At 95, the author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea still works every day. ‘Stories are a huge comfort,’ she says over lunch at the Savoy
Judith Kerr has a theory about life. The first half of it, she suggests, lasts until you are about 18. All the rest counts as the second half. “Children’s years go on so long,” she says, “and pack so very much in.” Kerr’s own formative years – fictionalised in her book When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit – are more than a case in point. She escaped from Germany in 1933 with her mother and her father, who was a journalist and fierce critic of the Nazis. They lived for a while in France before being welcomed as refugees in London. She recalls being bombed out of a hotel in Bloomsbury in the blitz. “I was sleeping on a chest of drawers in the cellar,” she says. “Everyone expected the invasion any day and I knew we wouldn’t survive. I remember lying there thinking: ‘I’m 17, and I don’t yet know what I can do, and I would so like to find out.’”
Seventy-eight years on Kerr could be forgiven for thinking that she has made good on that curiosity. She has written and illustrated 35 books for children that have sold more than four million copies. But she still reckons there is plenty more to do. Settling down amid the chink of china and plink of piano at Kaspar’s at the Savoy, at a table overlooking the lazy old river, she explains that she made sure she got an hour or two of work in that morning to ensure she could properly enjoy lunch: “Otherwise I’ll always tend to think the day has been wasted.”
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