“Dad cradled his only son as best he could while hampered by the fact that the only part of Frankie’s body that remained outside the iron lung was his head and neck.”Īt a time when a single case of Ebola or enterovirus can start a national panic, it’s hard to remember the sheer scale of the polio epidemic.

“Frankie could not swallow-he was literally drowning in his own secretions,” wrote his twin sister, Janice, decades later. He died on his way to the operating room. His parents rushed him to City Hospital in Syracuse, New York, where a spinal tap confirmed the diagnosis every parent feared most in 1953: poliomyelitis. Then, the day before Halloween, 6-year-old Frankie Flood began gasping for breath. I now know that I was not alone – Philip Roth has recently written vividly about the widespread fear of the disease in his novella Nemesis ( see my review), and this excerpt from the Atlantic explains why: As a very small child, I didn’t understand that the miracle of vaccination protected my luckier generation against the disease, and I was frightened of it. I think that I felt this uncharacteristic anxiety because the book is set in a polio hospital and it brought back childhood memories of other – slightly older – children that I knew who had fallen victim to polio.

Joan London’s story-telling is both vivid and unsentimental and I feared that a character I had come to care about might not survive the pages left to read. It was one of those books that I looked forward to reading each night, and yet I hesitated too. There is an elegiac, melancholy tone to this novel.

The Golden Age by Joan London