A cruel twist of fate

This, as its title suggests, is a poignant book. In his account of the world’s last great polio epidemic in Cork, to which he fell victim at the age of six, nearly 50 years ago, Patrick Cockburn is neither self-centred nor self-pitying. He shows journalistic detachment in discussing the history and character of this terrifying disease, and as much, if not more, sympathy for its other victims as for himself. But he does at one point allow himself to say — and it is a most convincing claim — that he was perhaps ‘uniquely unlucky’.

His famous parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, were largely responsible for his crippling. They decided in 1956 to return from a period in London to the Blackwater Valley in County Cork (she was of Anglo-Irish Protestant stock and yearning to go home), although they knew of the epidemic and had been repeatedly warned of the threat it posed to their children.

They did not take the warnings seriously. They persuaded themselves that their crumbling Georgian mansion outside Youghal, 30 miles from Cork, was isolated enough to escape the epidemic, which was to affect 50,000 people. They also had a fatalistic attitude to illness and a cavalier approach to risk, caused, their son believes, by their own experience of danger.

Claud, as a communist, had commanded a battalion in the Spanish Civil War and witnessed massacres in Eastern Europe. Patricia, as a child, had seen a former British chief of staff shot dead on his doorstep by an IRA gunman and had travelled as an adult through the forests of the Congo making a language map. During the second world war, their house in London had been demolished by a V-1 rocket. ‘Neither courted danger,’ writes Patrick Cockburn, ‘but nor were they likely to listen to prudent counsels advising against a return to Cork during the polio epidemic.