Judith Kerr Obituary by Janie Hampton

photo: Rex Shutterstock

Judith Kerr, esteemed writer and illustrator of children’s and young adult books, died last week aged 95. I had two memorable phone conversations with Judith. The first was when I was researching my book on Girl Guides and the Second World War, which included Jewish Girl Guides coming from Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain. Judith told me about her arrival from Germany in London, aged 13 in 1936. She was born in Berlin, where her father was a well-known German-Jewish journalist who openly criticized the Nazis. In 1933 he was warned that his passport might be confiscated, and he fled Germany, just a day before he would have been arrested. Shortly afterwards his wife, Judith, and her brother followed. The family travelled via Switzerland and Paris and settled in London.

Judith had left school when the Second World War began. By now speaking perfect English, she worked first as a secretary and then volunteered for the Red Cross, before being awarded a scholarship at the Central School of Arts in London. Later, she described an air- raid in London as vividly as a picture: ‘The sky was red, reflecting the fires on the ground, and in it hung clusters of orange flares which lit up everything for miles around. They looked like gigantic Christmas decorations floating slowly, slowly down through the night air. In the distance, yellow flashes like lightning were followed by muffled bangs – the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park. Suddenly a searchlight swept across the sky. It was joined by another and another, crossing and re-crossing each other, and then a great orange flash blotted out everything else.’ Judith met her future husband, television scriptwriter Nigel Kneale, in the school canteen where she was teaching, and he suggested she join the BBC as a scriptwriter.
The second lively conversation I had with Judith was when I was writing about the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. I was searching for other cultural events that year, and Judith told me about her work at the BBC television studios in Lime Grove. Nigel Kneale, known as Tom, was writing a science-fiction television serial when he, Judith and their colleagues watched the coronation on a black and white television. The Quatermass Experiment was to be about an alien arriving on Earth, but Kneale could not decide where the alien should land. As the coronation reached its climax, he realised that most television viewers had now seen inside Westminster Abbey: this would be the perfect place to first see the alien. ‘There was neither a budget nor the possibility of filming in the Abbey, so we bought a guide book, which included a photo of Poets’ Corner,’ Judith told me. Making television drama in 1953 required ingenuity and imagination. They photographed the guide book’s photo, blew it up and pasted it onto a canvas panel. ‘Then I put on a pair of wash-leather gloves, while Tom stuck bits of curled wire and twigs onto them. We cut a slit in the backdrop, and Tom put his hands through, wearing the gloves. He waggled his fingers very slowly. That was the scariest moment of the drama – when ‘the vegetable’ first appeared, this creep-crawly alien thing with tendrils which had absorbed the bodies and souls of two astronauts. The cameras could not move, and the cameraman saw everything upside down and back to front. It was all filmed live for the television, while another camera showed the actor in terror.’

Mog the Cat. copyright HarperCollins

Judith and Kneale were married in 1954 and had two children. When they complained that children’s books were boring, Judith told them stories about ‘Mog’ the cat. Later she wrote and illustrated the stories, and the series of 18 titles about Mog were published from 1970 to 2015. ‘Cats are very interesting people,’ she later said. After 30 years she wrote Goodbye Mog in which the cat died, a brave step for a children’s writer.

The Tiger who Came to Tea. copyright HarperCollins

Probably her best-known book was The Tiger Who Came to Tea, which also began in order to liven up her children’s day. Asked by BBC presenter Emily Maitlis if the tiger symbolised the the overturning of suburban life during the 1960s sexual and social revolution, she simply replied, ‘No, it was about a tiger coming to tea.’ Kerr’s ability to see the world from a child's perspective enabled her to write and draw exactly what a child wants to see, not what an adult thinks they should. She never wasted their time by repeating in words, what was already in the illustration. The illustrations were clear and simple, with only the essential people and objects in them. Published in 1968, the book has never been out of print. 

