My 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, London, for a few months so my father could work at Punch magazine. 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 small. Brook Lodge, to which my parents had moved after the war, was a mile and a half from Youghal where nobody had recently got polio. Perhaps its isolation – we had no car or phone – gave my father and mother a deceptive sense of safety. They thought that if Andrew and I did not take the trap or gig into Youghal, and kept away from the beaches, we would be all right.

On the boat from Wales to Cork my father had several conversations with other passengers. They knew more about the extent of the epidemic in the city than we did. We reached Cork docks late in the morning and mountains of luggage were packed into a van. We hired a car to go to Youghal, but first we wanted to do some shopping in St Patrick's Street in the centre of Cork. This was normally packed with cars and people, making it impossible to park.

On this day it was agreeably empty. The same was true of the shops. My father remarked that we seemed to have hit on a lucky day. The driver of the car turned around in astonishment. "People are afraid," he said. "They're afraid to come into Cork. Business is going to hell. If the epidemic goes on, in a few weeks half the shops in this street will be bankrupt." We hurriedly bought a few essentials and headed for home.

In Brook Lodge we felt safe enough. There was a walled garden and four fields, about 35 acres in all. But my father was wrong to think that the house was isolated. The main contact with the outside world was himself. We lived well, but were permanently short of money. In the month after we returned to Ireland, he had to return to London several times.

At about this time he suddenly got a severe headache and a pricking feeling in his fingers. He did not realise its significance. For every person who gets polio in its crippling form, hundreds get the virus without serious effect. This immunises them, but while they have the disease they can carry it to others. A few days after my father's last visit I had a headache and a sore throat. The local doctor was called. Within 24 hours he diagnosed polio. I remember little of what happened, except crying as I was put into a cream-coloured ambulance. I sensed the anxiety of the people standing in the driveway by the back door of the ambulance and sobbed louder.

I was extremely frightened. I had never spent any time away from my parents. The ambulance took me to St Finbarr's, the fever hospital, a converted grey stone 19th-century workhouse on the south side of the city. The hospital was old, but the staff friendly and kind. I lay in a bed in a crowded ward for three weeks. Nobody, apart from doctors and nurses, was allowed into the room. Every few days a nurse would point to the door of the ward and I could see my parents waving from the other side of a glass porthole.

A few days later my brother Andrew joined me. He was at a school in Dublin when I was taken to hospital. My father had immediately telephoned the school to tell the headmaster to send him home. By the next morning he was also in St Finbarr's. I greeted his arrival with relief. He was in a different ward than myself, but a nurse gave him piggy-back rides – we were not allowed to walk – up and down the stairs so he could sit on my bed and talk to me.

The poliomyelitis virus, to give the disease its full name, attacks the nerves of the brain and spinal cord leading to paralysis of the muscles. Some shrivel and die. In other cases the nerves are only stunned and can be brought back to life by courses of physical exercise over a two-year period. After three weeks at St Finbarr's I was sent to an orthopaedic hospital at Gurranebraher, on a hill overlooking Cork. It was a horrible place. I was lonely because Andrew had recovered and gone home, only his big toe affected by the disease.

The nurses maintained a gruff, barrack-room discipline. One night I woke up and heard a nurse telling a small boy who had messed his bed that if he did it again he would have to eat his own excreta. Afterwards I had difficulty sleeping because I was frightened the same thing would happen to me. For food we got a thin, watery mince with hard, boiled potatoes.

I was there for six months. My physical condition got slightly better. I could move about the ward on crutches with my legs in steel callipers and my back supported by a hard plastic waistcoat like a corset. I was miserably unhappy. My parents decided, against the advice of the doctors, to take me home.

I went to Whitechapel Hospital in London for a series of operations on my feet, the purpose of which was to transfer the muscles which had survived to do the work of those that had died. Over two years I learned to walk again without callipers or the plastic waistcoat and gave up crutches when I was 10.

By then polio was being rapidly eradicated. In the US, Dr Jonas Salk had carried out successful trials of a new vaccine in 1954. By the early '60s, polio – under the impact of mass vaccination – had largely disappeared. By 1957, the first trials of the Salk vaccine were taking place in Ireland and within a few years polio was eradicated.

Abridged from 'Polio: the Deadly Summer of 1956'. For the full essay, including its wider impact on Cork city, see www.independent.co.uk

Shane Coleman is on leave