated by reports of war, surprisingly little was published at the time about the ravages of the disease.

War censorship was another reason, with the authorities anxious to keep up civilian morale and to deny the enemy knowledge of the effect flu was having on the military effort. These factors also applied in most other European countries and also in America.

Spain, though, was neutral. So not only was there no censorship for military reasons but also the reporting of the considerable local effects of the disease was a higher priority for Spanish newspapers.

The resulting international publicity for the country's plight, as well as the fact that a February outbreak in San Sebastian was the first many people heard of the 1918 flu, quickly earned the disease the almost worldwide soubriquet "The Spanish Lady".