Michael Rosen's world: socialism, poetry and folk tales Illustration This is my favourite illustration from Emil and the Detectives, a 1929 children's novel by the German writer Erich Kästner. It's the story of a boy who enlists the help of friends to foil a bank robber. This illustration, by Walter Trier, depicts Emil's nightmare in which he is chased by a steam train. It was another important book when I was young and it's at the heart of this year's Brighton Festival. Childhood I was brought up in Pinner in Middlesex, though my Jewish ancestors emigrated from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Russia. My teacher parents met in the Young Communist League at 16. They fell out with the Communist Party after the Soviets invaded Hungary, but never gave up on socialism or Marxism. Politics was passed down the family line, and I was taught to question things. There was this sense that there was never one source of information; never one opinion. Once, I came back from school and announced that the RE teacher had told us Jesus said we should be meek. Dad said, "No - be bold, not meek. And be curious! Miner's lamp My paternal grandmother, Rose, bought this tiny brass miner's lamp [pictured] during the 1926 miners" strike; they were issued as a means of supporting miners" families. I find it moving that my Jewish grandmother, living in London, felt strong enough in sympathy with the miners and their troubles to support them. It's a powerful link with the politics of the people in my family; I hope I keep that tradition alive. Poetry I started writing poetry at 15 because it was a bit of a buzz in our home. The spark was reading James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the poems of DH Lawrence and Gerard Manley Hopkins. I liked the idea that poetry enabled you to tap into things that had happened in your life in a slightly experimental way. Blacklisted I decided to train as a doctor because medicine seemed to combine all the humanities and sciences. But I felt I wasn't very good, so I switched to English at Oxford. Later, I worked for the BBC until they told me it would be better to go freelance. It wasn't until 1984 that I discovered I'd been effectively blacklisted, though I'd never made any secret of the fact that I was a Marxist with a small "m." Beginnings When I published my first children's book, Mind Your Own Business (1974), there was a lyrical, slightly melancholic children's poetry still prevalent, exemplified by Walter de la Mare. I was one of the first British children's poets to draw closely on my own childhood experiences and to relate them in the language children actually used. The idea that you could write about mundane things such as brushing your teeth was new. Wooden box made by Michael Rosen's father. Photo: David Denny Box Dad made this wooden box when he was a schoolteacher in the 1950s. Mum used it to store the letters that he sent from Germany while serving in the US Army of occupation in 1945-6 [he was born in the US, moving to the UK when he was two]. Throughout my childhood it sat in the cupboard at the top of the stairs, alongside the gas masks. But some time in the last 10 years Dad told me he had thrown out the letters, which really upset me because I never got the chance to read them - apart from one or two. He arrived in Berlin at a cataclysmic moment and was utterly moved by what he saw; the city had been smashed house by house and people were begging on the streets. He must have known his uncles had died in Auschwitz, but he never talked about it. He'd just say, "Well, they were there at the beginning of the war and they weren't there at the end." Eddie I lost Eddie, my second child, when he was 18. He had a temperature. It looked like flu. He went to bed and was dead in the morning. He died from meningeal septicaemia. Later, I came across a postcard of a man carrying an elephant, and thought, "That's me." It inspired my adult anthology, Carrying an Elephant: A Memoir of Love and Loss (2002). Writing helped me to understand it all. If something awful happens, there's a complete lack of comprehension. Why did it happen? Why me? And then you realise it's not just you. Becoming a father again helped ease the grief, though you can never sort it out. Painting by James MacKinnon. Painting This painting by James MacKinnon depicts a tower block on the edge of London Fields. City buildings at night do a nice thing for me. It's something about the humanness of human beings; people settling down, having tea, arguing, kids going to bed. It gives me a warm sense of communality.