Article: Essay: The summer plague Cork, Ireland, 1956. For six-year-old Patrick Cockburn it should have been a time of carefree innocence. Instead, a polio epidemic was about to change his life forever

M

y parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, were curiously unworried when they heard of an abnormal number of polio cases in Cork in the summer of 1956. At the time we had moved from Ireland to Hampstead for a few months so my father could work at Punch magazine, which Malcolm Muggeridge had briefly revivified. My mother, though, never liked London and was eager to get back to the Georgian house and farm where we normally lived, in the countryside about 30 miles east of Cork city.

I was six and my brother Andrew nine. My parents knew that we were vulnerable because polio, also called "infantile paralysis", primarily affected children. News about the outbreak was sparse, but the risk seemed ...

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