Michael Rosen

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading creative people reveal the formative influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the author, poet and performer Michael Rosen. He's also a broadcaster, known to Radio 4 listeners as the host of Word of Mouth. After publishing his first collection of poetry nearly 50 years ago, Michael became one of Britain's best-loved and most prolific children's authors, with dozens of books to his name. He's best known, of course, for We're Going on a Bear Hunt, the story of a family outing, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury.

0:47He served as the Children's Laureate and in 2023 was awarded the Penn Pinter Prize, the citation noting his ability to address the most serious matters in life in a spirit of joy, humour and hope.

1:05Michael Rosen, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thanks for having me, John. We're going to be digging back through your life, Michael, as listeners will well know. Of course, you nearly died from Covid a couple of years ago. How are you now? Well, luckily you're on my right-hand side because that means I can see you with my right eye and I can hear you with my right ear. If somehow or other by mistake we'd positioned ourselves differently, I'd have been craning my neck round because I can't really see with the left eye and I can't really hear with the left ear which I sometimes tell children when I'm in schools I can't hear with my left eye and I can't see with my left ear and see how long it takes for them to get it.

1:44You talked extensively about the experience of going through of spending all that time in hospital and the coma as well and the treatment and the recovery. How has the experience changed the way you work do you think? Maybe a little more urgently perhaps slight sense of you know mortality so this morning oh really a lot of people might say oh you're expecting to slow down but in fact you're speeding up with you yes I mean this morning I was footling about a bit and then I suddenly thought now hang on I'm in the middle of this poem cycle I'm writing for a book that I'm doing look I've got about an hour before I leave the house hey I'm going to do this I think before I got ill I might have gone nah do it this evening thankfully your life did go on and you're still with us but let's take you right back Back to the beginning.

2:28You were born in Harrow in North London. For somebody so associated with words and with language, was it a household full of books growing up? Oh, it was, yes. In fact, my friends used to come over and they couldn't believe it. So it was in the suburbs. It was Pinner, actually, and we lived in a flat over an estate agent. Not my parents, I rushed to say. They were teachers. And the rooms were full of books and my friends used to come over and go, wow, look at all these books. There's even books in the toilet. I think we used to call it the lavatory, didn't we? There's books in the lavatory. And then they would say, has your dad read all those?

3:06And I'd say, yeah, and my mum. And they couldn't believe it. They used to go along the shelves sort of wondering how anybody could have read so many books. What were the books in your household library? Well, my dad had studied English at university so there was loads of old stuff, you know, like Beowulf, very musty from the 1930s with these notes all over them, and I used to stare at those. We used to play games with the Oxford English Dictionary. There were two volumes. It was the shorter, as my dad would call it. Let's get the shorter down, Mick. And then we used to play a game where I had to read out a word and he had to give the definition, and you'd make up completely bogus definitions, and we would just be absolutely killing ourselves with laughter.

3:49There was a lot of old political stuff. The orange covers of the Left Book Club. I can see whole shelves full of those. Your parents were both communists, weren't they? Yeah, they were up until 1957. But the Left Book Club, which wasn't officially communist, it was Labour, Socialist, and so there were whole rows of these. And I remember thinking, why are all these books orange? You know, about seven years old. And you say your parents were both communist card-carrying members until 1957. What happened then? Well, Hungary happened. Right, of course. And it happened at a moment that I'll never forget, really, because we were in Trafalgar Square demonstrating against the British and French invasion of Egypt and Suez.

4:27And I can, in my mind's eye, mind's ear actually, I can hear Nye Bevan speaking in the distance. You begin to restore the tarnished reputation. And that is to get out, get out, get out! And I'm dabbling around in the water in the fountain. And then suddenly somebody came up to my parents and said, They've gone in. The tanks have gone in. They've reached Budapest. And then I racked back in my mind as a 10-year-old, Budapest? Is that in Egypt? But your parents left the Communist Party then in protest at the invasion, the Soviet invasion. More or less, yes. I think they left it a few months while they argued about it.

5:07And then there was this memorable moment when my parents asked me and my brother into the front room, into the sitting room, and this is very rare, we didn't get one of these type of conversations usually, and my dad said, we're leaving the party. And I remember thinking, what is this? Well, I had no idea really what it meant. I didn't really understand why it was so important to them, and basically it was the end of a dream for them. I mean, they had joined the Communist Party aged 17 when it seemed to them that the Communist Party was defending them against fascists in the east end of London.

