‘I WAS CONVINCED I WOULDN’T LIVE TO 18’

Author and illustrator JUDITH KERR OBE on her extraordinary life: surviving the London Blitz after fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, and finding inspiration for her classic book The Tiger Who Came To Tea

Author and illutsrator Judith eKrr OBE on fleeing Nazi Germany and surviving the Blitz

We came to London in 1936 when I was a teenager, three years before the war. We learned English quickly and, at that point, my brother and I were still having an adventure. We felt we’d had a very good childhood, much better than if there had been no Hitler and we’d stayed in Germany. It was so interesting. We went to Switzerland, then Paris, then London. If you arrive in a country and can’t understand what anyone is saying, then a year later you’re speaking their language, that gives you a tremendous boost. I loved being in Paris, it was wonderful. It’s a huge credit to my parents that my brother and I felt that way. They were always positive in front of us. The Second World War broke out a few weeks after my 16th birthday. On my 17th birthday the Germans marched into Paris, and then came the Blitz in London, where we were living. My main preoccupation at that point was a conviction that I wouldn’t live to be 18. Everyone expected the Germans to invade Britain and we knew my father [Alfred Kerr, a prominent German Jewish arts critic] was on a Nazi blacklist. They’d put a price on his head. We all felt if the Nazis got into Britain that would be it for us. The Blitz was pretty tough. We lived in Bloomsbury, which was badly affected. But we never experienced any hostility as German refugees. People were most generous. No one ever said anything nasty to us. There were three types of aliens: enemy aliens, who were the Germans and Italians; friendly aliens, such as the French and Poles; and people like my family, who were German but known to be very anti-Hitler. We were friendly enemy aliens. All the way through the war, I was always drawing. Eventually the Blitz quietened down and I started going to evening art classes. I began to realise that this was what I wanted to do. It was a great help. It gave me something to live for. I was very shy. Always worrying what people thought of me. If I could talk to that teenage girl now I’d tell her to hang on in there, it’s going to be all right. And don’t worry so much about what other people think of you. Though that would be empty advice because I still worry now. My husband [scriptwriter Nigel Kneale, who died in 2006] was a keen photographer and we would look through pictures he’d taken of our lives together – we were married for 52 years. The children [Judith has a Clockwise from above: Judith as a child in Berlin; today, in her studio at home in Barnes, Southwest London; with her OBE for children’s literature and Holocaust education in 2012; an annotated page of

for a Sotheby’s auction

son and a daughter] said how nice I looked when I was young and I thought I looked nice too. I wish I’d known then. My husband changed my life. He was a writer – he wrote the Quatermass serials. When I met him he was working for the BBC, just doing any old job, scriptwriting for children’s shows, adapting plays for television. He taught me a lot about writing and encouraged me. I struggled when I tried to write When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, the book about my childhood. I said to him, ‘This is no good. I can’t do it.’ He read what I’d written and said, ‘No, this is good. You must finish it – but you can’t just write about moving around all those countries. Hitler has to be on the first page.’ In the end, I got him on the second page. It was good that they published

The Tiger Who Came To Tea. The book was a success, but I had no idea it would pass through the generations in the way that it has. It was the first thing I ever did, a bedtime story for my daughter Tacy. I saw her little face wanting to be entertained so I put in everything she liked. We’d seen tigers in the zoo. We thought they were incredibly beautiful. So the thought of one coming to your house – wouldn’t that be lovely? And she was crazy about the idea of going to a café at night, so I put that in too. The teenage me would be in total amazement if you told her about her success in the future. All I ever hoped for was a way to pay the rent while being able to paint. I thought that maybe I could get a job as a ticket clippie on a bus, and ask for a very early shift so I could paint the rest of the time. I was very close to my father, who died in 1948, and I still have conversations with him in my head. I didn’t know how bad it had been for my parents – that they were terrified for their lives. My father was loathed by the Nazis. When they came to power, no one was allowed to pay him. Suddenly we had nothing. All our belongings were confiscated. We moved to Switzerland because he hoped to write for a big Swiss newspaper he’d written for before but they were worried about antagonising the Germans. So they refused to have anything to do with him. I didn’t know any of this. But it made me feel proud of him when I understood. If I could go back and relive any time in my life, it would be when my husband and I were first married. We’d finally got a tiny council flat just behind Kensington Church Street in West London – it was difficult to find anywhere to live in the 1950s because everywhere had been bombed. I remember going out for a walk in Kensington Gardens one Sunday and realising this wasn’t a special occasion. We could do this any Sunday. And it was wonderful.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is published by HarperCollins, price £6.99. To order a copy for £5.24 until 13 August, visit you-bookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640*

The teenage me would be in total amazement if you told her about her future success

Came To Tea The Tiger Who