Judith Kerr

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and four, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a writer and illustrator. Her most famous creation, Mog the Cat, has sold three million copies over the last thirty years and has never been out of print. Alongside her carefully told stories for children sits another type of fiction, equally meticulous in its narrative, but with a more sombre theme. These are novels which reflect her own life as a young Jewish child in a happy German household which in the thirties fled from the Hitler regime to live first in France, in Paris, and then its final home in England.

Presenter1:02

She wrote these books to help her English husband and children to understand her own experiences and feelings. Now eighty, she says of the country that gave her the language of her success that it was wonderfully generous, one which saved our lives. She is Judith Carr. You've lived here for more than sixty-five years now, Judith. I mean, I have a sense that you're more English than the English, is that right? Well, my husband says so, and I think it applies to all refugees. Why do you think it is? Because they did save our lives, and because we found a kind of humour and tolerance here, which didn't, I think, exist in other countries at that time.

Presenter1:48

I think I became a Brit, as you might say, during the war, because um the people here were so extraordinarily good. We were here right through the blitz and the bombing, and people were being killed every night, and there were my parents walking about with their German accents, and nobody ever once said anything nasty to them. I came really to feel that I would never want to live anywhere else. And even my father, who loved France, when he was asked after the war, wouldn't you like to go back to France where he could speak the language and everything? He said, But I would have to take the entire English population with me.

Judith Kerr2:15

King.

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But nevertheless, the truth is that you lost your home, you lost your country, you lost your language, didn't you? That must be

Presenter2:40

Difficult psychologically to come to terms with. The language really.

Presenter2:46

It was a delight to come to England and find this incredibly rich language which I have been very lucky to be able to write in.

Presenter2:56

Um

Presenter2:57

No, that was a plus. No sacrifice at all. But the fascinating thing is, now that you you write in English and someone else translates your books into German, whether it's Mog the Cat or your autobiographical writing when Hitler stole Pink Rabbit

Judith Kerr3:02

The b

Presenter3:13

Why don't you put them in German? I couldn't. I I my my German

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Is

Presenter3:19

A bit scrappy and um

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I have the vocabulary of a nine year old.

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And I've forgotten a lot of that.

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Well, we'll hear how you came here in just a moment, but tell me about the first record you'd like to take to your desert island.

Presenter3:34

It really stands for everything that was happening in Germany.

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As we left, uh the horror of

Presenter3:44

seedy Berlin with a Nazi influence everywhere. I never saw any of it because I was nine years old, and my parents were very protective, and I only found out afterwards what I had escaped from.

Speaker 44:03

Feel calm and piety. Welcome!

Presenter4:06

Come.

Speaker 44:08

Frances, estrangés, stranger, luclique, chousine, just les anxiete.

Judith Kerr4:13

At the

Speaker 44:20

Happy to see you, blithe rest is stay. Pilcomen bienvenu, Buelcom cabaret.

Presenter4:33

Wilkommen, performed by Joel Gray from the original cast recording of Cabaret, and very much Judith Carr the music of uh the thirties in Berlin, which is the Germany that you and your family fled from, the four of you, mother, father, brother, sister um, and the story which you told in your book when Hitler stole pink rabbit, pink rabbit you left behind as a little girl. It was nineteen thirty three, so quite

Presenter4:56

Early on. Why did the family go then? How did it know to go then? Well, my father was Alfred Kerr. He was a hugely well known

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Journalist, a drama critic, and um he was

Presenter5:12

On the first black list published by the Nazis, this was a list they published in Der Stilme in nineteen thirty two. Um and these people, they said, we will stand up against the wall and shoot as soon as we get into power. Why, why him?

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Uh he

Presenter5:30

wrote about them, he made fun of them.

Presenter5:34

Uh and he was enormously popular as a journalist, so everybody read what he wrote. And uh of course to be made fun of is the worst thing that can happen to you. So was his life in danger even then, in nineteen thirty two, thirty-three, before he went? Yes, it was. One of the things he used to do was to go and broadcast once a week. And um

Presenter5:56

Every Thursday he had to go to the broadcasting studios,

Presenter6:00

do his broadcast and then come back through the Berlin streets, which were already very, very dangerous. People were being murdered and the police were standing by doing nothing. And so the broadcasting company

Presenter6:15

Used to send a car for him with two armed bodyguards, and my brother and I just thought we didn't even have a car. Gosh, you know, a car with two people. Very grand. In fact, he was so sure that something might happen to him, because he could so easily have been attacked, that he once left a farewell note from my mother in case he didn't get back. But still a huge leap for the family, for your mother, who was much younger than your father, about thirty years younger than that.

Judith Kerr6:40

Yeah.

Judith Kerr6:46

Yeah, thirty years.

Presenter6:48

Huge leap, because you lived a very comfortable life in a leafy suburb of Berlin. Huge leap to realize that you had to leave all of that behind. My father was in bed with flu and somebody rang him up, somebody he didn't know, to tell him that the Nazis were planning to take away his passport. And so he got out of bed with a high temperature and my mother packed him a rucksack and he got out of the country within hours. So when eventually, and it was only a couple of weeks after your father had gone, it was decided you should all go, you and your brother and mother too, for you it was just a sort of sudden trip and you thought you'd be coming back.

