cultureAUGUST09
66
finalsay
Judith Kerr86, author and illustrator of 16 books about Mog, the cat, and
of The Tiger Who Came To Tea
If you ask me if I wanted to be a writer or an
illustrator, I would say a bit of both. I always drew
but my father was a writer.
He was very well known in Germany before the
war. He was a drama critic but he wrote about other
things and recognised the threat of Hitler very early on,
which is why they hated him.
He told my mother that he wanted her, my
brother and me to leave the country just before
Hitler became Chancellor in 1933.
My father said, `They'll hang onto you to get me
back'. My mother's friends said that was crazy but we
heard that the morning after we had left, they came for
us � at 8 o'clock in the morning.
We crossed the frontier into Switzerland just in
time and I remember my mother was terrific. I was
just nine but she always gave us lots of confidence.
At the frontier I almost gave us away. My mother
had told us that we mustn't say a word but I forgot.
She gave us such a look!
We went to Paris, which I loved. My father
thought he could stay and write there. We were there
for a couple of years and then, in 1936, we came to
England.
When you have learned one foreign language it
gets easier. I had already learned French and I knew
that I simply had to learn English.
All sorts of jobs during the war were closed to
me because I wasn't British but in the end I got a
job with the Red Cross. We would get the uniforms of
officers who had been killed. Officers had to buy their
kit so they would come to us and say, `What have you
got?'
I always wanted a cat and I could never have one
as a child. But my husband was a great man for cats.
He was a Manxman although he liked them with tails.
We always promised ourselves that when we got
a house we'd get a cat and the first one we got was a
tabby cat called Mog.
Mog was a very favourite cat. All the things in the
first Mog book are either things that Mog had done or
could have done � although he never caught a burglar!
The first Mog story I told my little daughter
when she was three and she really liked it.
When the children went to school I thought I'd try
to do a picture book and I was pleasantly surprised
when they published it.
You will have guessed that I've always liked
tigers too. The Tiger Who came To
Tea has always been very popular. I
don't think it's ever been out of
print.
An exhibition of Judith Kerr's
work will open at Seven Stories,
the Centre for Children's Books,
in September. See
www.sevenstories.org.uk

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