Customer Reviews

The Broken Boy

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The author, who contracted polio at age six, was one of many victims of the polio epidemic in Cork,
Ireland. Over 50,000 got the virus in 1956, "one of the last great outbreaks of
polio anywhere in Western Europe." An outbreak that occurred just a few years
after a vaccine had been developed in America.

The book is interesting when it describes the way that the community denied
and downplayed the effects of epidemic. Newspapers, then still the main source
of information in Ireland, never named polio victims and only published, more or
less uncritically, official reports on the epidemic. This, and apparently, the
desire of the business community to maintain economic stability in the
community, created an environment of incoherent hysteria where children
were kept home from school and public swimming pools closed, but pubs
remained opened.

Patrick Cockburn, a distinguished international news correspondent, was
gravely affected by the disease. Today, he walks with a limp, cannot run or
drive a car. He tells quite a bit of his days in hospital and feelings at the time.

He seems, though, a bit reticent about it at times, because it was so long ago and also
perhaps because of a resentment at his parents moving house to Cork, despite
warnings about the epidemic.

His parents were Claud and Patricia Cockburn. His father was a leftist writer
and his mother a daughter of Anglo-Irish upper-class parents. Both were
adventurous and neither were accustomed to changing their plans if risks were
involved. Much of the book, perhaps too much, is written about his parents and
their background. For those readers of Alexander Cockburn, Patrick's brother,
this family background is very familiar ground.

Well-written and interesting in places, this is a slight contribution to the
literature on diseases and epidemics. Cockburn laments the lack of information
on polio epidemic in Cork, so perhaps this is spadework for another, larger
book. For those who are interested in epidemics in general, Cockburn points to
a classic account, Journal of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.

I had polio, about the same in immediate and long-term effect as Cockburn, at about the same time. The reason for the reticence the earlier reviewer notes is that at that time we were all bombarded by images of kids in iron lungs, and by encouraging stories about other little boys and girls who'd had polio or other crippling diseases and accidents (the miler Glenn Cunningham was a teacher favorite) and who'd gone on to greatness of one kind or another.

Part of that message was that if we weren't going to be cheerful overachievers we should at least have the grace to shut up about it, since so many others (the coffin kids) had it so much worse. To be a polio survivor is to know absolutely that whatever you may think you deserve, there's another kid in the ward who deserves much more; however great you think you are there's another kid who's better. It screws me up at job interviews but otherwise makes me a better person than I might otherwise be -- though not, as noted, as good as Patrick Cockburn, most likely.

This is a good book. A nice comparison read would be Wilfrid Sheed's _People Will Always Be Kind_.