By AS Pollock, single mother, teacher and Labour activist
As a child in the 1970s I was convinced that Mr Benn ran a fancy dress shop on Stoke Newington High Street and the girl with diamond tights having dinner in the Wimpy was there because of a handsome Tiger. Years later when I found myself alone and trying to feed my 4 year-old, Judith Kerr’s classic psychedelic story “The Tiger who came to tea” showed me that egg and chips is best served with a side order of fantasy,or in a caff.
For once, the obligatory out-pouring of FB grief, which has accompanied her death at the age of 95 has resonated with me, for I grew up with Jewish godparents who had escaped Berlin in the 1930s. My godparents were elegant, cultured and the very definition of cosmopolitan and yet there was more: an edge, a quirk – an ability to envisage the surreal and intuit suffering. This same mittel-european edge illuminates and illustrates all of Kerr’s bestsellers, from the Tiger to Mog the forgetful cat, perhaps it is the edge of the outsider – the refugee.
Kerr herself had no time for the overblown dramatisation of her own back-story, when one over-enthusiastic journalist opined that the Tiger could be seen as a symbol of the Gestapo she retorted “Poppycock” but in later life she would do more and more work with The Refugee Council and Holocaust charities.
Born in 1923, Kerr was the result of a glittering union between two respected German- Jewish families. Her father Alfred Kempner, was a celebrated theatre critic, who changed the German language by coining all sorts of phrases to report on Weimar’s cabaret. Her mother, Julia Weismann, was the daughter of a prominent Prussian politician and a feted concert pianist.
Warning about blackshirts’ arrest
Inevitably, Alfred Kerr’s lampooning of Hitler made him a target and set his family on a 3-year dash across Europe. According to Kerr, he was lying in bed with ghastly flu one January afternoon when he received a note telling him that the black-shirts intended to arrest him. He rose from his sickbed and fled that very evening.
By March 1933, the Nazis had won the Reichstag, nine days before this Alfred had sent train tickets for his family to escape to Switzerland. After a few months they washed up penniless and hungry in Paris. They stayed there for two years, long enough for Judith to learn word-perfect French, but their father’s perspicacious grasp of politics led him to look further afield.
He drew on his earlier fame as the Kulturpapst (Culture Pope) to fire off begging letters asking for commissions/advances/visas/tickets, a manic frenzy of networking, all aimed at escaping the Nazi’s. Einstein wrote to say he could not stretch to a family ticket to New York, but Alexandra Korda, a Hungarian Jew who became a stalwart of Pinewood and Ealing, purchased Alfred’s film-script on Napoleon. The family came to rest in a grubby hotel room in Bloomsbury and the children were dispatched to English public schools, their fees paid by strangers.
Uniquely powerful style of illustration
At age 21 Kerr married BBC producer and writer of The Quartermass Experiment, Nigel “Tom” Kneale. They settled in Barnes, producing the writer Michael and actress Tacy. Her bright and airy riverside home seems to have become a vocal point for a certain sort of 1950s intellectual and she embraced the housewifely norms of the post-war boom. But evidently something more was at play; all through her teatime years she honed a uniquely powerful style of illustration, dragging her children on weekly visits to the zoo to draw. She published The Tiger who came to Tea in 1968 and became an overnight success at age 45.
Whether or not she was a reluctant domestic goddess, her work spoke to my own frustrations as a non-typical mother. Trapped at home, I was very much the sort of young mum who would willingly let the Tiger in if only to brighten up the endless trudge of nappies and snacks. To other mothers of my generation the book also has redolence.
Clare Solomon, President of University of London Union (2010-11) and leader of the tuition fees rebellion, remembered how Kerr’s other bestseller The Adventures of Mog lightened up dark themes for her children.“Judith dealt with otherwise avoided topics such as death, so that my children could feel comforted as well as sad about losing beloved Mog. It was controversial to kill Mog off but also a brave act in the face of commercial bookselling. Single mums are often zapped of all energy and creative ability so to share her characters was a joy”.
Slim, chic and bright-eyed at 90
For Simone Pound, Director of Equality at the Professional Football Association, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit had echoes of my childhood rejections, both of us growing up mixed-race in the 1980s. “I totally related to taking the games compendium and leaving the favourite cuddly toy and the injustice I felt when a family in Switzerland wouldn’t let their child play with Anna because she was Jewish makes it one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever read”.
Only recently Simone met Judith at a National Literary Trust summer party “where she graciously acknowledged my gabbling fan- girl adoration. She was slim, chic and bright eyed, despite it being very late and her being 90 plus”
Ultimately, the books offer us a stable but chaotic version of being a mum. For all her airy dismissal of her childhood poverty, her version of Britain was a suburban cocoon from where she could observe “London schoolchildren are ahead of the whole country, this is because there’s so many refugees. They all have that edge and they are British. Interviewed after the referendum result, she remained optimistic “I would never take dual nationality. I owe this country too much”. Having survived Nazism she stayed in love with the British, despite recognising austerity and the global refugee crisis. After all, it may be schmaltzy but it is always reassuring for all impoverished mothers to know that faced with “mum what’s for dinner?” you can always reply “a tiger ate it” and then knock up some egg and chips.
May 30, 2019
