The Broken Boy

By Patrick Cockburn

It is very easy to get polio. The celebrated Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn was just six years old when he woke up one day in the summer of 1956 with a headache and a sore throat. His parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, had recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of the fact that a polio epidemic had broken out in Cork City. Cockburn caught the disease and was taken to the fever hospital where, alone for the first time in his life, he was kept in isolation. The virus attacks the nerves of the brain and the spinal cord leading to paralysis of the muscles. Patrick could no longer walk.

The Broken Boy is at once a memoir of Patrick Cockburn's own experience of polio, a portrait of his parents, both prominent radicals, and the story of the Cork epidemic, the last great polio epidemic in the world, affecting 50,000 people. This terrible disease always behaved strangely, attacking the middle classes rather than the poor, children rather than adults, and striking fear everywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OR Books
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781682192917

Patrick Cockburn

Patrick Cockburn is Iraq correspondent for the Independent in London. He has received the Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting, the James Cameron Award, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism. He is the author of Muqtada, about war and rebellion in Iraq; The Occupation (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007); The Broken Boy, a memoir; and with Andrew Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.

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ALSO BY PATRICK COCKBURN

Getting Russia Wrong

Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn)

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq

Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq

Henry’s Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, A Father and

Son’s Story (with Henry Cockburn)

The Rise of Islamic State

The Age of Jihad

War in the Age of Trump

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First printing 2022

Published by OR Books, New York and London

© 2006, 2022 Patrick Cockburn

First published by Vintage in the United Kingdom.

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Typeset by Lapiz Digital Services. Printed by Bookmobile, USA, and CPI, UK.

paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-321-1 • ebook ISBN 978-1-68219-320-4

For Janet, Henry, Alex and Kitty

Contents

Introduction: Epidemics

The Kent Variant

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

1. Patrick Cockburn with his mother

2. In 1955

3. Andrew and Patrick Cockburn

4. In 1956

5. Patrick, aged seven, with Claud Cockburn

6. Aged eight, unable to stand

7. With Claud at Brook Lodge

8. Myrtle Grove

9. Climbing the Chinese gates

10. Kitty Lee

11. Edith Blake

12. Edith and Henry Blake at their daughter’s wedding

13. Patricia and Olive Arbuthnot

14. Patricia as a debutante

15. Patricia in the 1970s

16. Claud Cockburn at the Week

17. Claud Cockburn and John Strachey

18. An iron lung

19. St Finbarr’s hospital

20. Claud Cockburn with the staff of Private Eye

Illustration no. 19 is reproduced courtesy of the Irish Examiner

Introduction: Epidemics

Iwas unlucky in catching polio in Cork in Ireland in 1956 as this was one of the last polio epidemics ever in Western Europe and the US. Dr Jonas Salk had discovered a vaccine that had been successfully tested the previous year and, at the time I fell ill, mass inoculation was being rolled out for the first time to stop the spread of the virus in Chicago. Across the city, health workers took over vacant shops, the forecourts of gas stations, the backs of trucks, parks and street corners to vaccinate people. The number of new infections declined as herd immunity was established, marking a turning point in the effort to stop epidemic polio. The success of this decades-long campaign was one of the greatest American achievements in the twentieth century.

Not that it did me any good at the time as I was admitted to St Finbarr’s fever hospital in Cork city on 30 September. When I was released three months later, I was at first confined to bed or was in a wheelchair and learned to walk again with metal calipers on my legs and wearing a plastic waistcoat to keep my back straight. Though my mobility improved markedly over the years, I could not run and have always walked with a severe limp. I was conscious of my disabilities, but I never thought much about why this had happened to me or about the epidemic in general. I could not have said with any certainty – and this self-inflicted ignorance was to continue until I was well into middle age – in what year it had taken place or whether it was caused by a virus or by bacteria. I sensed that thinking about this, picking at the emotional scar tissue, was not going to help me. Only in the late 1990s, when I was in Iraq as a journalist talking to doctors and patients in ill-equipped hospitals hit by UN sanctions, did I start to feel it strange that I knew more about sickness in Baghdad than I did about polio in Cork, when it had been me lying in a hospital bed.

