Michael Rosen: I must not taint the joy of my son’s childhood with the fact that he died

I don’t understand time. I have to deal with it nearly every day — using the Tube, buses, catching trains from Euston, King’s Cross, London Bridge, Victoria. As it happens, I don’t have a watch, I rely on my phone and the clocks on trains, on buses and at stations. Talking of which, I love it when the stations have kept the big clock from before their modernisation — like the one at Waterloo.

But all that is about time-keeping, timetables, appointments, engagements. These are the moments in time to do with events, happenings, occurrences. Busy-busy stuff. The time that baffles me is how stretches of time in my life don’t have the same weight or meaning. As I turn 80, I am finding myself thinking more about the interaction between time and memory.

Here’s an example: if you were to ask me about the period in my life between the ages of about five and 11 (1951-57), my mind is full of stories, sensations, feelings, surprises. This period in my life was not particularly shocking or bothersome. Quite the opposite. We were living in a flat over an estate agents (not ours!) in Pinner in Harrow. That was my brother — four years older than me — and my mother and father.

What people tell me is a bit odd about me is that I can recall every room, every bit of decor, every window, every door in the flat. And more: I can describe the rooms and corridors of the schools I went to and when I look at the old photos, I can reel off most of my classmates’ names. And more yet: if I home in on individual children, I can bring to mind the shoes they wore, or the sound of their voices, or the way they laughed or flicked their hair. And, as some people might know, I’ve written many, many times about the incidents that happened to me during that time in my books: Chocolate Cake, The Babysitter, The Go-Kart and the like.

So this time in my life is mentally very long, full of detail and memory. Now, jump to another equivalent chunk of time (six years, isn’t it?) — let’s say in my thirties, in the 1970s. I was living in Hackney and although there are vivid incidents — like, obviously, the births and early years of my first two children — I can’t gather up these years with the same intensity and focus. Now one explanation for this might be that I was in the latter stages of a bizarre illness: hypothyroidism, which, if undiagnosed, can turn you into a sluggish, cold, muddle-headed, depressed creature — as I was!

Then again, I’ve discovered that the two or three years immediately leading up to my time in intensive care in the Whittington Hospital in Archway, in 2020, which included 40 days or so in an induced coma, are pretty well “wiped”. It’s almost as if the drugs that were used to sedate and paralyse me (I was ventilated) have knocked out a bit of my memory.

So, can I explain blurred or disappeared years purely in terms of my medical state? What about this? For several years in the 1990s I worked in Bush House in Aldwych, in the BBC World Service. I presented three radio series: Poems by Post, a poetry request programme; a book review programme called Meridian Books; and Early Versions, a series about the first manuscripts of famous books. I loved doing this work and immersed myself in it quite intensively.

Now quiz me on who appeared on the programmes and what we talked about and I can recall only a handful of them: the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe; Nick Hornby (Arsenal soulmate); and Connie Booth (Fawlty Towers) coming in to read some American poems. But so much of that time has disappeared into some kind of blurry pool.

I ask myself what all this means: it feels as if some parts of my life are as permanent as buildings that survive from that time and other parts are ephemeral, as disappeared as the radio programmes we made that weren’t put in an archive — that just went out into the air and were gone.

The lost times don’t matter all that much when it’s to do with work. What’s much more bothersome is the sense of losing, say, my children’s childhoods. One of those children — Eddie — died. What I’ve had to teach myself about that is that I must try not to taint the joy of his childhood with the fact that he died. It just spoils it. After all, I tell myself, I can no more “have” his childhood, than the childhoods of the living offspring.

Not long ago, the new owner, Katrina, of a second-hand bookshop and performance space in Muswell Hill got in touch. She wanted me to come in and do a reading. Then she said that she was at school with Eddie — Haverstock in Chalk Farm — and that I had met her several times. I went in for the reading and I’m afraid I stared at Katrina trying to remember her — but no. Then she gave me a photo of their sixth-form drama group, dressed up as ghouls in a play they had written. Do I remember it? Sadly not. It’s great to have the photo and see Eddie but I’m sad that I don’t remember the cast (Eddie’s “crowd”) or the play itself.

Time is very strange.