At home: Judith Kerr

By Penny Wark - Financial Times - 14 January, 2012

Having arrived in London as a refugee from Germany, the illustrator has spent 50 years working in the same house in south-west London

Light floods into the south-facing house

It is 50 years since Judith Kerr and her late husband Nigel Kneale first saw the Victorian home in south-west London where she still lives – and she remembers it with her illustrator’s eye for detail. “The house was pitch dark. It had brown panelling and was full of lodgers and they’d all put dressing tables in front of the windows. We said, well, it faces south, it must be light,” she says. “We brought the children up here, worked here. I love this house, couldn’t bear to leave it. I wouldn’t know who I was somewhere else.”
The author of the children’s picture classics, The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog the Cat books, is small and neat, and she conveys a great deal without using many words. If Kerr’s strong sense of belonging seems unusual, it is worth remembering that as a child she was a German refugee. Her Jewish father, Alfred Kerr, a celebrated theatre critic who was bold enough to criticise Hitler, left Berlin suddenly in 1933 when the Nazi regime burnt his books, and urged his wife to follow with their two children. They escaped 24 hours before the Nazis arrived for their passports. Kerr was nine. “My mother was marvellous, I had no idea it was dangerous, she was so protective,” she says.

Judith Kerr at home

The family lived in Switzerland and Paris before reaching London in 1936, where they led an impecunious existence in a single room at a modest hotel in Bloomsbury and were known as “friendly enemy aliens”. Kerr is now 88 and as always, her sense of the ridiculous, combined with her ability to see emotional truths clearly and without sentimentality, enables her to tell fantastical stories that make perfect sense. The Tiger Who Came to Tea, published in 1968, and the Mog books, first published in 1970, have sold more than 9 million copies. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, her account of her young life and another bestseller, is widely read in Germany where it is used to explain the Nazi regime to children.
The full interesting story at The Financial Times.