I started reading about polio, a disease that has probably been around for thousands of years. There is an ancient Egyptian sculpture of a man with a wasted leg, looking very much like my own. Walter Scott was made lame by it as a child. But these were individual cases and it was not until the first half of the twentieth century that polio epidemics began to sweep through cities. Before then most people contracted the virus in infancy, when their mother’s antibodies helped them to gain immunity. Long before the Covid-19 pandemic made the phrase ‘herd immunity’ infamous, the pool of people who had polio without knowing it was large enough to prevent pandemics. It was modernity that gave the polio virus its chance: as 19th-century cities acquired clean water supplies and efficient drainage systems, babies were no longer contracting the virus in large enough numbers to provide protection. When collective immunity faltered, epidemics would surge periodically through cities like New York, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Chicago. Devastating though these outbreaks were, they seldom occurred at the same time in different places because vulnerability to the virus would vary.

I was surprised that nobody had written a history of the Cork epidemic which had paralysed part of Ireland for the best part of a year. It lived on in popular memory as a terrifying event and there were plenty of victims still alive since they were crippled as small children. Nevertheless, the epidemic had never been the subject of a book or a serious academic study. I asked surviving doctors from that period, who were far older and therefore less numerous than their patients, why this was the case. They said they believed that people in Cork had been so frightened of the disease that they wanted to forget about it once vaccination had removed the danger. Polio had always carried an extra charge of terror compared to other diseases because its victims, whom it crippled or killed, were young children. As I read up government documents and newspapers about the epidemic, I came to understand that a further reason for the silence was that many Irish people were ashamed of what had happened, mistakenly imagining that the epidemic was caused by Irish underdevelopment, and that this was a symptom of the failure of independent Ireland to successfully modernise. I interviewed any medical staff and polio survivors I could find for a long article on myself and the epidemic published in 1998. I planned to write a book on the subject, but this was delayed by the post 9/11 wars when I was to spend much of my time reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2005, I published a memoir about the epidemic as I experienced it called The Broken Boy. I described my experiences in the context of my family and of Ireland in the 1950s. The title was something of a misnomer, since I felt singularly unbroken, but it did at least tell the reader that the book was about the suffering of a small child.

I am glad I researched and wrote the book when I did because many of the best-informed witnesses died soon after its publication. Much of the text made gloomy reading but it ended on an up-beat note that later turned out to be over-optimistic. At the end of the final chapter, I had written dismissively of the last prophetic line in Albert Camus’ novel The Plague in which he wrote that ‘the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.’ I found this a bit portentous and out of date, writing that polio might have been among the last of the life-threatening plagues, such as leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, typhus, measles, malaria and yellow fever, to be eliminated or brought under control during the twentieth century.

Polio epidemics had a surprisingly short career: less than seventy years between the end of natural immunity and the widespread use of the Salk vaccine. It was a story with a seemingly happy ending and this was the topic of my original book. Few people realised – certainly I didn’t – that if polio epidemics were a product of modernity and not of backwardness, then the way might be open for other epidemics of equal or greater severity.

I was surprised but not very alarmed when Covid-19 was first identified in Wuhan at the end of 2019 because previous coronavirus outbreaks, such as SARS 1 and MERS, had not spread far and had been suppressed. As more information about the virus emerged in the early months of 2020, it struck me that in some respects the pandemic more resembled a polio epidemic on a world scale than the 1918/19 Spanish flu outbreak to which it was often compared. Covid-19 and poliomyelitis – to give it its full name – are alike in being highly infectious and most of those infected have few if any symptoms and swiftly recover. But they become carriers all the same, infecting others, some of whom may belong to the unlucky 1 or 2 per cent – there is great dispute about the fatality rate among victims of Covid-19 – who will feel the virus’s full destructive impact.

There are similarities in the treatment of both illnesses, particularly in trying to keep people breathing: the iron lung was invented in the US in 1929 and the first Intensive Care Unit was created in Denmark in 1952, both in response to polio. Simple methods of combating the two viruses such as handwashing are the same: when Queen Elizabeth 11 visited Australia during a polio epidemic in 1954 there were fears that the crowds of schoolchildren assembling to greet her might pass the virus to one another and maybe even to the young monarch herself. So the Australian government launched a mass hand-washing campaign, leading to a drop in the number of children contracting polio during the royal visit. Nobody seemed embarrassed by the fact that no such effort had been made before the queen’s arrival prompted it.

