There’s not much of a plot the book works as a series of vignettes, which provide a glimpse of what it was like to contract polio and to live and work in The Golden Age, including how the home and its patients were viewed by the outside world. In this home we meet a varied cast of characters including Frank Gold, a 13-year-old Jewish refugee from wartime Hungary, and his parents Ida and Meyer Elsa, a 13-year-old patient, and her anxious guilt-ridden mother Margaret and Sister Olive Penny, a nurse and war widow with a teenage daughter of her own. That outbreak - and the Royal Tour of Western Australia - feature in Joan London‘s most recent novel, The Golden Age, which takes its name from an actual children’s convalescent home, which existed in Leederville, a suburb of Perth, from 1949-1959. The outbreak was so bad - one newspaper report from 6 March 1954 claims “there were 15 cases in January, 80 in February and 40 for the first five days of March” - that an impending visit by The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh had to be seriously curtailed. One of those outbreaks was in Perth, Western Australia, in the early 1950s. In the 20th century there were major outbreaks of this incurable infectious disease, which caused paralysis in infants and children, in Europe, the USA and Australia. It seems remarkable that poliomyelitis (otherwise known as polio or infantile paralysis), which has almost been eradicated from the world thanks to the development of a vaccine in the 1950s, was so prevalent just a few generations ago. Fiction – paperback Vintage Australia 256 pages 2015.

The Golden Age by Joan London