Judith Kerr, an extraordinary life

By E.W.

IT WAS only ten days ago that Judith Kerr, at the age of 95, won Illustrator of the Year at the British Book Awards, the publishing trade’s annual celebration of the best in the business. Since Ms Kerr had been a heroine of British children’s literature from the publication of her first book, “The Tiger Who Came to Tea”, in 1968, one might reasonably say it was about time, too. But it was only the year before, in 2018, that the awards deigned to recognise illustrators at all. The first winner was Axel Scheffler, the illustrator of Julia Donaldson’s “Gruffalo” books.

Still, Ms Kerr never lacked for attention from her millions of adoring readers (and their parents). “The Tiger Who Came to Tea”—in which the eponymous feline arrives at the home of a girl named Sophie and proceeds to eat all the food in the house and drink all the water from the taps—had sold 1m copies by its author’s 94th year and has been the subject of a touring exhibition and a travelling stage show. Equally beloved was Ms Kerr’s stories about Mog, a family cat; the series finished with the ground-breaking “Goodbye Mog”, in which the beloved pet died. Ms Kerr was nearly 80 when the book was published in 2002 and said that she wanted to address the subject of death. At her age, she said, “you begin to think about those who are going to be left—the children, the grandchildren. I just wanted to say: Remember. Remember me. But do get on with your lives.”

Ms Kerr’s own life was an extraordinary one. Born in Berlin in 1923, her father was Alfred Kerr, a prominent theatre writer and a vocal critic of the Nazi regime. “He had a very strong sense of Jewish ethics,” Ms Kerr said in 2016. “He was brought up in the Jewish faith but he decided at about 20 that he didn’t believe in God. People used to ask us why we didn’t go to RE classes at school and, aged five, I used to say, ‘I am a freethinker!’ which is what I had been told I was.” Warned in 1933 that the Nazi regime was about to confiscate the family’s passports, they fled to Switzerland, then France, finally ending up in Great Britain.

She trained at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and while working as an art teacher met her husband, Nigel Kneale, a screenwriter. The couple had two children, Matthew and Tacy: there were a lot of visits to the zoo when the pair were young. Ms Kerr explained the genesis of her first book plainly: “I made it up to amuse my children because we were bored and because their father was away filming for very long days at a time.”

In 1971 she published “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit”, in which the Kerr family’s escape from Nazi Germany was transformed into a story of adventure rather than terror—Ms Kerr would say in later life that her parents concealed their own fear to ensure that was how she and her brother Michael perceived it at the time. It became the first volume in her “Out of Hitler Time” trilogy; in 2012 she received an OBE for services to children’s literature and Holocaust education.

Children wrote to her from all over the world, a fact she found “hugely cheering”: “You feel that somebody is quite fond of you, even if you don’t know them!” She felt that her life had been an extraordinarily fortunate one. “I remember being asked when I first started trying to do books: ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said: ‘I just want to be able to do well enough that I can go on doing it.’” That is precisely what she did. Her last book, “The Curse of the School Rabbit”, will be published in June.