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‘I’ve every reason to be an optimist’
Fifty years after writing Thetigerwhocametotea, Judith Kerr is still happily creating life-enhancing stories for children. Jessamy Calkin went to meet the writer and illustrator, now almost 95, who shows no sign of putting down her pencil. Photographs by
Judith Kerr lives by herself in a lovely light-filled terraced house in Barnes, south-west London, opposite the common, on a street that is fragrant with the wisteria that races enthusiastically up and down her neighbours’ walls. Her living room is covered in photographs and lithographs and there is an enchanting painting of a bee by her daughter Tacy. Postcards litter the mantelpiece – one very recognisably illustrated by her friend Axel Scheffler. Her current familiar – a bossy, wellbuilt cream-coloured cat with a tabby tail, called Katinka – settles comfortably on the carpet next to my chair. ‘She likes you,’ comments Kerr amiably in her soothing, mellifluous voice. ‘She usually hates journalists.’
Kerr will be 95 this month. She is petite and pretty, with an open face, which looks ready to be amused at all times. She is wearing a navy-blue dress from Ghost and pearls at her neck and wrist. We have a lively conversation accompanied by tea and biscuits, followed by coffee, and then a martini, fetched from her kitchen, which is still recognisable as the one portrayed in The Tiger Who Came to Tea, her first children’s book, which was published in 1968 and has never been out of print.
Fifty years and 30 books later, Judith Kerr is still drawing almost every day – although arrangements for the Tiger’s birthday are interfering with her schedule – and she is currently working on two new children’s books (one about a baby who gets up to no good while its mother is staring fixedly at her phone). After breakfast, she goes upstairs to her little studio on the top floor and sits at the same desk she has had for nearly half a century, surrounded by pots of crayons, art books and softtoy prototypes for Mog, and starts drawing.
‘And I go on for as long as it works. You can’t just stop, even if what you’re doing is rubbish, because you have to work through that. There are times when you long for something to happen – just to see somebody – because you can spend four days at a go without talking to anybody, and that gets a bit much.’
Drawings take her several days, but she’s got quicker at it,
she says, and her technique is to ‘stop at a point where the next thing is sort of in view’. A blank page can be very intimidating. ‘The thing is to keep it moving. Drawings don’t take me as long now because I’ve got better at it,’ she says. ‘I know how to not waste time. And technically it’s got so much easier. In order to research what things look like, I used to have to search through library books, and now I can just google! And nowadays if you draw a squirrel that’s three sizes too big, you can just put a little note saying “please reduce by 20 per cent”. And they can do it! Which is fantastic – rather than having to redo the whole tree and the squirrel and six people and four tigers and so on.’
She draws almost every day, but after her husband died, 12 years ago, she didn’t draw for the best part of a year. They had been together for 54 years. ‘It was such a different time, and there were an awful lot of things to do and consider. Then I remember quite deliberately thinking one day, “I’m going to start drawing again.”’
‘Obviously I get lonely, but I’m very lucky because I work. I’d be in despair if I didn’t work’
The following weekend she went to lunch at a local restaurant – Riva – run by some Italian friends, where she often used to go with her husband, and saw a scene that inspired her. Just a small thing, but it struck a chord. ‘One of the waiters was attending to a “good liver”. He was sitting there, waiting to have his drink poured. I looked very hard, and thought, “I must remember how to draw this scene.”’ And when she got home she found she could do it. And she hasn’t looked back.
Her husband, the screenwriter Tom Kneale, had been ill for a few years before he died. ‘In some ways it’s easier if you know that it’s going to happen, but you never think it’s really going to happen. You don’t know how to live without that other person, and it’s totally different – you’re not half of something any more – you’re so used to being one of two. Every way you think is in relation to that. Obviously I get lonely, but I’m very lucky because I work. I’d be in despair if I didn’t work.
‘And there are compensations in that I’ve never before in my life been able to work for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I don’t cook now, I microwave. If I don’t want to eat in the evening, I don’t. If I want to go for a walk at night, I can. It’s lonely, but I’m totally in charge. In those 12 years I’ve done a lot of work; and I also think I’ve got better with more practice.’
