Last year The Tiger Who Came to Tea turned forty. Mog the Forgetful Cat will reach the milestone next year, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit in 2011.
That the books have remained in print since their original publication is proof of their enduring appeal, so it is fitting that Judith Kerr, their creator, is the subject of a retrospective at Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books, in Newcastle.
The exhibition includes childhood paintings as well as letters and poems in French and German, all of which reveal Kerr’s precocious talent, plus family photos, life drawings from her time as an art student, original artwork and sketches from her most famous work, and even a life-sized tiger sitting at a kitchen table. It’s a portrait of a fascinating life that is both moving and charming.
In the trilogy of autobiographical novels that begins with When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Kerr documents her childhood as a refugee from Nazi Germany, then her years as an older teen in wartime London and finally her attempts as an adult to come to terms with her past. Although the three books are published together as Out of the Hitler Time, the final volume, A Small Person Far Away, was written as a novel for adults.
Kerr's father Alfred was a writer and eminent theatre critic in Berlin. In England he found it nearly impossible to sell his work. Her mother was a pianist who wrote two operas but who in exile became the practical one who held the family together. Despite the difficulties, her parents kept their worries from the children.
‘My parents were wonderful. My brother Michael and I knew there wasn’t much money but it didn’t seem to matter much. They made us feel it was an adventure. I much preferred it to the sort of childhood I would have had had we had a so-called normal childhood. When we were in Paris we had this grotty, tiny flat and were looking out over Paris and I said to my father, “Isn’t it wonderful being a refugee!”’
Kerr wrote When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit in order to tell her children about her childhood experiences. ‘When I started writing Pink Rabbit the children were 10 and 12, so for the first time I thought about my parents as a parent myself. I suddenly thought, “What would I do if I had to get the children out of the country?” I wouldn’t be that good. I’d get them out but they’d be a lot more frightened. I started writing the book to tell the children what it had been like, but by the end of it I wanted my parents to be remembered.’
‘In Pink Rabbit they were still in control. It was a happy story, and then it wasn’t. I realised how awful it was. My mother became very unhappy; my father too. 'They were no longer in control. We were just adrift, really. I hadn’t meant to write anything about that, and then I thought I wanted to tell it like it was. Being a refugee wasn’t all jolliness. So I thought I had to write two more books.
'What I really wanted to write about was not Hitler, particularly, but how relationships change in the family. Your mother knows everything, she’ll be able to fix anything, but then suddenly you’re in charge and she becomes vulnerable. She was an amazing woman. Very very clever in some ways, and not at all in others. We always got on terribly well by letter! She was hard to be with because she was too much.’
In The Other Way Round (republished as Bombs on Aunt Dainty, the title Kerr originally wanted), the second of the three books, Kerr struggles to build her identity as an artist when secretarial work was a safer route to much needed security. ‘I remember saying to my father when I was having a bad patch, “Why don’t I just get a job?” I could earn £8 a week, because I knew a lot of languages, which was enormous. 'And he said, “Because if you did, you’d always think less well of yourself,” which was marvellous.’
Eventually she won a scholarship to art school. The award required her to study illustration, a subject in which she had no interest. A kindly tutor advised her to sign up for the required class but to attend her preferred life drawing class instead.
All went well until, just before she was due to leave, a diploma was introduced. ‘As I was down for book illustration I had to take a diploma in book illustration!’ exclaims Kerr, incredulous after all these years.
‘I hadn’t done any. So feverishly for the last month I tried to produce some book illustrations, and I failed! It’s the only time in my entire life that I’ve failed.’
Subsequently, of course, she did develop not just an interest in illustration but an aptitude for it. It was from her children that she learned the art of creating a good picture book. ‘I’d been telling my daughter Tacy a bedtime story about a tiger that came to tea. I thought I’d see if I could turn it into a picture book.’
The child-centred focus, age-appropriate language and subversive humour in The Tiger Who Came to Tea are familiar in picture books today, but in the late-1960s the approach was much less common.