5:45They're Jewish. Moseley was not only trying to march through the East End, but there would be people standing on street corners, jeering and shouting and pushing, and even worse, occasionally throwing things and so on. And they had to run the gauntlet of that. I mean, my dad used to make a bit of a joke about it. He used to say when he was courting my mum, he had to go from behind the London hospital up to Bethnal Green. And he said, oh, the risk I took to go up to Bethnal Green, sort of outside of the Jewish quarter, if you like. and Mum would say, oh shush, you know, you always make a drama of everything.

6:18Were they part of that Battle of Cable Street then? I think it was their first date, John. Quite literally, yes. When it was the communists and the socialists and local people confronting the fascists who were arriving on the streets. October 4th, 1936, we were told the story, me and my brother, many, many times over. Passing the Tower of London, 5 ,000 fascists rally to their mobilisation for the much-advertised march through the East End. in step here thousands of east enders prepare to resist the invasion barricading the path the fascists would take six thousand police are already concentrated in the area others are rushed to reinforce them communists laborites and jews jam the fascist route i think it was a sort of glorious moment for them personally it was when they got together also socially politically culturally that this was a moment when they stood up and said no you cannot march through here Oswald Mosley

7:17and in fact Mosley and the British Union of Fascists were kept away towards the Tower of London in Mansell Street and never in fact were able to walk down Cable Street but my parents had another funny story about it which was that all sorts of barricades were going up and famously my parents got caught on the wrong side of the barricades and some mounted police were coming towards them and they were getting very nervous when suddenly a door opened and they were pulled inside. So my parents always used to temper this heroism with a little bit of anticlimax. It was a Jewish household as well, as you've already said.

7:51How important was faith to the family? Faith not at all, but what's called Yiddishkeit, that's to say Jewishness, very important. My parents used to talk about being Jewish. They used to use lots and lots of Yiddish words. In fact, a leap ahead by many, many years, I've started going to Yiddish classes. Before going to Yiddish classes, they asked us, how much Yiddish do you know? And I thought, well, about 20 or 30 words, maybe. And so I sat down at my computer and I wrote down every Yiddish word or expression that I could remember that my parents told me, and it came to very nearly 300. Do you need to go to class?

8:28I do. Oh, yes, I do. I'm actually bottom of the class. Are you going to put it to some kind of literary use, do you think? I hope to translate some poems. I mean, most of them have been translated already, but never mind, I will do it. And turns like some of yours into Yiddish, maybe. Oh, that's a thought. Hey, no, I hadn't thought of that. Come on, Michael. Yes. We're going on a bear hunt in Yiddish. That's already been done. Oh, is it? Yeah, you see. So there we are. You see people are at one jump, two jumps, eight jumps ahead of me, which is the story of my life, really.

8:59On this programme, I ask my guests to choose some of the most important influences and experiences that have shaped their own creativity. and your first choice is a painting by Bruegel. It's the Netherlandish Proverbs. When did you first see the painting? Well, I should think when I was nought, because my dad, I think, had acquired some great big reproductions of paintings from the 16th century. There was a Kranach, I think it's the one called The Stag Hunt, and this Netherlandish Proverbs painting. It really is quite extraordinary, because what Bruegel has done is people, a huge canvas, at least it seemed to be huge to me looking up at it, and hundreds and hundreds of people acting out proverbs.

9:43So if you think casting, not pearls, in this case it's flowers, I think, before swine, then it's there. No use crying over spilt milk. Somebody's spilling some milk. Somebody's spilling some milk. It's no use banging your head against a wall. It's no use tiling a house with pies. But to the delight of my friends, there's some rude ones. So not only did they come over to the house and go, look at all these books, they said, let's look at Mick's rude paintings. So they used to all come over... And spotting the tiny figures doing rude things. Well, and it's not all that rude, but I suppose, you know, 1950s Pinner, it seemed rude.

