Stories of a life well spent

> Nonagenarian author Judith Kerr reflects on her time as a refugee, her work as a children’s author, and what lies ahead

opposed to Nazism.

“My father was ill in bed with flu and this man rang up and said: ‘They are trying to take away your passport, you must get out immediately’,” she recalled.

“I never knew his name and always wondered what happened to him, but he saved our lives.”

Her father immediately realised the gravity of the situation, and took the first train to Switzerland, where his wife and two children joined him a few days later, just one day before the Nazis took power in Germany.

The family finally arrived in London when Kerr was nine years old.

Kerr told the story in an autobiographical novel entitled When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a book that has been on German schoolchildren’s curriculum for years.

Two primary schools now bear the author’s name, one in Berlin not far from the Grunewald district where the Kerr family lived, and the other in London.

Kerr credits the success of the book with being “published at a time when the Germans hadn’t really managed to talk to their children about the past”. Kerr said she found the recent resurgence of the far-right “worrying”.

“You know, I have done all that. But I don’t think at the moment, it is anything like as bad as it once was,” she said.

She said she also did not think Brexit was a good idea, adding: “Then we’ve got Trump. It’s not a good time really.”

The author and illustrator is perhaps best known for her best-selling book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

The book chronicles the story of a little girl named Sophie and her mother, who are having tea in the kitchen when the doorbell rings. In steps a huge tiger which devours all the food and drink before leaving, never to be seen again.

Since its publication in 1968, the tale has been read by generations of children, and sold five million copies around the world.

Fellow children’s author Michael Rosen once said metaphorically the tiger in Kerr’s children’s book could be interpreted as a vision from her past – an underlying threat, robbing the family of everything they own and disrupting the comforting routine of a young child’s daily life.

“It was a bedtime story I made up for my daughter who was then three,” explained the nonagenarian, with curly grey hair and a mischievous smile, in the living room of her southwest London home where she raised two children.

Kerr recounted how her husband, screenwriter Nigel Kneale, was away at the time, leaving his wife and daughter “bored” without him. “We both wished somebody would come and I thought a tiger would be quite nice,” she said, recalling they had admired the creature’s beauty on visits to the zoo.

The book even features the same yellow and white cupboards in the kitchen on the ground floor of Kerr’s big, bright family home where she has lived since the 1960s.

Just five years shy of becoming a centenarian, Kerr continues to work, dozens of coloured pencils laid out in her studio on the second floor of her house overlooking a big park.

Her next book, Mummy Time, will be published in the autumn by HarperCollins, which also reissued The Tiger Who Came to Tea this year.

It’s been a long journey for an author whose family had to flee for their freedom.

“Here I am, 86 years later,” she said. “And all that time is because of that man who rang my father.”

A man whose name she never knew. – Agencies