From The Times, Saturday, October 26, 2002
There is a moment in Michael Rosen's new book of poems where something goes
badly wrong. It has been moving along for 40 pages, rather in the manner of
a photo album, with verbal snapshots of a London Jewish left-wing family.
There is Connie, his mother, leaning on the Formica table and saying she
never understood why Stalin got rid of his generals, and countless other
such joint appearances by the domestic and world orders. There is the
university radicalism, working life, a strange departure from the BBC,
writing, small children - lots of them - and then his ebullient 18-year-old
son Eddie being slid awkwardly down the stairs in a body bag.
You go back over it to make sure you've got it right; check that this isn't
some trick, trope or metaphor that even representational poetry can pull on
you when you're not looking. But no; there it is, just when Rosen, who is
56, is reminiscing about how he and his huge boy - six feet four and broad
with it - used to gauge his growth: "Like where his eyes came to, face to
face. The way his finger-tips edged beyond mine, hand to hand. His wrists
peering out of the ends of his shirtsleeves. The way the guys couldn't keep
hold of his body bag as they tried to slide it down the stairs." Not much
ambiguity here.
There's the police arriving at his house in East London; the place filling up
with them, asking him questions, seeing if it might have been a drugs death
or a murder - 18-year-old boy, small hours, Hackney, you get the picture.
There had only been the two of them in the house that night. Then there is
the doctor from down the road, a family friend who had known Eddie from
nought, forcing a way through the resistant police to inspect the body.
There's Eddie's mother, Rosen's first wife, having to be told. There's his
second, estranged, wife arriving. Impossible, unreal exchanges going on,
with Eddie still lying dead upstairs and waiting to be taken away.
All this is a composite of what he has written in this collection of 70-odd
prose poems, Carrying the Elephant, and what he now says when he recalls his
second son's sudden death three and a half years ago. For much of the time,
Eddie had been staying with his girlfriend, Melissa. But the previous
evening, a little under the weather with what seemed to be flu, he was with
his father. Eddie's stepsister had had "a fluey thing" the day before. So
there was something doing the rounds, as there so often is. Rosen remembers
mopping him with a flannel. He also inspected his skin and - crucially, in
the light of what happened a few hours later - saw no spots there. "I can
see it now," he says. "There were no spots." He put him to bed around
midnight, and gave him some paracetamol.
The next morning he made an early start. Rosen is well known as a radio
presenter and children's author, and he was due to perform in a school that
day. It was about 6am when he went into Eddie's room. As he writes in one of
the Carrying the Elephant poems, "he was blue and stiff and landed with a
thud when 999 told me to pull him to the floor".
As far as he was concerned, the police need not have asked their questions
since it was clear to him that he had killed his son. Three years on, this
sense has not entirely left him, even though the rest of the world knows it
to be erroneous. Meningococcal septicaemia was the culprit. This is the
illness caused by a bug producing toxins in the bloodstream which trigger an
inflammatory response. As Eddie Rosen's case displayed so graphically, it is
often rapid in its onset, coming in behind the mask of flu symptoms, and
often fatal. There was a massive rise in its occurrence towards the end of
the Nineties. In 1999, the year of his death, there were 1,828 known cases
in Britain, compared with 430 in 1994.
"The (police) doctor said to me, rather offensively, that Eddie must have
shown the spots," says Rosen. "In the final stages of MCS, you get red
spots. You do a glass test, putting the bottom of a glass against the spot.
If it doesn't disappear, it means there are burst capillaries in the skin.
And that means it's invading, and they (the sufferer) should be rushed to
hospital. At the time, I didn't know what MCS was, and no one whom I met
knew either. If you say meningitis, people think of the brain, and the
inflammation of the lining. MCS is the meningitis bug going into the blood."
Rosen is more medically literate than your average British dad, having studied
medicine at university for a year before switching to English. Even this
carries the potential for self-reproach, for although he agrees that the old
(Nineties) posters were "much feebler" about MCS than about the brain
variety of meningitis, he observes that the knowledge was available
nonetheless. "If you have lived a life where knowledge is important," he
says "well then, what do you do, I mean psychologically, when you think to
yourself, one reason he died is that I didn't have the knowledge?"
Three years on, he has this hard-won enlightenment for an answer: "You have to
deal with the fact that you reproach yourself. You can't stop doing it; but
you have to deal with the fact that this is what you are doing."
The practicalities of this course have not been made easier by the fact of who
and what Eddie was. For he was evidently a bit of a giant, emotionally as
well as physically. According to his father, he was nothing less than a
saviour during a difficult time for the whole family; Rosen and his second
wife were separating, and there was a total of five children involved,
including their own and the offspring of their previous partnerships. During
the break-up, in 1995 and 1996, he was largely in charge of Eddie, his
half-brother Isaac, and his stepsister Laura. "No one had rows with Eddie.
They may have had rows with each other, but never with him. He was like a
rock in every way. I was unbelievably grateful to him. He helped me more
than I can say at what was a fairly lousy time. Two days after he died, I
was talking to two friends and I completely broke down and said, 'He saved
me, but I couldn't save him.' That's what I felt. There were children
hanging on to me."
Futility set in - a deep, unshiftable feeling of what's-the-point. He never
thought about doing away with himself, on the grounds that it required a
particular kind of nerve. But he did think how brilliant it would be if he
didn't wake up, and for a while he would curse inwardly when sleep kept on
proving finite. At the corresponding point of the poem cycle, the writing
goes haggard and minimal: "He lost his life, His life was lost, We lost his
life, I'm losing his life."