The poliovirus was worse for the very young; for the coronavirus it is the old who are hardest hit. For both illnesses, respiratory aids – the ‘iron lung’ and the ventilator – have been symbols of the struggle to keep people alive. In Cork in 1956, doctors did not seem to grasp how frightening such machines were for children: when I was in St Finbarr’s, one girl screamed and struggled when doctors tried to put her inside an iron lung because she thought it was an actual coffin and she was being buried alive. Politicians often compare the campaign to suppress the coronavirus to waging war against a dangerous enemy: they wrap the flag around themselves and call for national solidarity. Fear and a need to see visible action to counter it are a feature of all epidemics. In Cork, doctors were convinced that the disease would only be stopped when it ran out of victims. In this book I quote Jack Saunders, the city’s chief medical officer, insisting that a real quarantine was impossible because for every case detected there were one or two hundred undetected or undiagnosed in the community, principally among the children. Similar words were to be used 66 years later in Sweden and in US states like Texas, Florida and North Dakota to downplay the Covid-19 pandemic or suggest that there was no way of stopping it.

There were similarities too in the response of governments and peoples to the threat. At every level of society and the state, fear of death – or, more accurately, fear of being held responsible for deaths – drove decision-making. As a consequence, this was often ill-judged with under-reaction and over-reaction succeeding each other as the authorities lurched from commercial close downs to over-rapid re-openings. Wuhan city in central China with a population of eleven million could scarcely be more different from Cork with just 114,000, inhabitants in 1956 but popular reaction had points in common. As in Wuhan, local people in Cork convinced themselves that they were being fed false information downplaying the severity of the epidemic. There were rumours everywhere in the city, said Pauline Kent, a physiotherapist who treated victims, that dead bodies were being carried out the back door of St Finbarr’s at night. The medical authorities in Cork were truthfully announcing the number of new cases and fatalities each morning, though they were simultaneously undermining their own credibility by issuing upbeat statements, dutifully reported in the local newspapers, with headlines such as ‘Panic Reaction Without Justification’ and ‘Outbreak Not Yet Dangerous Say Doctors’.

Arguments about lockdowns, commercial closures and quarantines raged on a miniature scale in Cork during just as they were to do many years later in America and Europe. As related later in this book, my family had unwisely returned to Cork from London at the height of the epidemic because my parents believed that we would be isolated and safe in the middle of the Irish countryside. But our quarantine was never complete: my father, Claud Cockburn, needed to travel to and fro by train and boat between London and Cork to boost his journalistic earnings and was necessarily brought into contact with carriers of the disease. He may have underestimated its prevalence because by then the main local paper the Cork Examiner, that normally carried comprehensive reports of all events in the county, had stopped carrying all but the most meagre accounts of it. My father told me that its owners had been pressured into silence by local store owners and businessmen who said that they were being ruined by the epidemic frightening off customers and they would withdraw their advertising unless the press stopped reporting the disease. I did not quite believe this when my father first told me about it but when I looked at the files of the newspaper I discovered that reportage comes to an abrupt halt several weeks before I was admitted to St. Finbarr’s.

Rescue came as the epidemic burned itself out and the first doses of Salk vaccine arrived in Cork in 1957. It was in such demand that part of the first consignment was stolen. There was little surprise that the life-saving inoculation had been developed in the US, which many people Western Europe saw in the aftermath of World War II as the source of all good things and of scientific breakthroughs in particular. Perception of American competence and capability was partly shaped by its conquest of polio. Compare this with 500,000 fatalities from Covid-19 in the US at the time of writing. Everything that was done right over polio was done wrong over Covid-19. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, himself crippled by polio, had been the driving political force behind developing a polio vaccine, while President Donald Trump had minimised the danger posed by Covid-19, refusing to wear a mask and recommending quack remedies. In 1956 Elvis Presley was filmed on the vastly popular Ed Sullivan Show on television baring his upper left arm to be vaccinated, while in January 2021 Trump was vaccinated in secret in the White House. Presumably, he did not want to offend those of his followers, who were dubious about vaccination and considered it unmanly.

I was particularly interested in the social difference between those targeted by polio and Covid-19. The first was sometimes called a ‘middle class’ disease in Europe because it was the better off who suffered worst. As explained above, they had lost their natural immunity because they drank clean water and used modern sanitation systems. My parents never realised that their children were far more at risk in our isolated country house than if we had been living in the slums of Cork.

