He might be one of our most popular writers – the champion for every bored,
overdrilled, tested-to-tears pupil in the land – but even the Children’s
Laureate struggled to find one of his offspring a place at a London school.
That’s right: Michael Rosen, the father to seven children and step-children
aged 2 to 31 (one deceased), poet, performer and broadcaster, author of some
of our best-known children’s books from We’re Going on a Bear Hunt to the
heartstopping Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, is mired in our great city’s
education system.
“We live between three primary schools, and we applied for all three and
didn’t get into any of them, because Hackney has spent the past ten years
selling off schools for Manhattan loft-style developments,” said Rosen.
He was told they were on a waiting list, and would go down it over time rather
than up. “If you ring local education authorities you enter the land of
Kafka. One woman described it as a waiting list and the next woman said no,
it’s not a waiting list and we never refer to it as a waiting list.”
So what is it? “Exactly. If it’s grey, it’s got a trunk and it’s got a tail,
it’s an elephant. Well, in this case they said it’s not a waiting list.”
Because that would imply parents are having to wait for places?
“Indeed. You’d say, ‘Well where am I on the waiting list?’ ‘It’s not a waiting
list. You’re sixth.’ ‘Oh, so it is a waiting list?’ ‘No, it isn’t. It’s an
applications list.’ Oh right, so I’m sixth on the applications list and then
you’d ring up again and they’d say, ‘You’re now tenth.’ ” Eventually a
school he hadn’t been allowed to visit, and for which he was not on a
not-waiting list, offered his daughter a place, but the story illustrates
much about Rosen. He speaks as he writes, loose and jazzy, alive to the
absurdities of language and life. This children’s author is neither cuddly
nor comforting: in person he is nervy, challenging, wild-eyed; in prose he
specialises in mischief, anarchy and some of the harshest truths adults have
to face, let alone children.
Most of this world view is embodied by his son, Eddie. In Rosen’s early works
Eddie crops up repeatedly as his muse. He was “an extraordinarily
rumbus-tious” child; he loved “chaos and anarchy”; he was “a stand-up
comedian as soon as he could stand”. In one poem, Nursery, when all the rest
of class are singing Baa baa black sheep, Eddie goes his own way (and was
sent to the naughty chair) by singing “baa baa moo moo”.
In that spirit, Rosen is a vociferous opponent of current education policy,
which he describes variously as loony, disastrous and backward; “teachers
are treated like squaddies”, children fare even worse. One of his poems, in
an anthology called No Breathing in Class, is about a teacher who is so
strict that she bans breathing.
There had been “this extraordinary shift in the past ten years: you don’t talk
about teaching and learning, you talk about management”, he said.
“The Government thinks it terribly important that you set up these weird
incentive schemes in classes, so you get ticks, smiley faces and
certificates. This is about competitive stigmatising. They think it’s
rewarding the children; in fact, it ends up punishing most of them.”
He is angry at the rigorous testing regime which has reduced his passion,
literature, to a series of tick-box exercises. Take SATs, the exams now
given to every child aged 7 and again at 11, forcing children to think like
Gradgrind, solely about facts.
“If you look at the questions they ask about a story, they are all obsessed
with telling the events of the story in the right order, understanding the
chronology, logic and facts.
“This is why you write up scientific experiments, but it isn’t why you tell
stories. They have completely misunderstood the purpose of narrative. We
tell stories to engage people’s feelings . . . Unless you do that, there
really isn’t much point. You might just as well do reports, you might just
as well do the stuff that you do when you talk about the germination of
plants or the metamorphosis of caterpillars.”
As the children get older, many schools say they don’t have time to read
“whole” books.
“What is the point if you never learn about outcome? The reason why you read
novels or stories is in great part because you want to see whether the
baddie gets their comeuppance, whether the girl gets their boy, why their
dad lied to them. It’s crucial to it.
“If all you do is just look at a page and then answer five questions about
adjectives and clauses or whatever, it denies what any of us are in the
business for. Any writer, ever, from Homer onwards.”
This “completely misleads teachers and children, and from them parents, that
the way we respond to stories is about facts”. In doing so, it “curtails the
emotional response”.
At the same time – and Rosen finds this a piquant absurdity – government
ministers are calling for emotional literacy, or happiness lessons. Nothing
to do with our children’s happiness, he said, only that of adults.
“All anxieties about children and youth are not about them at all, it’s about
our anxieties about our future as adults,” he said.
“We’re busy screwing up and so we project all that on to children saying, ‘My
God, the little beasts don’t say please any more’. ”
If you let Rosen talk, he quite rapidly takes an idea and runs away with it,
expanding into radical reform of education, scrapping “backward” faith
schools, rethinking the “19th-century” curriculum, letting children decide
what they want to learn. It’s imaginative and possibly hopelessly left-wing.
