Michael Rosen with Bear Hunt illustrator Helen Oxenbury

IN those first, frightening weeks, doctors were scrambling to find out what the Covid virus did to the human body. They were trying to find out how to diagnose, treat and hopefully cure – and doing all this as the easily transmittable virus was tearing through the population and the death toll was sky high.

March 2020 – pubs were closing, toilet roll had become a vital commodity, and poet, author and broadcaster Michael Rosen was feeling a bit under the weather.

In his new book, Getting Better, the Islington-based writer considers the experience of 40 days in a coma, trying to recover, and trying to make sense of what had happened and what it told him about other life landmarks and how he reacted to them.

Speaking last week at Burgh House, New End, the author of children’s tales including We Are Going On A Bear Hunt and non-fiction such as a study of Emile Zola’s role in exposing the Dreyfus affair, he explained how, after being discharged, he had to take stock.

“I got Covid and was in hospital for three months,” he explained.

“I did try to die but they – the doctors and nurses – wouldn’t let me.”

As he works to rebuild his strength, the concept of recovery and coping has been at the front of his thoughts. It has prompted him to explore trauma and grief, and ask the question loved by the Stoic philosophers: can an individual control external pressures and overcome obstacles – or at least, manage the impact such obstacles have?

“The idea is that you do not get better, you are always getting better,” he says.

“You are not just getting better from one thing, you are getting better from a whole range of things, and that is throughout your life. You could say it is one state of the human condition, you are always trying to get better. You wake up in the morning and say – what am I doing? Oh, I am trying to get better!? I started thinking about this, and this thing that had happened to me, that I was disturbed.

“It is quite strange, the idea of being in a coma for 40 days.

“It made me think of other traumatic episodes in my life.

“How did I try to get better and what did I do?”

Michael explained he has very little memory of being taken ill. When he came out of intensive care, he was unaware he had been in a coma. The book considers companionship, friendship, love and the kindness of strangers. Michael is aware his life was saved by the dedication of people he does not know. That has had a profound effect on him.

“My wife Emma said to me that the shadow of death had crossed my face,” he recalls in the fortnight leading up to him being rushed into the Whittington.

“I got hold of the ambulance service, I called them from my bed, and they said ‘will you breath down the phone?’ So I did. He said ‘that doesn’t sound like Covid.’ He said ‘do you feel worse today than you did yesterday?’ I said, ‘no, not really’. He said ‘well, it’s definitely not Covid then.’”

A GP who lives in Michael’s street popped in – and said he was in genuine danger. Michael was rushed to hospital and the process of saving his life began.

In one section, Michal considers how his parents coped with trauma.

“I interrogated them in my mind,” he says.

He knew of the tragedies they experienced and how they reacted.

Aged 10, Michael discovered he had an older sibling called Alan.

“My brother and I were sitting on the floor in our flat in Pinner,” he recalls.

“I found a photo of my mum with a baby on her knee, so I say ‘oh is that me, or my brother Brian’.

“My dad says ‘it’s neither of you, it’s the baby who died.’

“That was the first time I had ever heard of this baby.”

Alan died of whooping cough during the war, and Michael never heard his mother speak of her lost child.

“My dad mentioned it every so often over the years, but my mum never, ever mentioned it – there were no pictures, nothing to mark him, no grave, my parents did not do the traditional Jewish thing of lighting an anniversary candle.”

His parents way of coping reminded Michael of their response to the Holocaust, which saw almost all of the European Rosen family murdered.

“I remember my dad saying he had two French uncles who were in France before and they weren’t there at the end

“If you are 10 and your father says that to you, what do you make of it? I remember asking my dad what happened and my dad saying ‘well, they probably died in the camps.’”

He recalled a trip to Germany as a child, and how one day the itinerary veered sharply away from sight seeing.

His parents went off alone, and Michael recalled his mother returning later, looking horrified, haunted. They had been to the Buchenwald death camp.

“All mum could say was terrible things went on there,” he says.

“All I could think of as a 10-year-old was the torture room at the Tower of London. That was the only way I could locate it.”

From the loss of his sibling, Michael considers the reverberations when Eddie, his 19-year-old son, died unexpectedly of meningitis, and how he coped with bereavement. A longstanding health issue – an under-active thyroid – stymied his career.

He had blamed himself for losing an exciting job at the BBC, his inability to secure a post down to his illness, he believed.

Later he discovered the BBC had been lent on not to provide full-time work to himself and six others by M15, who claimed he was too left-wing to work for the state broadcaster.

Understanding why things happen and considering how you react is at the heart of this moving book.

Michael is perfectly placed to sensitively consider adversity and reaction.

“Getting Better is a process,” he added. “You don’t get over it, you get on with it.”

• Getting Better: Life Lessons on Going Under, Getting Over It, and Getting Through It. By Michael Rosen, Ebury Press, £16.99