Judith Kerr at work

Judith’s son was eight when he saw the film The Sound of Music and commented, 'Now we know what it was like when Mummy was a little girl.' Judith was determined that he, and other children, should know what life was really like and so wrote the semi-autobiographical Out of Hitler Time trilogy. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Bombs on Aunt Dainty (originally published as The Other Way Round) and A Small Person Far Away, describe childhood among of the rise of the Nazis in Germany, life as a refugee in Britain during World War II, and the post-war years. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit won the state-funded Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Children's Literature Award) in 1974 and became a set text in German schools. In 2004, she said, 'I think of the business of the Holocaust, and the one and a half million children who didn't get out as I got out, in the nick of time -- 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 had just a few days of it. And I hope I've not wasted any of it: I try to get the good of every bit of it because I know they would have done if they'd had the chance.'
After the death of Nigel Kneale in 2006, Judith found writing and drawing even more important and continued publishing books into her ninth decade. Over 50 years, she published more than 30 books. Her publisher at HarperCollins, Charlie Redmayne, said she was 'a wonderful and inspiring person who was much loved by everyone. She was a brilliantly talented artist and storyteller. Always understated and very, very funny. She loved life and loved people - and particularly she loved a party.'

photo Daniel Sambraus/AP

Judith Kerr was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to children's literature and Holocaust education. A year later, the ‘Judith Kerr Primary School’ in London opened as Britain’s first German-English state bilingual school. Just a week before she died, Judith was nominated at the British Book Awards as Illustrator of the Year. She leaves her son Matthew Kneale, a prize-winning novelist and author of ‘The English Passengers’ and daughter, Tacy, who designs special-effects for films.

Anna Judith Gertrude Kerr, 1923 -2019. 

www.janiehampton.co.uk 

Desert Island Books -- Sheena Wilkinson

I’m at the Scattered Authors retreat this week, in lovely Charney Manor in Oxfordshire, a History Girl’s paradise. On Monday night I took part in a very enjoyable bookish version of Desert Island Discs, where castaways had to choose three books – a ‘classic’, a contemporary book and a ‘wild card’. It struck me, when it came time to think about my monthly post, that my choices all said a great deal about my love of history, though when I chose the books it was with no conscious awareness of that. So here they are for you, with some historical musings, and with thanks to Mary Hoffman (fellow panellist)  for the idea!

1. Classic Children’s Book – Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild, 1936.

I love Ballet Shoes for its mix of grit and romance, for its three very different heroines, for the nuanced adult characters and the 1930s London setting. I first read it as a child in the 1970s, and knew immediately, when I read about the Fossils’ having to ‘save the penny and walk’, that I was in ‘the olden days’. At that age I wouldn’t have known exactly when in the olden days, because I don’t think I would have had the nous to check the date of first publication, but it didn’t matter. It was a world of nursery teas, omnibuses and genteel poverty. A world where your frock needed to match your knickers. Later I knew that this was the 1930s, and understood how shortly that inter-war period was to come to an end.

Ballet Shoes, of course, is not a historical novel – Noel Streatfeild was writing about her contemporary world, which was forty years in the past when I first read it, and eighty years ago now. My second choice was very different:

2.    Contemporary Book – A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson, 2014

This is one of the best novels I have ever read, and is broadly historical – broad in that sense that its story encompasses about a century. It is, I suppose, a kind of family saga, except that suggests something much more conventional. A God in Ruins is structurally unconventional, moving backwards and forwards in time, and there is a conceit at its heart which I would not dream of spoiling for you which asks questions about the very nature of history and existence. Once again, as always, I loved the small material details, but unlike Noel Streatfeild, Kate Atkinson is looking back, particularly to the years around the Second World War.

Which leads neatly to my third choice:

3. Wild Card – When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Judith Kerr, 197X

This is a very different kind of novel. It is historical – Judith Kerr was writing in the seventies about the thirties, but it is also based firmly on her own personal history.  As in Ballet Shoes, we are in difficult circumstances, but here too the children are largely protected by heroic adults, in this case their parents. Once again, material things matter and help to bring the world to life – Anna having the right kind of pinafore for her French school, buying a pencil, travelling to Switzerland by train.

I thought I had chosen these books randomly. And, yes, on a different day I might have chosen three others. Only now do I see the links between them: they all write about a similar period, in very different ways. Between them I think they contain everything I love as a reader of fiction set in the past, and everything I strive for as a writer of historical fiction.

