Award-winning children's author Michel Rosen told tales about his own politically-active upbringing with communist parents on Wednesday night.

The 72-year-old prolific writer, former Children’s Laureate, and author of classics such as We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, shared tales from his memoir So They Call You Pisher!

The master storyteller was delivering the memoir of his own radical self-discovery for the third night of the 2018 Swindon Literary Festival.

His parents, both members of the communist party from the ages of 16, met after his mother went along to the Young Communist League table tennis tournament.

Their first date was The Battle of Cable Street in 1936, a clash between police in East London, who were seen to be protecting a march through the East London by the British Union of Fascists, and leftist groups who attempted to block the protest.

“My parents were there on that day and found themselves on the wrong side of the barricades, “he fondly remembered

His parents, facing hordes of mounted police armed with batons, then narrowly avoided being charged at before being whisked inside by a kind stranger.

The memoir retells his first encounters with politics and his attempts to understand it as a child. “Was Cable Street the reason why mum was communist?” he remembered asking his father Harold.

His parents even held communist party branch meetings in the family living room every Tuesday evening. Mr Rosen told how he and his older brother Brian would listen from the stairs.

“We didn’t go to bed when we were asked. We went half way up the stairs and peered over to see who might be coming to the Pinner branch communist party meeting," he said.

“Even if nobody turned up his parents would continue with the meetings. “It wasn’t the most propitious place for starting a world revolution,” he said.

The memoir leads up to the author’s own activism in the ‘50s and ‘60s and his arrest at the ’68 protests. He has also been a public supporter of labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and also came to his defence over the recent row over anti-Semitism in the party.

Questions from the audience came about how he parents eventually left the communist party after a family trip to East Germany in 1957.

The audience learnt the only time Rosen and his brother were called into the living room "for a chat", apart from when his father overheard a friend joking about stealing cars, was when his parents announced they were leaving the party.

Teachers from Swindon also put questions to the author on more topical points about how to engage children at school and the best way to teach the English language.

The author and lecturer of children's literature replied that books should be at the centre of the curriculum and to get children to regularly write their own short stories.