WHEN I WAS in my youth, I used to enjoy talking to elderly relatives about what it was like for them growing up in the first two decades of the 20th century. My gran told me about walking down a busy shopping street in Edinburgh in 1918, when she was in her teens, where people literally collapsed and died in front her from Spanish Flu. Or my girlfriend’s granny, who told me about returning to her primary school after Christmas in January 1914, when she was 8 years old, to discover that two of her friends weren’t coming back because they had died during the holidays from diphtheria, a terrible respiratory infection which, quite literally, suffocates you.