Since Tom died, she says, the books have been more ‘picture based, maybe because of no longer being around a writer’. She finds writing hard and he would sometimes help her – she initially had a lot of problems with her autobiographical children’s novel, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which she wrote in 1971, the first of a trilogy. The book was a fictionalised account of her childhood, and is now used as a set text in German primary schools. It is a compelling tale of her early life in Berlin with her parents and brother. Her father, Alfred Kerr, to whom she was devoted, was a highly respected critic and essayist. He coedited a leading Berlin newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt ,and was the author of several books, which were burnt by the Nazis when they came to power. Her mother, Julia Weismann, was a musician, 30 years younger than her father. The family were Jewish but not religious; as a child Judith used to proclaim, ‘I am a free thinker.’
Her father fled to Prague in the middle of the night, after being warned that he was about to have his passport seized; and days later the family crossed the frontier to Switzerland on a milk
train. Kerr later found out that the morning after they left, German guards came to their home to confiscate their passports.
One of the saddest bits in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is the story of her father’s best friend, Max Meyerfeld (‘Onkel Julius’ in the book), who would often take the children to Berlin Zoo, which he went to daily; he knew all the animals there and would feed the monkeys by hand. ‘You could have your picture taken with a lion cub and my parents said it was a waste of money, but Uncle Meyerfeld said, “I’ll pay for you.” So I had my picture taken with the lion cub, which was called Baby, and it ran after me and I was so thrilled that it liked me.’
When Alfred Kerr left Berlin, he urged his old friend to do the same, but Meyerfeld stayed. Years later, Kerr learnt that Meyerfeld had killed himself in 1940, after his pass to the zoo had been revoked because he had a Jewish grandmother.
The terrible consequences of Nazi rule are something that has permeated her life. One of her books is dedicated to ‘the one and a half million Jewish children who didn’t have my luck, and all the pictures they might have painted’. In a 2004 edition of Desert Island Discs, she said, ‘I think about them almost every day now, because I’ve had such a happy and fulfilled life and they’d have given anything to have just a few days of it, and I hope I’ve not wasted any of it.’ The record she then chose took my breath away when I heard it – an enormously moving memorial prayer by the Neimah Singers, which she had heard by chance. ‘A shattering thing,’ she called it.
Judith Kerr arrived in England in March 1936, aged 12, after three years in Switzerland and Paris. Her family had very little money, but their move to England was financed by a screenplay her father had written about Napoleon which been bought by Alexander Korda for £1,000 (though the film was never made). They lived in a shabby hotel in Bloomsbury and, thanks to some benefactors, she went to boarding school in Kent, which she hated, and then later got a scholarship to the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1945. She drew constantly. (When the family left Berlin, her mother packed several of Kerr’s early drawings.) She worked at the BBC for a while, where she met Nigel Kneale (Tom) in the BBC canteen in 1952; they were married two years later. Neale became famous for writing the popular sciencefiction series Quatermass. They had two children, Matthew (also a writer, he won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 2000 for English Passengers) and Tacy, an artist. Matthew now lives in Rome with his wife and two children (‘he decided to move there when he was eight, and now he has’); Tacy in London.
It was while teaching her children to read that Kerr became frustrated with how boring and banal the books on offer were. In particular, she couldn’t bear unnecessary information. ‘Why say that Jack is wearing red trousers if there he is in the picture in red trousers?’ The Tiger Who Came to Tea was a story
for Tacy – a simple but very appealing tale of a tiger who comes to the house and eats and drinks everything, including all her father’s beer.
Judith took the idea to her husband’s literary agent who showed it to Collins and they loved it; she has been published by them ever since. One editor, she says, worried about the fact that her tiger had ‘drunk all the water in the tap’ which wasn’t very ‘realistic’. Judith giggles at this. Antonia Fraser called it a ‘dazzling first book’ and it immediately did well. The Mog series, equally famous, followed. Mog the Forgetful Cat was the first of several books about an eccentric cat ‘with views’, and a repertoire of very subtle and mostly disapproving or bemused expressions.
Kerr’s appeal lies in her beautiful and accessible illustrations, and her particular humour. Her stories are poignant but not sentimental. ‘It’s a mysterious thing,’ says children’s laureate Lauren Child, who is a friend of Kerr’s. ‘But it’s something to do with the way she depicts things – whether the story is about the everyday or the magical, there’s a truth to it. This is so in both her illustrations and her writing. What also comes across very clearly is that she likes children and understands how they might feel, think and react to a situation. I am sure this is because she has such good recall of how it was to be a child. Her stories have an appealing matter-of-factness and lack sugary prose – she is very in tune with the way children see things – her work never patronises and nor does she.’
