“I Just Write About the Things that Amuse Me,” says The Tiger Who Came to Tea Author Judith Kerr
When Judith Kerr invented a story for her daughter about an unexpected visitor, she didn’t realise that people would still be sharing it fifty years later…
- by Judith Kerr
I learnt to read in German – which is much easier than English, with all its though/ought/bough silliness – and I did it very early, when I was around three or so.
The world is full of writing, and every time I saw words on street signs, or advertisements, or whatever, I’d ask my mother what it said, and she would tell me, until I found I could do it for myself.
It happens like that for some people, I think; a kind of osmosis. In Germany, children don’t start school until they are six – and I remember being amazed at my poor classmates, who were having to be shown how to read.
Of course, things were very different in those days; there was no radio, and certainly no TV – so if you wanted stories, you had to read. I find it interesting how some people now talk about ‘screen time’ for children in a way that’s not unlike how reading was often seen back then.
“He’s always got his nose in a book!” was a dismissive comment, indicating that someone was avoiding interaction with the real world, which was A Bad Thing.
Books were an escape, yes – and an indulgence. To finish your homework and retire to some private place with a story, and perhaps a bag of sweets… well, it was wonderful.
And sometimes, a huge comfort, especially when the war started. Everyone had paperbacks then; you never knew when you might be stuck on a train for hours because of a bomb on the lines.
Paris. And all the time, I read; that’s how you learn new languages. At first, I only used to seek out fairy tales; I didn’t want anything more real than that.
Later on I enjoyed Heidi, although it troubled me that the author also wrote a lot of books in which children, especially good ones, were rather apt to die. It’s not that I thought I was a particularly suitable candidate for such a fate – but after all, mistakes do get made!
I loved Tom Sawyer, and thought the way it opened, diving straight into the story with no, ‘Once upon a time…’ was splendid; and I also recall reading an abbreviated version of Oliver Twist.
I was keen on school stories, too – they’d been few and far between in Germany, but I managed to get hold of some Angela Brazil novels in English when we were in France, working my way through them with the help of a dictionary.
I caused a certain amount of surprise, I believe, when I arrived in London cheerfully describing things with my distinctive accent as ‘ripping’ and ‘smashing’.
It’s been fifty years since my first book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, was published – although in fact, I’d come up with the story six years earlier, for my daughter Tacy, who was not quite three at the time.
We’d seen tigers at the zoo, and she’d been awestruck by them – as children are, generally, I suspect. She saw them as beautiful creatures, not frightening or aggressive.
My husband [screenwriter Nigel Kneale], who usually worked at home, was away at the filming of The Entertainer, and Tacy and I were a bit bored, and lonely, and My family fled Germany before the war, in 1933, going first to Switzerland, then to wished that somebody would come and visit. And that’s how it all started.
There really is no subtext, or at least not one I’m aware of. Michael Rosen – whom I love dearly – has suggested that the tiger might represent the Gestapo; but we left Germany before all that started, and anyway, I draw the little girl snuggling the animal in one of the pictures, which doesn’t support that theory very well!
Michael knows I don’t agree with him, but everyone is entitled to an opinion; besides, I think he’s done me a lot of good – after all, as long as people keep on discussing the book, it will keep on getting read.
I knew nothing about children when I had mine, but it always seemed to me that the best way to persuade them to do things would be to make them laugh.
When he was learning to read, our son Matthew had Janet and John books; but after a while he said, very formally, “Mummy, I cannot read these boring books any more. I am going to learn from The Cat in the Hat instead.”
And he did; Dr Seuss was a revelation – I was so impressed by the clever, playful way he used words that I tried a similar style for my Mog books.
Although I do deal with serious, and sad, subjects, I mostly just write about things that amuse me, and that I think will amuse my readers. Half a century on, it still seems to work…
The Tiger Who Came to Tea 50th Anniversary Party Book will be available from June 2018 (£9.99, Harper Collins Children’s Books).