So – what would your Desert Island books be, and what might they say about you as a History Girl?

'Judith Kerr at 92' by Lydia Syson ('We haven't always been old ladies...)

Every so often I go into a small grump about the way authors these days are forced into the role of performers.  Instead of being left to write or draw in peace, they have to climb onto stages and make witty conversation.  Their audiences sometimes seem keener to pay for tickets for such shows than buy the speakers’ books.  And then I go and sit at the feet of a literary heroine (or hero) and go wobbly with admiration and perhaps a little bit tearful and I think instead how wonderful it is that those of us who worship certain living writers now have so many opportunities to breathe in their auras, get a better sense of how they tick, and generally show our love and appreciation for their work.  It doesn’t matter one bit if you've read almost everything they’ve said elsewhere already (and possibly forgotten it).  There’s something indefinably remarkable about having heard that person say it again, out loud, in your very presence.  And there’s always something new too - a new book, a new thought, a new image - to treasure and mull over until the next opportunity arises.

Nicolette Jones and Judith Kerr at Jewish Book Week 2016
@photographer Enda Bowe

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit was probably the first book anyone ever pressed into my hands and told me that I had absolutely got to read.  (The friend who did that, when I was about ten, was half-German, and she was absolutely right.) It was also the first book I ever read about growing up in Hitler's Germany. Last month I had the enormous pleasure of listening to Judith Kerr talking to Nicolette Jones at Jewish Book Week.  

Judith Kerr told lots of the lovely stories which you can read in her illustrated autobiography Creatures, which came out a couple of years ago when she turned 90: about the weird cat who stalked green beans, and the other weird cat who liked boiled eggs, and the two different fathers’ faces in The Tiger Who Came to Tea.  

@photographer Enda Bowe

She sat in her neat tartan skirt, looking like a perfect white-haired old lady, who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, not even one she had noticed communing with his own reflection, spotted on a shiny car.  She talked modestly and honestly about her working life, her marriage and her children, always observant but slightly giving the impression that everything had somehow just happened.  But of course the firm resolve and gentle sense of rebellion so fundamental to her character and so clear in all her books kept surfacing.  The first German publisher of the Mog books had annoyed her by insisting in an ‘anti-feminist’ way that the cat was a male.  ‘How could a creature so enterprising possibly be female?’ they argued, and changed the cat's sex.  So Judith Kerr gave Mog kittens. 

There was sadness as well as humour.  When she became a widow herself, she began to notice widows everywhere, and started to draw old ladies getting up to things.  (My Henry, The Great Granny Gang. ‘We haven’t always been old ladies,’ she observed.  She also spoke of reading recently a new biography of her father, Alfred Kerr. 

Alfred Kerr, portrait by Lovis Corinth, 1907

When he left Germany in 1933 just before his passport was taken away, he was so famous an essayist and theatre critic that he was known as the Culture Pope, and his books were burned.  Yet Alfred Kerr ended up in England a nobody, without a language in which he could write. Judith and her brother Michael had quickly learned to love being young refugees, living in Switzerland and France, learning new languages, seeing the world; she conveys the adventure of it all beautifully in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.  But it is was only a few months ago that she realised quite how well her parents had managed to conceal the truth of their situation and their own emotions from the children, and how very desperate they had become.  At one point her mother had not just wanted to commit suicide herself, but to kill the children too.  Even without this knowledge, reading The Other Way Round in adulthood is a peculiarly painful experience because of the delicate way Kerr portrays the shifting relationship between parents and children when the family comes to England.  The book is now called Bombs on Aunt Dainty but I think the original title got to the nub of the book, and I wish it hadn't been changed.  

@photographer Enda Bowe

The week after this event at Jewish Book Week, the French government began to bulldoze a section of the Jungle Camp in Calais, where hundreds of unaccompanied and unprotected children have been surviving. Citizens UK believes 150 of these children have a right to be reunited with family in the UK, but the processes are not set up to help them, and they are stuck.  Judith Kerr talked movingly of the warmth of the welcome and the value of the help she and her brother received as young refugees, and has written that she became a ‘Brit’ in the summer of 1940.  Now she is a national treasure.

www.lydiasyson.com