10:20So there's a man, sort of, in a first-storey window, and there's an inside of a moon, and his hand seems to be around his waist, sort of waist level, and in fact he's peeing on the moon. Oh, right. Where is that one? We've both got to say we've got a photocopy of the painting. On the left, there's a building. Yeah, I've got him. And the proverb is something like, who does he think he is? He thinks he can pee on the moon. He's literally peeing on the moon. And there is, in fact, you can't see it in your little repro, but a little dotted line. And so my friends used to go, look, you can see the pee.

10:52And they'd get really excited. But even more exciting, if you look to the doors, two bottoms coming out of what used to be called a Jake's or a John in the olden days. and then loads of blokes trying to get into the loo, backing into it. Do you see? They're all backing and they've pulled their hose down, you know, their tights, they've pulled them down, they're all trying to get in. And the proverb being, they all think they can shh in the same John. And, of course, my mates used to think this was hysterical. You know, the idea of loads of people backing into a toilet with their trousers down.

11:26It's a very literal representation of proverbs. Did you understand what the proverbs were at the time, do you think? We had a guide. Oh, really? So there was a book. It had the reproduction and a tissue paper, cellophane piece of paper with numbers. So if it said 16 and then you looked across... Oh, I see, right. ..and then you saw 16. And so my friends used to paw over this as well and go, look, look, there. It is a sensational painting because it's an expression of Low Countries culture at that time. It's the genius of the people, their proverbs. This isn't written culture, he's alluding to.

12:01It's the oral culture of the people of the Netherlands, well, indeed, of Northern Europe, you might say. And at the same time, these scenes are very down-to-earth. These are very ordinary people. All life is here. It feels like it. Which I can imagine appeals to you now. But why did your parents have it on the wall, do you think? Because they were great believers in the wisdom of the people, if you like. so one of their favourite poets was Carl Sandburg and Carl Sandburg wrote a book which he called We the People which was made up of people's sayings and you can almost marry that poem and that book up against this painting and also they loved traditional songs and music so the first music I can remember was Burl Ives and the moment I say that I can hear Burl Ives singing Lolly too dumb, Lolly too dumb I went out one morning to take the pleasant air Lolly-Doo-Dum, too-dum, Lolly-Doo-Dum day My dad used to sing French, German, he loved German folk songs, Italian.

13:09So my head is full of various forms of popular culture, if you like. So your parents saw this as a political artwork in a way. It was depicting everyday life. Obviously it's full of life. It's comic as well. Is that why you've chosen it as an influence? Because all of those aspects can be read into your own work, do you think? Yes. I mean, it's not why I chose it. I chose it because it's so in my face. You know, if you say, Michael, sit yourself down in the living room in your house when you're 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 15, then, bomp, this is what comes up in my mind, alongside a carpet that I used to love digging my fingers into and the courtier stove that my dad used to kind of sit in front of and pray at almost.

13:51Do you know what I mean? And so, yes, a comic. Indeed, I was introduced to comedy very early on. My parents used to love Peter Ostinov, Dennis Norden, Frank Muir. Absolute obligatory listening. So there was a lot of comedy. And both mum and dad were very good at being mimics of imitating accents and voices. And my brother as well. You've painted such a vivid picture of family life. I mean, it sounds, in a way, quite an eccentric household as well. And all of these different interests that your parents have, the academic interest, the political interest, the sense of humour as well. Did that make you something?

14:24I'm wondering what sort of child you were. Were you regarded as different as a child? Were you quite an odd child? I don't think I was regarded as particularly odd up until about the age of 11. I mean at school. Yeah, that's right. But I think things changed when I went to secondary school. And I got in with a group who I can only describe as sort of school surrealists. and there was a whole group of us and we entertained ourselves and whoever happened to want to be anywhere near us. We just got up to all sorts of pranks and crazy stuff. I mean, I'll take one example. You know, there were school lunches where you all had to sit down to eat school lunch and a group of us decided to come in one day with our own lunches and candelabras and we somehow or other got hold of those red ropes with little hooks on the ends and we got pictures of the Queen and Winston Churchill and we suddenly whipped these out of our bags and had a banquet in the middle of the school hall.

15:24And, of course, there was a riot. The whole school came rushing towards us to see us and we were going, cheers, here's to Winston Churchill. And I can remember the deputy head after it was all over. She blamed it all on me, as it happens, and it really wasn't my idea. But anyway, she came up to me and she said, I don't think you realise, Rosen, that the point of a grammar school and the point of being a grammar school pupil is that you must learn how to conform. I thought that sort of explained quite a lot as to why there was a difference between the school surrealists and the ethos, if you like, of Harrowield County Grammar School.