The opposite was true of the Covid-19 epidemic during which it has been the poor living in cramped accommodation and with pre-existing bad health who have been the most likely to be infected and to die. Health inequality exactly replicated health inequality. In Britain there was a sour joke that the lockdown only applied to the middle class, because they stayed at home while the working class brought them food and other necessities.

I live in the cathedral city of Canterbury in north-east Kent in southern England. I noticed in the first half of 2020 that, though television newscasts and newspapers reports focused almost exclusively on the epidemic, there was little from ground level describing its impact. Were people really staying at home? Were they frightened? Did they know people who had caught the virus and had died from it? What did they think of the government’s efforts to control it? As when I had started my research into my book about polio two decades earlier, I found that there was limited local reporting. Even worse, news gathering was even more sparse that it had been in the 1950s. The main reason for this was that local newspapers, the main source of local news, had been largely wiped out by competition from the internet which had taken away their advertising revenue. In Cork in 1956 the local business community had successfully threatened the Cork Examiner with withdrawal of their advertising in order to stop it reporting the epidemic. But in much of Britain and the US during the Covid-19 epidemic there would have been no need for such threats, because little was being written at a local level and what did appear was just reassuring comments from the county health authorities.

I did some reporting myself to get an on-the-ground sense of what was happening. There were some difficulties in doing so because during an epidemic people do not welcome people into their homes, even if they know the visitors. I decided to take a single small district in Canterbury called Thanington that I had written about in the past in relation to Britain leaving the European Union. This had the advantage that I had local contacts who knew me and would willingly talk on the phone.

Overall, I could get an accurate impression of how people in Thanington were coping with the first wave of the epidemic which was not very severe in Kent. This period ended when the government over-confidently lifted the national lockdown on 4 July 2020 when the infection rate was low, despite the warnings of government scientists. Again, there was a difference from polio: this was sometimes called ‘the Summer Plague’ because the epidemics normally took place in the summer months. The Covid-19 virus, by way of contrast, flourished as did flu during the winter. The number of infections began to rise again in September leading to fresh lockdowns across the UK and a consequent fall in the number of people testing positive for coronavirus. But in two districts, Thanet and Swale, on the north coast of Kent, infection rates inexplicably soared in November. At first health experts sent to investigate suspected this might be something to do with the behaviour of the people in the area. But they soon discovered that it was the behaviour of the virus that had changed and that it was spreading faster and was possibly more deadly than before.

This was the ‘Kent variant’ of the virus that quickly spread to the rest of Britain and to the rest of the world. It was predicted to become the dominant variant in the US by March 2021 and by then was present in every continent apart from Antarctica. I was singularly well placed geographically to write about this because British government scientists said that it had first been detected near Canterbury and this was confirmed by a senior local health official who revealed privately that it had originated in Margate, a run-down seaside town 15 miles from the city. Given that Margate was on my door step, I had local contacts who helped me research the beginnings of the ‘Kent Variant’ and why the north Kent coast had provided such a perfect breeding ground for the virus to mutate into a more deadly form.

Canterbury 7 March 2021

The Kent Variant

THANINGTON: THE FIRST WAVE

Thanington is a deprived area beside the River Stour on the western outskirts of Canterbury in northeast Kent. Before the pandemic many people here were working on zero-hour contracts as cleaners or supermarket shelf-stackers. Many settled Traveller families with a strong sense of solidarity live here, but the level of education in the area is low. Paula Spencer, who runs the local community centre, told me she was stopped in the street by a 15-year-old boy who asked her to type ‘BBC’ into Google on his phone because he didn’t know how to spell it. Twenty years ago the district used to be known locally as Little Beirut, thanks to the high incidence of violence and crime. This reputation had ebbed, though local people remain wary of talking to the police and speak of gangs taking over houses on the estates to sell drugs.

