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 clink 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.”
Any slight anxiety I’d had that, at 95, Kerr might be a little frail are dispelled at once. She is a twinkly presence, full of stories. She scans the menu, with its seafood specialities, and makes a quick choice of crab to start and lobster linguine to follow – “It all looks wonderful!” She takes little persuasion to join me in a glass of wine.
“Miss Kerr”, as a waitress calls her, is something of a special guest here. In the adjacent room, a special “Tiger Who Came to Tea” spread is served for children in honour of her bestselling book. She celebrated her 95th birthday here with her publisher. “It was rather wonderful,” she says. “I looked out of the window and there was this beautiful fox walking along Embankment.”
If Kerr comes into central London these days, she says, she will mostly use the bus or tube, because she likes to observe passengers, perhaps committing one or two details to memory to be sketched later. “If you can get people’s hands right, all the rest follows.” Since 1962 she has lived in the house in Barnes, west London that she bought with her husband Nigel “Tom” Kneale, the playwright and pioneering TV writer (of Quatermass and many other things) who died in 2006. She tries to be at her desk every morning, drawing or writing. In the evenings, or if she is stuck on an idea, she will walk the half mile to the river. “I can sit on the sofa and have an idea. But mostly I get to it by walking.” She has a book out for Christmas, Mummy Time – a nicely observed parable about a parent distracted by her phone – and another for older children that she is half way through.
As she tucks into her crab starter, we talk about her inspiration to write. It came initially from her father. “All his books were burned quite early on by Goebbels. But they have been reprinted.” Alfred Kerr was a theatre critic, who instilled in Judith and her brother – Michael (who became Britain’s first foreign-born senior judge for 800 years) – a spirited independence. “My father grew up in a normal Jewish household and remembered it quite fondly, the candles and so on. But he didn’t believe in God and that was that. We didn’t go to RE at school. The other children would ask why,” she recalls. “Aged five I said what I had been told to say: ‘I am a free thinker!’”
She wasn’t a fan of German children’s literature – “books about virtuous girls in the mountains who tended to die”. She loved instead a translation of Tom Sawyer. “I remember that opening: ‘“Tom!” Keine Antwort – “Tom!” No answer’ – I thought it was so wonderful to start a book like that, and put you right in the middle of the action.”
Her father, 30 years older than her mother, returned to Germany just once. In 1948 the British government sent him back to Hamburg on a troop plane to attend a performance of Romeo and Juliet. The audience gave him a standing ovation when he walked in. Afterwards he went back to his hotel and collapsed. A friend found him the next morning. “I’ve had a stroke,” Alfred Kerr told him. “But it wasn’t the play. It was bad, but it wasn’t that bad.” There was no prospect of recovery and, secretly, Kerr’s mother helped her husband to end his life by smuggling some pills into the military hospital. The following morning, around his body, his bed was covered in notes. The last read: “I feel that I am dying.” “He wrote until the very last second,” Kerr says. “As any writer wants to.”
As she tells this story, Kerr is working her way patiently through her linguine. “This is wonderful but slightly difficult to eat!” she admits, laughing, twirling her fork. “I will make sure I get all the lobster though.” She broke her wrist earlier in the year. “It was rather lucky,” she says, “because I tripped over when I was on my way to a hospital appointment, so I just carried on and they fixed it up. And it was my left hand too, so it hasn’t stopped me working.”
I wonder if her experience of war made the childhood innocence she captures in her books all the more precious?
“Well,” she says, “stories are a huge comfort when things are bad. Hugh Lofting wrote the first Doctor Dolittle novels in the trenches. There’s a charity I like that allows soldiers to record bedtime stories for their children at home to listen to.”
Her first stories, about the tiger who came to tea, and Mog the cat, were told to her two children. It was her husband who encouraged her to write them down. “I learned from Tom that writing is all about shape,” she says. “With drawing I do feel now I know what I am doing. Writing I am less sure about.”
Sometimes the creative process is so mysterious that she feels she can’t exactly claim credit for it. “If I think of something outrageous that works, I say to myself, ‘That’s come straight from Tom,’” she says. “We were married 52 years. He encouraged me so much.”
As our plates are cleared we talk about how her new book reflects on the way parents in the park often seem more interested in their phones than their toddlers. Does she avoid technology?
“When I got a mobile phone I said I want one that does nothing but make calls,” she says. “They told me: ‘This one has a torch too, is that OK?’ I felt I couldn’t go far wrong with a torch.”
She has a computer which she uses to scan her drawings and for email. Her son, the novelist Matthew Kneale, lives in Rome with his family. I suggest that she must wish her grandchildren were a bit closer. “Oh no,” she says, “it’s nice to have the excuse to go to Rome. And when they come here, they see London as an exciting foreign city and they have great plans to visit places, which I enjoy.”
She smiles. “I like this generation that are teenagers,” she says. “They seem kind. They like to cook. They are quite idealistic …”
It’s a shame, I suggest, that they have not also been able to vote. Given her own European heritage I wonder what she makes of the mess we are in?
“Oh, I still keep hoping for a second referendum,” she says. “The first was based on so many lies.” She recalls how somebody once asked her father after the war why he didn’t go back to France, where the food was better and he had more fluency in the language. He answered, she recalls, that he would go, “but only if he could take the entire English population with him. People here were incredibly good and kind to us. I don’t think that has all gone.”
She thinks about this for a moment, smiles, orders coffee, talks about getting back home to her work: “Good heavens it is three o’clock! And here we are overlooking the river and eating lobster!”
Mummy Time (HarperCollins, £12.99) To buy a copy for £11.43, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846