15:56When did you first start taking an interest in poetry and writing poetry? The very first time was when Miss Grant came in and said, today we're going to do dramatic monologues. Is this an English class? Yes. And then she took out Robert Browning's The Poem That Is Usually Called My Last Duchess, though in fact I think Browning called it something else like Ferrara. That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive. I call that piece a wonder now. Fra Pandolf's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands. It's a sensational poem. Spoiler alert coming, for those of you who don't know the poem, is that as you read it, and it's the Duke talking, you realise that he's probably done away with the Duchess.

16:42he's killed her and possibly some others as well but you don't know that and he never says that and so the irony of the poem and why it's full of dramatic irony you know do you know more anyway all that stuff and I remember thinking this is genius I just thought this was the cleverest thing that I'd ever read in my whole life I was about 13 and then at the end of the lesson Miss Grant said now go home and write a dramatic monologue and I just I loved that I went home and and I wrote something, I mean, quite extraordinary and odd, a poem about a bloke standing on a beach and he's not being merciful to somebody who's pleading for his life.

17:24And so I sort of picked up the kind of morbid quality of the Browning. But where it came from in my imagination, I've no idea. So that's responding to a challenge. What about writing poetry for yourself, about wanting to express something of yourself through words? So we come now to O-level GCSEs these days, and on my O-level course, we had the Pageant of Modern Verse, poems by D.H. Lawrence included Snake, Bat, Man and Bat. And I loved these. I just thought, they're not exactly dramatic monologues, but they are monologues, you know, and D.H. Lawrence is both in the moment and outside of the moment.

18:05when I describe it to students I say D.H. Lawrence was able to capture the idea that he's walking along beside himself in the swimming pool. So in the poem Man and Bat he encounters a bat and he somehow or other discovers he's got a kind of ancient fear of bats. So around about this time I was in my bedroom so now we go up to the next floor above the living room in the flat in Pinner, and the windows open and a moth has flown in. And I remember batting the moth away, and then I think I killed it. And then I thought, I could write a poem like the D.H. Lawrence poem, and I called it Moth. So did you then start writing your own poetry without referring to some of the great poets?

18:48When did you start becoming an original writer? Yes, I've still got it, actually. I've got a red notebook, and I started writing poems a bit like D.H. Lawrence, a bit like Carl Sandburg. Carl Sandburg does a lot of stuff of children talking, parents talking to children. Why do the children put beans in their ears when the one thing we told them not to do was put beans in their ears? You know, that's a Carl Sandburg line. And I started sort of writing down things that my mum and dad had said, like, never let me see you doing that again. And I would write these things out in different ways. And also, I absolutely love Gerard Manley Hopkins.

19:27The idea that you could get hold of words and just stretch them and break them and make them mean things. You know, dappled, dawn, drawn, falcon. I mean, what is a dappled, dawn, drawn, falcon? Well, he's talking about the wind hover. And he's, you know, I caught this morning, morning's minion, kingdom of daylights, dauphin, dappled, dawn, drawn, falcon. And he's got something about the underneath him riding steady air. He's breaking the grammar. He's breaking the syntax. And I just thought, wow, you could do that. And I did experiment quite a lot with that. I mean, nobody was interested in those as it happens, but I've still got those tucked away, sort of gathering dust in the Red Notebook.

20:06When did you first get published? What happened? Well, actually, the very first book was... I was still at university. I wrote a play called Backbone, and it got published by Faber. I was only 20, but then there's a bit of a pause, and I'm scribbling these poems, beginning to develop a kind of voice of my own. And I was hawking these around and tried Faber because they had published the play. And they said, well, no, you know, we do T.S. Eliot. You know, we don't do this bloke, Michael Rosen. But anyway, they went on being hawked and they landed up at a kind of bohemian publishers called Andre Deutsch, not existing anymore, and a wonderful woman called Pam Roids, who said, oh, I like these.