‘I was very influenced by Dr Seuss. He used the same words again and again in different ways and I tried to do the same thing. You shouldn’t use more words than you have to. The terrible crime, I thought, was to make them read something they already knew from the illustration: “He had blond hair and a big moustache.”
'Well, there he is; they can see that. Or you could put something in the pictures that is the opposite of something somebody says. It’s much more fun. Though with Tiger I had all the words before I had the pictures, which was unusual.’
In the book, Sophie watches admiringly as the tiger that has appeared unexpectedly at the door empties the refrigerator, cupboards and even the taps. Her mother is unperturbed, only belatedly realising there is nothing left for dinner, while her twinkly-eyed father arrives home from work, assesses the situation without raising an eyebrow and takes his wife and daughter to a café for dinner.
The images of the father are based on Kerr’s late husband Nigel (Tom) Kneale. ‘Some of them didn’t come out right and I had to redraw them. Tom was terribly busy writing scripts by then and he couldn’t sit for me so I got an actor friend of ours called Alfie Burke, who lived round the corner, to sit for me and I did some drawings of him. If you look at the book carefully you can actually see which ones are Tom and which ones are Alfie Burke.’
The Mog books, too, are ahead of their time, with scatological issues forming a key part of Mog’s Bad Thing and the cat dying in Goodbye Mog. Though the idea was initially met with horror by her publisher, they changed their mind when they saw the sensitive way in which Kerr handled the subject.
‘I’m getting very old and I was wondering and thinking about how people are remembered. I think I always found the best way to remember my mother was to think of the funny things she said and did. I had this dream about my own death. It was awful. The children were there and it was cold and dark and it was my funeral.
'I thought, things can pass and you can remember people but also find new people. And I said it all in Mog’s voice.’
It was finally done and one of the children said “What should we do now?” and the other one said, “Let’s go to McDonald’s.” And in my dream I had this wonderful Yiddishe mama reaction, which was: “They’ve hardly got me buried and already they go and eat junk food!”’
‘More seriously, I suppose, I wanted to say that you don’t lose people. My father died in 1948 and I can still have a conversation with him. I thought, things can pass and you can remember people but also find new people. And I said it all in Mog’s voice.’
All of Kerr’s books have begun with an idea or a more fully formed plot with the exception of her new picture book, One Night in the Zoo.
‘This one just started with the pictures. It sounds terribly pretentious – I started by thinking of Chagall. Well, there’s nothing of Chagall left, except there’s a lot of blue and it’s slightly surreal. But I wanted to do these animals doing crazy things and I’d thought of some of the rhymes, but I couldn’t stick it together in a way. It needed something to hold it together, and my art editor suggested I make it a counting book and of course immediately there was a skeleton to hang it on, so that’s what I did.’
‘I liked doing the rhymes because they take you to places you wouldn’t otherwise go to. Sometimes having thought of a rhyme that I liked – “a crocodile and a kangaroo set off on a bicycle made for two”; I thought that was terrific – when I tried to draw it I thought, “What fool wrote this?”’
Kerr is working on a new picture book at the moment. She won’t say much about it other than to reveal that it is about an elderly woman. Since Tom’s death nearly three years ago, she finds herself thinking more about her own mortality as well as her childhood. ‘I think it’s something that people do when they get old anyway; you think over your whole life. Tom and I were together 54 years, married 52 years. You get so in the habit of thinking of everything automatically in connection with this other person. He used to ask quite a lot about my childhood; he was fascinated by it. But suddenly you’re not part of this double thing anymore and you have so much time to think. You think about everything, really.’
‘People here were so good to us in the war. It must have been awful for my parents, but when you consider what happened to the others who stayed behind, nothing bad happened to us. We didn’t lose anyone. All our family got out: my grandparents, uncles, aunts, they all got out. Nobody died. We had a terrible time with money, but so did lots of people, and people were very good to us wherever we went.’
‘I suppose it was easy to talk about, and it was easy to .read, because although I wrote about things that were happening – I’d heard about concentration camps before I was ten because people were coming out of Germany and talking about it – it didn’t happen to us. So I’m very lucky. It was an adventure.’
