My mother never used to let us go to the town swimming pool & open air lido on August Bank Holiday weekend; in fact she often made us stay away on any hot sunny day in August when large crowds could be expected to be there.
This seemed like absurd risk aversion to us – she was worried about polio (still called infantile paralysis by some), but what were all the chlorine, the footbaths & showers (before you went in to the pool) for, if not to kill germs? We had never heard of anyone catching polio there.
Until the day it happened to a girl in my class. She had been a very promising swimmer – had represented the county – so she kept up her training come what may.
Fortunately for us it was not long before mass vaccination came in & we all lined up for our jabs at school.
It was round about 1980 that I decided that most of the recommended jabs for travellers are unnecessary – at least for the kind of places I travelled to. But I have always made sure that my polio was up to date.
Incidentally, the Times correspondent demonstrates in other ways that child elf’n’safety is not just a modern concern: ‘Parallel bars & vaulting horses are hardly suitable to untrained children of varying ages without more supervision than it would be possible to provide’
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