20:46Have you ever heard of somebody called Quentin Blake? And so I then met up with Quentin. and he liked the poems and I can remember, I can see him, he had a great big sheet of paper in front of him and he got me to read the poems and as I read them he sort of drew me you know, I was describing, you know, hiding behind the door and my brother coming into the bedroom and me kind of whacking him over the head with a pillow and he would draw that, you see, and he was laughing quite a lot as well maybe the piece of paper was filled with about 30 or 40 little vignettes like this and I then went over to look at it and I laughed I said, oh, that's it, you've got it, you see.

21:23And ever since then, I've always thought what's brilliant about Quentin is that he kind of mimes onto the page. I think of him as a mime artist. It just so happens he doesn't mime, he draws. And sometimes he's done pictures, which is at least four extra jokes on top of my poems. And I look at them and I just so admire them and I so love them. But did you need that for the poems to succeed, for them to be published, for this partnership to start, do you think, for the visual representation of what you were writing? I think so. Poems are very bald on the page. They seem to start in mid-air. So one of my poems in that book begins, I share my bedroom with my brother and I don't like it.

22:01OK? But who? Who? If you're an eight-year-old, what do you mean, I? Who's I? And who's your brother? And why should we care whether you like it or not? So it's like a curious sort of mid-thing. And then it goes on about his bed's by the window under my map of England's wellways that's got a hole in where his friend Tony Sanders, he says, once killed a Roman soldier. Boom! With the Radio Times. Boom! That's me performing it. When I'm performing it, I can do a little intro. I can say, you know, this is me when I'm nine or something, or a bit younger. You're illustrating it, and you're doing it here for me right now with your hands, you're performing.

22:39And that's what Quentin did on the page. But if you've got that boldly on the page and you're an eight or nine-year-old, it's sort of, like, dislocated. We talked earlier about the influence of folk music on your work. There is, of course, a folk song vibe to your best-loved poem, We're Going On A Bear Hunt. Do you remember how Bear Hunt started, the very first moment? Well, indeed, it is a folk song in various forms. The Brownies go on a lion hunt. In America, they go on bear hunts, but in their version, there's a gun involved, and quite often the version ends when they get to the bear. I can remember a wonderful Scots folk singer, Alison McMorland doing it.

23:18And so I was getting it from various directions. And then I was performing it in a school. And the artistic director of Walker Books came to see my show, you see. And I thought, I wonder whether he wants to publish any of my poems. Anyway, he comes up to me in the end. He says, that bear hunt thing at the end, that would make a really good book. Can we do that? And I said, yeah, you write it down. He said, no, you write it down. I said, no, you write it down. I said, no, he said, you write it down. We stood there arguing. I said, you write it down. I said, I want you to write it down. So I went away, and I immediately discovered that when I perform it, even now, when we go through the grass, I go...

23:56When I go through the mud, I go... I have a whole little routine with the boots getting stuck in the mud. Like that. Well, you can't write that. You've got to come up with some words. Anyway, so I did that and came up with Swishy Swashy. And also, I hadn't said long wavy grass or things like that. I had to find some other descriptions anyway. and so I then handed it over and they did say how do you think that might be a picture and I said I thought maybe it could be like carnival there'd be kings and queens and dancers and all this and then maybe a bloke in a bear suit and they went hmm it's not quite what we've got in mind Mike so I went alright okay and we'll get Helen Oxenbury to do it and I thought wow Helen Oxenbury I read her books to my kids and these wonderful board books of babies playing and all the rest of it.

24:46And I thought, oh, wow, this is going to be amazing. And then about two years later, I think as long as that, I got this phone call and it was almost the sound of someone weeping at the other end saying, you've got to come in, Michael. You've never seen anything like this. People get very emotional in the children's book world and that's why I love it, actually. And so I went in to Walker Books and taken upstairs to a darkened room and there are these paintings, these incredible paintings on handmade paper of what looks to me like a family holiday in Cornwall. And I'm thinking, where's the bear?

25:23Are there any bears in Cornwall? You see how literalist and tedious I'm being now, I'm really ignorant. And as they move each sheet, the breathing's getting kind of faster, you know. Isn't it incredible? Isn't it incredible? I'm trying to keep up with the level of emotion going on here. and then they said, it's going to be an incredible book and I didn't dare say, is it? And then I went home. Did you not know straight away? Did you not look at those drawings? I am professing to complete clod-hopping Philistinism. I had no idea how this would work and then the book came out and there was this huge kind of explosion of love for the book.