The last time I saw Michael Rosen was in February 2020, when Covid-19 was something happening to far off people in far distant lands, and we toddled along to mass participation events without a second thought.
It was at the Lollies awards for funny children’s books, held in a crowded basement, and he was the entertainment, performing his poems to the school children who’d been invited along with many children’s publishing folk.
How the children loved him! And how the adults envied his fabulous rapport with his audience, the way he seemed to be almost a super-child himself, way more energetic and youthful than his 70 plus years would usually allow.
And then, just a few weeks later, the news spread on Twitter that he was gravely ill, one of the first high profile victims of the pandemic. At first it felt like flu, and then a friend who is also a GP checked his blood oxygen levels, which were a horrifying 58. So he was rushed to the Whittington Hospital where he spent 40 days at death’s door, in an induced coma. Today, as we talk on Zoom, he recounts the story of his illness and recovery with, even now, a sense of disbelief that this happened to him.
The occasion is the publication of his new picture book for children, Sticky McStickStick, illustrated by Tony Ross. It's named after the walking stick that helped him get mobile again. It’s an unusual book for kids, in that the main protagonist is the author, and it describes a process which few of them will go through for many years. But it challenges the idea — still sadly common in children’s literature — that disability is somehow linked to wickedness or weakness.
“That idea of disabled people somehow or other being bad, of course, we know is deep, in culture, the idea that somehow or other you’re possessed, or you’ve got damaged…” says Rosen, admitting that his only slight concern about the book is that at the end he can walk without the stick, which of course is not always the case. “I don’t want to give the impression that if people throw away their wheelchairs, they’d somehow get better or something like that. It’s just meant to say that face to face with a big challenge like that, with a lot of help, you can get there.”
The idea of perseverance helps with all sorts of challenges, he adds. “A lot of it is about your state of mind when faced with all kinds of things.” Children, of course, can find all kinds of things challenging. He recalls seeing his eldest son weeping because he couldn’t find the right bit of Lego. “You have to take it at the level that it was a disaster. So I hope that the book speaks to those kinds of things that children know, when they hit the wall. It could be a piece of Lego or it could be something very serious like bereavement or separation.”
He’s back performing to children — which many writers don’t yet feel confident to do — mostly by Zoom but also in theatres and soon in schools. He honed his acting skills at the Questors’ Theatre in Ealing as a teenager and then in Oxford as a student. But he didn’t realise his poems were “little monologues” until he visited a school in the 70s —“I think I was quite shy” — and saw a teacher read them. “He danced the poem”. It all fell into place and a legend was born.
Over the years he’s perfected it, so it feels spontaneous and unrehearsed. “As a kid, my parents absolutely adored stand up comedy, comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’s a bit like this, where you kind of pretend you’re chatting.’”
Last week Rosen won the J.M. Barrie Lifetime Achievement Award, and when we speak he is also kvelling from the recent announcement of the CLIPPA Children’s Poetry prize for his book On The Move, Poems about Migration. The poems are about being the son of an immigrant family, about refugees today and the fate of his European relatives in the war, something he also wrote about in his book The Missing. Uncovering the fate of his uncles and aunts took decades, partly because older generations didn’t want to talk about it — from sadness, and possibly some “guilt and shame” that they were not able to help.
Writing about his Jewish background is nothing new, but the trigger for researching his relatives’ plight in the Holocaust was the discovery of a box of photographs, sealed in a cupboard, the lost family members that no one could bear to look at. He’s made “incredible discoveries” in the last few years, and the result has been an increased focus on Holocaust education in his work, and links with organisations such as Jewish Book Week and the Association of Jewish Refugees, that bring him a lot of pleasure. He speaks with warmth about his local Liberal Jewish community, the Crouch End Chavurah group and their rabbi, Sanda Kviat, and educational work he’s done for them.
It’s nice to hear of all this harmony after some of the spats he had in the Corbyn years — as an old friend of Corbyn, he could be scathing about accusations of left-wing antisemitism. Partly, as he points out now, because he felt that no one was looking at Boris Johnson’s record on Jewish matters, including a “classic and horrific” Jewish stereotype in his novel. He’s not a member of the Labour Party (and has never been one, since his teenage years) and, “It is a bit of a mystery to me to be absolutely honest…. I look at the television, I feel like a 15 year old again, like trying to figure out what’s going on, because I can’t read it. I mean, to be absolutely honest, I really can’t read what kind of a party it is. And that’s not a political statement, it’s a kind of naïve statement.”
This leads us onto Israel, where I’ve often felt that the tone of his criticism of the Jewish state is downright frivolous. But as he starts to answer the question, calamity strikes. My screen freezes and —it transpires — my internet is down. We eventually reconnect on the phone but the moment is lost.
It’s a metaphor, we agree, for the difficulties of communication and perhaps a sign that these things need to be talked over in person, at length, and not in the soundbitey format of social media or even a newspaper interview. We agree to pick up the conversation one day at our local Israeli bakery -— his suggestion. “I’m sure that’s the way to tackle these things,” he says, “and after a good few hours of talking we might find a lot that we agree on.”
Sticky McStickstick: The Friend Who Helped Me Walk Again is published by Walker Books