Compliance with lockdown rules was initially high: from the end of March 2020, when they were first announced, there were no children playing in the streets even though large families were crammed into houses too small for them. Many people were terrified of coronavirus, according to a resident who does not want his name published. His mother died recently, but not of Covid-19. ‘I think she really died of fear,’ he said. ‘She suffered badly from kidney disease, which made her feel vulnerable to coronavirus, and she was so terrified of getting it that the anxiety killed her.’ ‘The local reaction at the start of the pandemic was similar to when AIDS first appeared,’ Spencer said. ‘The scaremongering and the unbalanced reporting by the media – including the social media, where most people here get their news – combined with a lack of knowledge, education and understanding.’ People became more afraid than they needed to be. She had not heard of anybody in the area dying of the disease, though one young man she knew had committed suicide.

People already facing problems were unable to take the strain of being cooped up for so long. ‘My husband was a recovering alcoholic,’ a woman who has lived in Thanington for forty years told me, ‘but he went back on the booze and lost his job as a cleaner.’ She said that many people in the community had been drinking more in order to cope and predicted many divorces. Some have not been able to pay their rent and risk eviction and homelessness. She herself had run up debt on her credit card because she had no alternative: she was having to decide which bills she could afford to pay. Walking through central Canterbury before the reopening of pubs and restaurants on 4 July, she felt it was a ghost town: jobs were bound to disappear because many small businesses would never open up again.

Not everybody is so pessimistic. Older people in Thanington say children found it easier to adapt to lockdown. Job security was crucial to adults’ peace of mind. ‘I was off work from 27 March and only returned a couple of weeks ago,’ said Craig Hayes, who works as a caretaker at Canterbury Academy and has five children. ‘I was on full pay and I was left alone throughout the time off. We bought materials to do up the house so I have spent most of the time doing that while the kids played in the garden.’ He had been lucky so far, he said, though he worried about a second wave of the virus. Caroline Heggie, another long-term resident, is unemployed herself but said: ‘Both my neighbours work as hospital cleaners and their jobs are safer than ever.’ Pubs, restaurants, hotels and shops might not reopen, but she was encouraged that some supermarkets were taking on more workers, while those with hospital jobs were protected as ‘key workers’ – her daughter, for example, who had tested positive for the virus and was self-isolating in Dover.

I first visited Thanington early last year because it is an example of a poor white working-class district in which the majority had voted for Britain to leave the EU. It has a mixture of council and private housing and an estimated population of 2758 – low enough to allow its problems to be seen in some detail. Residents admitted that their area had a bad reputation. ‘I can’t even get my son to visit me, because he says the place is a shithole,’ one of them said. Its full name is Thanington Without, since it lies outside Canterbury’s medieval walls, but the residents sarcastically suggested that the name reflected the fact that it is ‘without a prayer, money or hope’. This is no longer quite as true as it was in the 1990s, when municipal workers refused to enter the main housing estate south of Ashford Road because they considered it too dangerous, and toys for a children’s playgroup on the estate had to be kept overnight in a gravediggers’ hut in the cemetery because there was nowhere else to put them. At one point the lack of essential services provoked a riot.

The turnround came twenty years ago, thanks to a £2.5 million grant from the EU regeneration budget. The money paid for new roofs and general refurbishment of the council houses as well as the building of a community centre with sports facilities and rooms where children could do homework. The crime rate halved and people in the rest of Canterbury stopped comparing Thanington to Beirut. But the district remains very poor: ‘It’s an area of huge deprivation with high unemployment and benefit dependency,’ said Paul Todd, who used to live there and works for a charity helping the homeless. ‘People are on the breadline and still have to use the foodbank,’ Spencer said, ‘even if a husband and wife both have jobs and are working as hard as they can.’ Cutbacks in government spending has chipped away at the improvements made with EU money. ‘A simple walk around the estate shows that it is more and more decrepit,’ Todd said, and pointed to uncollected rubbish, fly-tipping and the lack of repairs.

Among the signs of deterioration was a serious rat infestation. ‘People came to me and said there were rats in their kitchens, rats in their children’s bedrooms, running over kids’ feet,’ Spencer said. ‘Under bathrooms there was raw sewage seeping everywhere.’ The rat invasion may have been caused by work starting on construction sites for two new high-price private housing estates, with 750 and 450 houses apiece. Central government cuts to council budgets meant that Canterbury City Council allowed rubbish to accumulate, attracting rats, and was no longer operating a vermin control service. One family protected their house by giving their fence a concrete base sunk eight inches into the ground, with broken glass mixed into the concrete to