COME TOGETHER

An inspiring portfolio of poetry, painting and prose in praise of the open-hearted spirit of our United Kingdom

Iwas nine when my family fled from Germany, two days before Hitler came to power in 1933.

My father was a drama critic, who wrote and broadcasted against

the Nazis. We found out later that the police came to our house the following day to arrest us. At first we moved to Paris, but my father couldn’t find any work. Then the director Alexander Korda bought one of his scripts, which gave us enough money to travel to Britain in 1936. That saved our lives, because otherwise the Nazis would have caught us when they invaded France. I don’t think Korda had any intention of making the film; he did it as an act of kindness.

My mother had never been to England, but she had had an English governess as a child and was in love with the idea of it. She prepared herself for the move by reading the whole of The Forsyte Saga. When we arrived, she couldn’t believe how different it was from what she was expecting. London was darker and colder than Paris, and the people were very quiet. I remember going out for a walk to the Embankment, and the sun was just a faint red thing, just visible through the fog.

Even so, my brother Michael and I realised almost immediately that this was home. Later, we decided that we had had better childhoods than if Hitler had never come to power. Because our parents had protected us from the dangerous reality of our situation, we loved the experience of being refugees – it was always so interesting. I was astonished when I found out many years later that my mother had not only contemplated committing suicide while we were living in Paris, but planned to take us with her.

Friends paid for both Michael and me to go to boarding-school. Nobody ever teased us for being German, which is quite remarkable under the circumstances. I think Michael was bullied a bit for being a new boy, but then he played in a football match and saved all the goals, and that was that; and within a couple of terms he had won a scholarship. He was studying at Cambridge when the war started, and he was arrested as an enemy alien and interned on the Isle of Man.

It was Michael Foot who got him out; my parents wrote him a letter and he passed it to the Home Secretary. Within a week, my brother was free, and later enlisted in the RAF.

I found a job working in a bombed-out hospital for a woman called the Hon Mrs Gamage, who helped the war effort in all sorts of ways. She said: ‘Don’t tell anyone that you’re German. It could cause complications’ – so I didn’t. Everybody was extraordinarily kind. There were three categories of foreigners: enemy aliens, who were the Germans and the Italians; friendly aliens, who were the French and the Poles; and then there were people like my family, who were known to be Germans but anti-Hitler. We had a special category. We were known as ‘friendly enemy aliens’.

When the Blitz was at its height, some friends of my parents invited me to stay with them in the country so I could get a few nights’ rest. I didn’t want to go, because I was frightened that my parents might be killed and I wouldn’t know because the phone lines were always down. My mother and I were arguing about this in a police station, where we had to report my departure. A policeman overheard us, and told me to give him the number where I was staying. He said he would keep an eye on them while I was away, and promised to ring me up if anything happened. I’ve never forgotten it. All the same, I didn’t feel I truly belonged until I met Tom [the screenwriter known professionally as Nigel Kneale] in 1952, when he was working at the BBC. A year later, he wrote The Quatermass Experiment, and we had enough money to get married. He was a very funny and interesting man who liked me just the way I was, and always encouraged me. The Tiger Who Came to Tea was a story I made up for our daughter Tacy, and I put in all her favourite things; and Mog was the cat we got when we first moved into the house in Barnes where I still live. I wrote about Mog because I was so fascinated by the weird things she did.

Drawing picture books felt very self-indulgent: in the first three years, they only brought in £250, which wasn’t much even then. Now it seems amazing that the Tiger and Mog are so popular.

I still feel a great sense of gratitude to England. Since the Brexit vote, many of my relations have taken dual citizenship because they feel they are not only British but Europeans. As I do also. But somehow, for me, taking dual citizenship would feel like throwing something in the face of this country that took me in. So in the future, I may just have to languish in the slow queue at airports.

It reminds me how, after the war ended, someone suggested to my father that he move back to France, because he spoke the language and loved the food. But he said: ‘If I did, I’d have to take the entire English population with me.’ That’s how I feel.

Judith Kerr’s latest book, ‘Mummy Time’ (£12.99, Harper Collins Children’s Books), is out now.