Cosy it is not, but it acknowledges the maverick side of children that longs
for freedom, not restraint – that is, the “Eddie” in us all.
“There is a yearning from adults that children just behave. If you summed up
the total body of children’s books since they were invented about 400 years
ago in two words, it [would be] ‘Be nice’.”
Rosen does not naturally fall into this tradition. Anyone currently in contact
with young children will probably be familiar – even overfamiliar – with
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, and its lonely, rejected bear at the end.
Rosen knows only too painfully that life doesn’t always deal in happy endings.
Eddie died from meningitis at the age of 18. In Michael Rosen’s Sad
Book,Rosen wrote about pain and loss for children in a way that is shocking
for adults.
“What makes me most sad is when I think about my son Eddie,” the book begins.
“He died. I loved him very, very much but he died anyway.”
One night eight years ago, Eddie was at home with his father, feeling a bit
groggy. Rosen thought it was a dose of flu and put Eddie to bed.
“I went in in the morning to see how he was, and he was dead. I rang the
ambulance man and he told me to pull him to the floor and roll him over to
one side and when I did, he was stiff, he was rigid.
“The ambulance got there in five minutes. And they came running up the stairs
and put the finger on his neck, did exactly as they do on the telly and
said, ‘No, he’s dead that one, yeah, he’s dead’.”
That sounds harsh. No, Rosen said, it’s “the right approach”. Children often
ask what happened to Eddie, the cheeky boy of his poems. He had to face this
question months after Eddie died, at a book festival in front of an audience
of 400 children.
“It was quite difficult for me to say it, but I just thought I’ll go ahead. I
explained how he died, that’s all you can do.
“In our culture we think we’re supposed to shield children from death . . .
because we as adults don’t yet know how to deal with the fact that we’re all
going to die. You don’t have to make it part of life by being obsessed by
it, but you have to find a way in which it’s part of the conversation.”
Grief-stricken and racked with guilt – “I just thought that in some way or
another I’d been tested and failed because I hadn’t realised that it was
meningococcal septicaemia” – Rosen travelled to Paris with Eddie’s mother a
few weeks after his death. There he found a postcard with an illustration of
a man carrying an elephant, and Carrying the Elephant became the title of
his book of adult poems about grieving for Eddie. Why? Partly because, as he
describes in one of the book’s poems, Eddie had grown so big:
“There were ways of figuring how big he got.
Like where his eyes came to, face to face.
The way his finger-tips edged beyond mine,
hand to hand . . . The way the guys
couldn’t keep hold of his body bag as they
tried to slide it down the stairs.”
Rosen keeps the postcard with him still. “I thought at that moment, that’s me,
I’m carrying an elephant.
“Eddie was very strong before he died, he used to carry me, he used to do a
thing where he picked me up and threw me about – which, as an adult you find
quite difficult, but he used to do that,” Rosen said.
Then he added: “All part of his stand-up comedy routines, really. I looked at
the picture and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s me carrying Eddie’. ”
Favourite reads
Not Now Bernard David McKee “A perfectly crafted book where the rhythm
of the words matches the rhythm of the pictures”
Emil and the Detectives Erich Kastner “This book marks the arrival into
children’s literature of the city, its street life and its excitements”
Each Peach Pear Plum Janet and Allan Ahlberg “This is perfection – a
book where child and parent can hunt through the pictures for events coming
up or events past, while a new rhyme based on old ones pulls you through”
Mister Magnolia Quentin Blake “This one just makes it ahead of Blake’s
Clown because of my bias towards neatly constructed rhyme, sitting here
inviting every child to join in”
Squirrel Nutkin Beatrix Potter “Potter knew a lot about naughtiness,
danger, guilt and fear – perhaps Nutkin was right?”
BFG Roald Dahl “Dahl went tender with his last few books, while hanging
on to the outrageousness. His publishers told him he’d never get away with
whizzpopping in front of the Queen. He did”
Raff, the Junglebird Zetta Wells “This obscure book was a passion of
mine when I was a child. Heartstopping moments include losing Raff. Does he
come back?”
I din do nuttin John Agard “The Caribbean poets helped change the voice
of the poetry we call ‘English’, and none so potent, so full of echoes and
resonance as this.”
A White Sail Gleams Valentin Katayev “In 1905 Odessa, two boys, one
from a middle-class family, the other the son of a poor fisherman, face up
to the upheavals following on from the Battleship Potemkin episode. I read
this many, many times as a boy”
Northern Lights Philip Pullman “One of the great achievements of modern
children’s literature: giving our heroine some of the most difficult
problems any protagonist has had to face”
