Michael Rosen has learned to walk three times in his life. The first was when he was a toddler – as you’d expect. The second was when he was 17, after he was hit by a car while walking home from a school basketball game. The police came to pick him up. “They heard this burbling from the ditch, and that was me,” he said. “They asked me questions and I talked – quite articulately apparently – and then they took me to hospital.” Rosen doesn’t remember anything about the incident, or the 12 hours that followed. In the morning, he learned that he had broken his pelvis. He spent eight weeks in a hospital bed.
“It was quite a wake-up call for a teenager to be in the midst of all this fragility of the human body,” said the poet, broadcaster and former children’s laureate, now aged 74, over video call in late February. He sat in his living room in Muswell Hill, north London, where he lives with his wife Emma-Louise Williams, a radio producer, and his two youngest children, who are teenagers. (Rosen has five children, including his son Eddie, who died of meningitis aged 18 in 1999, and two stepchildren.) He wore a blue jumper and peered over glasses perched on the end of his nose.
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