Judith Kerr was not scared to confront death in her stories. But she helped us savour the joy of life

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/25/she-took-delight-in-spreading-joy-because-for-judith-kerr-life-was-a-brilliant-adventure

Version 0 of 1.

If you’ve got a life that so many people don’t have,” said Judith Kerr, “then you don’t waste it.” She was talking about the fact that her parents managed to escape from Germany before the Nazis took over. That thought – what a stroke of luck it is to be alive – became her great theme.

A few years ago – when she must have been in her late 80s – I watched her perform to a packed house in Edinburgh. On stage, in her pink dress, she giggled away like she couldn’t believe she was still alive as she fielded questions about the nature of that tiger.

“Was it an allegory of the Nazis?” “No, it’s a tiger that wants some tea.”

“Is the tiger the id, disturbing the mother’s bourgeois life?” “No, it’s a tiger who wants some tea.”

If you want to see how far people can take Tiger-interpretation, by the way, take a look at Andy Miller’s The Year of Reading Dangerously. He finds unease in every corner, fear in every face.

What people are really asking when they pose these questions is: “How come this little book means so much to us?” One of the things a really great children’s book does is alert us to small pleasures. The habit of noticing small pleasures can help us through the darkest times. I remember vividly seeing for the first time the drawing of Sophie’s parents taking her out to tea – after dark! – because the tiger had eaten all their food. It seemed unimaginably glamorous. I really wanted to be in that picture. To this day I never say, “Let’s not cook, let’s go out”, without feeling I’ve uttered some kind of magic spell.

Normally in children’s fiction you can’t begin the adventure until you’ve got rid of the parents. But parents and parenthood are central to all her work. Part of the power of The Tiger Who Came to Tea is surely that it captures that mixture of sublime boredom and the possibility of magic that characterises long afternoons at home with toddlers.

Male critics love to quote Cyril Connolly’s description of “the pram in the hallway” as one of the “enemies of promise” (they’re less inclined to remember that one of the other enemies was boarding school, by the way). But Kerr found a rich seam of inspiration in motherhood. Her children were her first audience. It was hearing her son say of The Sound of Music “now we know what it was like when Mummy was little” that provoked her into the Out of the Hitler Time trilogy.

The other reason parents appear in her stories, of course, is that her own parents were with her on the great adventure of escaping the Nazis. There are many fine books about the war but what makes Kerr’s trilogy important and newly urgent is that they give an account of how incremental and inconspicuous the drift into extremism can be. She had lived through huge and dangerous times but she wore history as lightly as a pink dress.

She was so proud of having been a refugee and so ready to thank the Britain that took her family in

Part of the reason there has been such a reaction to her death – apart from sheer gratitude – is that she was so proud of having been a refugee and so ready to thank the Britain that took her family in. A Britain that seems as improbable now as a tiger coming to tea. She had cheated the Nazis and for a while it looked like she would cheat death itself.

At book events she walked into the venue with the swagger of a prizefighter, dressed like she was ready to party. It seems ridiculous to be surprised by the death of a 95-year-old. She would not have been surprised herself. For all that they celebrate the good things in life, the books glitter with an awareness of how fragile life is. The tiger is gorgeous, but dangerous. Mog (spoiler) dies. The tiger never did come back.

One of my own favourites of hers is How Mrs Monkey Missed the Ark (1992) – in which Mrs Monkey is so preoccupied with finding “a nice mixture” of fruit and nuts for the journey that she totally misses her chance to join the other animals. She is saved from catastrophe only by a mixture of her own busyness and a friendly dolphin. It’s worth remembering that, as well as drawing forgetful cats, Judith Kerr helped create the nightmarish monster for her husband Nigel Kneale’s masterpiece Quatermass and the Pit.

The shadow of mortality only sharpens the colours of life. That day in Edinburgh she chatted about the nearness of death as cheerily as she chatted about colouring cats.

One of the most moving of the pieces that was written about her came from Nancy Banks-Smith, who recalled that when she interviewed Kneale he wanted mostly to talk about his wife. Maybe that’s why that little book means so much to us. Because it grew out of love – love which is as magnificent, dangerous and disruptive as an uninvited tiger.