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.’
It was a mistake that had a shattering effect on their son’s life, leaving him permanently disabled, with a severe limp, and bearing, by his own account, emotional scars. ‘Very occasionally well-meaning people suggested to me as a child that sufferings built character and endurance,’ he writes in the very last words of this book. ‘Even at the age of seven or eight I suspected I had acquired these supposed benefits at an excessive price.’
Another bitter irony is that Patrick got polio a year after the invention in America of a vaccine that would soon wipe out the disease throughout Europe and the United States. This, he says, was ‘one of the great American achievements of the 20th century and was seen as such at the time. In terms of national prestige, it was the medical equivalent of landing on the moon.’
The vaccine could have saved him from his fate, but there were delays in implementing the vaccination programme and he was unable to benefit from it. A year later, he would have been spared.
This book is not an autobiography, for it barely touches on Patrick’s distinguished career as a foreign correspondent in which, triumphing over his disability, he has followed his parents’ example and run great risks in the most dangerous war zones of the Middle East.
It is hard to define what it is, for it contains several distinct elements. There is the childhood trauma that he suffered when suddenly removed from cosseted rural bliss to isolation in grim Irish institutions for the treatment of his disease. There is his meticulously researched account of the history of polio and its effects in general. There is his extensive portrait of the decaying Anglo-Irish society from which he sprang on his mother’s side. And there is his account of his father’s dazzling career as a writer and journalist that seeks to explain his temporary conversion to communism and his obsessive hounding by British intelligence.
They do not hang together easily, but each contains passages of great interest and seems to fulfil a compelling need by the author to understand what has made him how he is.
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