Author Michael Rosen has said he “can’t bear” seeing nurses being underpaid and “100%” supports their right to strike, after reading a poem in Westminster Abbey dedicated to the NHS workers who saved his life.
The former children’s laureate read an extract from his 2021 book, Many Different Kinds Of Love, at a central London coronavirus remembrance service attended by hundreds of bereaved relatives and key workers on Tuesday.
Rosen, 76, contracted coronavirus in March 2020 and spent 40 days in a medically induced coma after suffering a microbleed on his brain which has left him deaf in his left ear, blind in his left eye, and without feeling in his toes.
Speaking after the Westminster ceremony, Rosen said he became a fellow of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) in June this year and supported NHS workers’ right to strike.
He told the PA news agency: “I support them 100%.
“Their pay is just – I can’t bear thinking about it, the kinds of privations they have to go through in order to train and then the kind of schedules and the work they’re doing – they need much, much better rewarding.
“It’s amazing that they can put up with it and put up with it for so long.”
Gratitude doesn’t express it really, it’s just beyond gratitude, you feel you owe your very existence to these people. It’s just a job, the way they think about it is we go to work and we do this, and yet they did so many things beyond that— Michael Rosen on the nurses and doctors who saved his life
Rosen said he had met with some of the nurses and doctors who saved his life, and the encounters brought him close to tears.
“It’s a difficult moment, because these people have done so much,” he said.
“Gratitude doesn’t express it really, it’s just beyond gratitude, you feel you owe your very existence to these people.
“It’s just a job, the way they think about it is we go to work and we do this, and yet they did so many things beyond that.”
Rosen added that in his patient diary, nurses described acts of kindness including holding his hand and singing Happy Birthday at his bedside for his 74th on May 7 2020, while he was “dead to the world”.
“It’s beyond care,” he said. “When I meet them, I’m in pieces, I can’t bear it in a sense, I just want to cry.”
Rosen said his coronavirus recovery, which involved learning to walk again, gave his writing “a bit of a kick up the pants”, and he even mentally wrote some stories, including Rigatoni The Pasta Cat, while he was unable to move.
He said the Westminster Abbey service to remember the more than 200,000 people who had died due to coronavirus was “wonderful” and gave a sense of “the vastness of it”.
“I got a sense of the immensity and the pain,” he said.
During the hour-long ceremony of prayers, hymns and readings, representatives from several faiths also blessed saplings in the abbey hall, which will later form a living memorial to those who died during the pandemic.
The trees will grow at the National Memorial Arboretum in the National Forest at Alrewas, near Lichfield, Staffordshire.
The Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, paid tribute to those still suffering with long Covid symptoms and thanked key workers for their “courage, skill, and selflessness”.
Hundreds of gold and silver leaves inscribed with the word “hope” also adorned the floor of the hall, which mourners circled to read before taking their seats.
