She dreamed up the fantasy of a tiger turning up for tea at a little girl’s home, and the tale she wrote and illustrated for her two children reached its millionth sale as its author Judith Kerr turned 94.
Some took the facile view that The Tiger Who Came for Tea reflected the past terrors Judith Kerr had experienced in Nazi Berlin where her father, a prominent critic of the regime, was on a death list. Kerr, who has died aged 95, strongly refuted that, insisting it was just the tale of a benign but hungry tiger whose presence in little Sophie’s house may have cleared them out of house and home, but proved a polite and gentle, if unexpected guest.
The tiger idea came to her after taking her three year old daughter Tacy to the zoo, and it became a regular bed-time story before she wrote it down and illustrated it, turning it into a children’s classic. It was described by Antonia Fraser as a “dazzling first book which would make children “scream with delicious pleasure”.
Another children’s writer, Michael Rosen, suggests that the tiger may reflect Kerr’s memory of past danger, but whatever theories psychiatrists devised about the unconscious mind converting childhood fear into joy, Kerr remained emphatic. It was just a tiger coming to tea.
Kerr’s gift was to turn the impossible into the natural. The book retained its appeal more than 50 years after it was published by HarperCollins in 1968. It was performed as theatre and Channel 4 aims to air a TV adaptation in time for Christmas this year.
Kerr wrote and illustrated some 30 children’s books, but The Tiger retains its No 1 position in the Kerr liturgy. Another eponymous feline followed. Mog the Forgetful Cat was published in 1970 to become the first in a successful series based on the many cats in the Kerr household.
But in 2002, something of her own past must have whispered to her and Kerr decided children needed to know about death. The result was Goodbye Mog. As she, herself grew older, intimations of mortality trickled into her mind, but in addressing young children she avoided sentimentality.
Kerr proved an amusing and adept entertainer at live performances and literary events. She was due to attend the Hay Festival in late May to speak about her new book The Curse of the School Rabbit, with its titular nod to JK Rowling.
Born in Berlin to Alfred Kerr, formerly Kempner, a distinguished theatre critic, and Julia née Weisman, the composer daughter of a Prussian politician, the family left Berlin in 1933 after learning Alfred was about to be arrested. Unwell at the time, he left his sick bed and fled to Zurich, followed by his wife, Judith and her older brother Michael. His books were burned shortly after they fled Germany. They reached Switzerland, France and settled in Britain in 1936.
Judith was 15 at the outbreak of war and volunteered to help wounded soldiers with the Red Cross. The family had led a comfortable life in Berlin, and they had to adjust to living in a Bloomsbury hotel with no income, surviving on charity. Michael was sent to public school but Judith went to 11 different schools in Germany and Switzerland, France and England. She learned English from the governess of an American family, and a short-lived boarding school experience was paid for by strangers.
Having left school at 15, Judith trained as a stenographer and volunteered for the Red Cross during the war. But her artistic talent won her a scholarship to the Central School of Art in 1945, after which she taught at a technical college and sold paintings and textiles. She then became a script editor/writer for the BBC. It was in the BBC canteen that she met scriptwriter Nigel Kneale, who created the TV character Professor Bernard Quatermass. They married in 1954 and had two children, Tracy and Michael.
Things proved more difficult, meanwhile, for Alfred, who could not resume his work because of the language problem. However he always remained a literary inspiration and a mentor to his daughter.
But her own work did not begin until her children started school. Despite freeing her tiger from any Nazi metaphors, she later told audiences that her eponymous characters really reflected people. Hitler did finally invade her first children’s novel, When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit. She told readers that a story was never as good if she completely made it up.
Described as a blend of fear and hope, the story was a paradigm for her own – a little girl escaping the Nazis with her family, told through the vision of a child. In it she re-enacted the protective comfort offered by her family which insulated her from any fear she might have felt.
Other books included The Other Way Round, renamed Bombs on Aunt Dainty, 1975, and A Small Person Far Away, which was, perhaps a reflection of how she adapted to life in England. She either did not feel an outsider, or did not project an outsider’s response in her work; coming to England, she felt, was coming home.
Judith Kerr was appointed OBE in 2012 for services to children’s literature and Holocaust education. In 2016 she received a lifetime achievement award by the Book Trust. She is survived by her daughter Tacy, a special-effects designer on the Harry Potter films, and son Matthew, author of the Whitbread Prize-winning novel English Passengers. Her husband predeceased her in 2006.
Gloria Tessler
Anne Judith Kerr, born June 15, 1923. Died May 22, 2019
