The lasting influence of some children’s books is one of the ironies of literary life – when considered alongside their lowly status, and the much greater prestige associated with fiction for adults. How many bestselling novels from 1968 are as widely known today, and as well loved, as Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea? Given that Kerr’s classic is still being passed from grandparent to child more than 50 years on, the answer must be: vanishingly few.
Kerr died in 2019. Were she alive, she would be 100 years old. Her anniversary is being celebrated with an animated film based on a Christmas story about her longest-running character, a chaotic tabby cat called Mog. Coincidentally, the centenary of her husband – the late sci-fi writer Nigel Kneale – has also recently been commemorated with a remake of a lost radio play, You Must Listen, aired as part of a celebration of 100 years of BBC radio drama.
Always modest about her achievements, Kerr insisted that her husband and son – the novelist Matthew Kneale – were the writers in the family, and that even her illustration left much to be desired. “Look at the tiger who came to tea – it’s not really a tiger at all,” she said in 2008. “Quentin Blake would have made it much funnier and Michael Foreman would have drawn it better.”
In reality, the power of her tiger lies in the fact that it is a surrealist creation, whose uncontainable appetite is of a piece with its otherworldly size and colour. It came from an imagination which, for two important reasons, was unconfined by the orthodoxies of children’s books at the time. First, Kerr was a refugee from Nazi Germany who spent her own early childhood absorbing European culture in a flight through Switzerland and France to London. Second, her training was as an artist and textile designer rather than a writer.
She recorded her early life in a powerful semi‑autobiographical trilogy that began with When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. She went on to produce an illustrated memoir, Creatures, which was reissued this year as part of the centenary celebrations. Her prose writing, like her picture books, is deceptively simple. On hearing that her beloved papa has a price on his head, Anna – as Kerr’s alter ego in Pink Rabbit is called – imagines him drowning in a shower of gold coins.
The image is economic, funny and terrifying, revealing the role that surrealism played in enabling her to hold the imagination of a child in tension with adult reality, without patronising either. She was dismissive of attempts to read political symbolism into her work – notably brushing aside the suggestion that her tiger was the Gestapo coming to call, turning her childhood home upside down.
In the early years of their marriage, Kneale was the celebrity. A precocious talent, recognised with a Somerset Maugham award for his first short story collection, matured into pioneering scriptwriting for television, film and radio. His near-future space adventure, The Quatermass Experiment, which started life as a four-part TV serial in 1953, has been credited with influencing everything from Doctor Who to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He remains a cult hero. And Kerr is now a household name whose kittens are still multiplying in her centenary year.