Kerr’s books invariably have an autobiographical element; even Mister Cleghorn’s Seal (2015) was inspired by a seal that her father rescued and tried to keep as a pet when he was young. And Mog was Kerr’s first cat, who would sit on her lap when she was working; although the fictional Mog took on some of the habits and eccentricities of her many real-life successors.
Kerr’s latest cat stars in Katinka’s Tail, which came out last year. Since the book was published, says Kerr, Katinka has become very self-important and has taken to sitting on Kerr’s work chair. ‘She’s never done that before. I tried to take her off it and she bit me! I got another chair and put a cushion on it and put her on the cushion, and she leapt off and went back to my chair, in a sort of terrible, arrogant way.’
Kerr has an extraordinarily youthful spirit. There is a quiet cheer about her, despite everything. ‘I think people of my generation probably are optimists,’ she says. ‘Dark things happened
while I was growing up, but I didn’t see them. I never saw the Nazis doing anything – we got out before that. Then we were in London during the Blitz, and everyone thought the invasion would happen any minute, and I remember thinking, “I’m 17 and I’m never going to get any older. I’m never going to find out what sort of person I am, or the things I’m capable of,” but that didn’t happen. Hitler didn’t win the war, although at one time it looked as if he would. Then we were worried about nuclear war – but that didn’t happen. And the communists didn’t take over the world, as it rather looked as if they would. We have awful things going on at the moment of course… but on the whole, I’ve every reason to be an optimist. I managed to get to art school, which seemed very difficult at the time. And now I’m getting paid for doing what I want to do. How lucky can you be?’
Af ew years ago, Kerr found out that the Germans paid her mother some reparation money, and Judith received £1,000 for her interrupted education. She is conscious that her parents had a very rough time. Her father, who was badly affected by his exile, took his own life, aged 80, after having a stroke. After the war was over he was invited to Hamburg at the behest of the British Control Commission, where he had a hero’s welcome. ‘He’d never flown before, and it was very excithe
She and her brother agreed that their childhood was so much better than if Hitler had never appeared
ing – to fly from London in 1948. He had a great reception when he got there, a tour of the harbour and lunch and in the evening he went to the theatre. He saw Romeo and Juliet, which wasn’t very good apparently, but the audience stood up and applauded when he came in.’ He had a stroke that night in his hotel. Another journalist found him in the morning, says Kerr. ‘He was on the floor, paralysed on one side. But he could speak, and he knew what had happened. He said, “I’ve had a stroke. It wasn’t the play – it was bad, but not that bad…”’
Several weeks later, when it was apparent that he would not recover, her mother obtained some pills and he took an overdose. Julia was not present when he did it, and a friend of his, who was aware of what was going on, advised him not to write any notes (suicide was a crime then, as was aiding and abetting it, and if he’d survived he could have been prosecuted). The friend went to their house and nonetheless found the bed littered with notes.
‘Messages to everybody,’ says Kerr. ‘And he gathered them all up, so we would have them – farewell notes. The last thing
wrote was, “I feel that I am dying…” and that was the end. He was a writer to the last moment.’
Judith Kerr is a person who values life greatly. ‘I do have a huge sense of gratitude. I so enjoyed my childhood.’ She and her brother (Michael, who became a judge at the Court of Appeal, and died in 2002) always agreed that their childhood was so much better than if Hitler had never appeared and they’d just grown up in Berlin. ‘I don’t think we’re the only refugee children to feel like that. Our life was just so interesting. Of course, nowadays quite a number of children have that sort of childhood and they don’t have to be refugees – like my grandchildren who are European and bilingual.’
What disadvantages are there, does she think, to being a child nowadays? ‘My children had less freedom than we had, and their children even less. Partly because of very simple things like traffic. My brother and I – aged eight and six – used to go out in the morning and come back for lunch – nobody bothered what we did in between. But they have great advantages as well. Education is much better. And I still can’t get over the fact – because I like classical music but I’ve never known much about it – that you can hear it all the time on the radio. We used to have to queue up to go to a concert and sit in the gods.’
Her book sales have now reached 10 million and been translated into 20 languages, but at nearly 95, she shows no signs of slowing down. I wonder if she sees any advantages in getting older. ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘The main one is you don’t need to worry too much about the future.’ She laughs. ‘And Brexit – I’m never going to know how that finishes.’
The Tiger Who Came to Tea Party Book, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, is out now (Harpercollins Children’s Books, £9.99)