Presenter7:31

My mother told us that the Nazis might Hitler might come to power. This was just before the elections of 1933, which did bring him to power. She said my father wanted us out of the country. What she didn't say then was that he thought that they would hold us hostage to get him back, because he was so deeply hated by them. She said we're getting out while this is going on. I'm sure it can't last. We'll come back probably in six months. And I thought it was really very exciting.

Presenter8:10

Tell me about record number two.

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Well, this is when we came to England. It was such a joy to find

Presenter8:19

people being funny about very serious things. So when the war started and we heard all these ridiculous songs roll out the barrel and uh run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run, which was turned into Hitler at the last moment and who are you kidding, Mr. Hitler, Bud Flanagan? It was a kind of joy.

Judith Kerr8:44

Who do you think you're kidding, Mr. Hitler, if you think we're on the run?

Judith Kerr8:53

We are the boys who will stop your little game We are the boys who will make you thing again Cause who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? If you

Presenter9:09

Flanagan and who do you think you're kidding, Mr. Hitler? You got out, you and your family of Berlin in March 33, as you say. Hitler came to power, I think, the very next day. It was just in the nick of time, though, because they did. The authorities did come for you, didn't they? Yes, we crossed the frontier into Switzerland on the morning of the day of the elections, and eight o'clock the following day we heard they came to our house for all our passports. So my entire life

Presenter9:38

depended on that particular timing. We didn't go out in the normal way. We didn't take a big express train to Zurich. We went to Stuttgart and then took a little milk train very early in the morning. But I was so unaware of any danger that I nearly gave us away. My mother said, You're not to say a word when the man comes to look at our passports. And he came and looked at the passports and nothing happened. And I opened my mouth to say, There, you see, nothing happened. And my mother gave me a terrible look and I stopped.

Presenter10:16

Of course, your parents were particularly unsuited really to because they'd lived such a comfortable life and had people to help them around the house and so on. I mean, your mother couldn't cook, couldn't sew, your father couldn't do anything except write in German, and that wasn't much good in England, presumably.

Judith Kerr10:28

Don't do anything except

Presenter10:31

No, well this was a thing that worried me when I was first writing Pink Rabbit, because I kept thinking, well

Presenter10:37

In other books parents always sort of find brilliant ways of solving practical problems, and uh this was not the nature of my parents. But the other thing would be presumably he was interned as an enemy alien. Uh my father wasn't, no. He wasn't, no. He was too old, was he?

Judith Kerr10:52

My father wasn't, no. He wasn't no.

Presenter10:55

Well, they knew about him and it was a panic measure. Um Michael wouldn't have been interned if it hadn't been uh for the fact that he happened to be in Cambridge at the time. Michael's your brother, so he would have been what?

Judith Kerr11:06

So I

Presenter11:07

Eighteen at the outbreak. Yes, eighteen. So, what happened to him? It was the.

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Weekend

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when everything seemed to collapse and I think the G Germans were at Dunkirk and in a panic measure

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Everybody who was within a certain distance of the sea, which Cambridge just was, was interned. By then

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We were expecting the invasion every day, and we wondered if we'd ever find him again, if there were an invasion. How long was he inside?

Presenter11:43

I think about uh couple of months. Then you see this extraordinary thing happened.

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which is one of the things that makes me so pro British. My father wrote a letter to Michael Foote, and this was, I think, in

Presenter12:03

September, October, nineteen forty, when people really had something else to think about. But Michael Foote passed it on to somebody in the government, and within six days, Michael was out. Tell me about his third record.

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My father died.

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In nineteen forty eight.

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which was a great loss. He died in Hamburg, of all places, where he'd been sent by the British Control Commission.

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To write about the German theatre, to raise German morale after the war.

Presenter12:41

And this is the piece of music that was played at his funeral, is it?

Presenter12:45

Yes, the uh Beethoven.

Presenter12:48

Seventh, which he always loved. The Hamburg Symphony Orchestra played it.

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And I remember walking through this icy auditorium and

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They put the Union Jack over the coffin because he had just very recently become a British citizen.

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He wasn't really your typical

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BRIT, to be buried under the Union jack.

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Part of the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. Seven, played by the La Scala Philharmonic, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini.

Presenter14:18

um played, as you say, at your father's funeral in nineteen forty eight in Hamburg. You obviously went over there for the funeral. That was the first time you'd been back since you left.

Presenter14:29

I presume by then, and you would have been twenty five or so, you knew.

Presenter14:35

the full truth. You knew the full extent of of the Holocaust and you would have known people who didn't survive it. Was that therefore difficult for you to go back?

Presenter14:47

I think there was just a sort of

Presenter14:50

feeling of disgust at that time. I find myself thinking about it now the last ten years far more than I did then. Why do you think that is? Well, we made a point of not thinking about it.

Presenter15:08

As children. That's it. That's gone.

Presenter15:12

I think we both had a sense, Michael and I, that, um, having survived, the least we could do was to make something of our lives.

Judith Kerr15:21

It's your duty.

Presenter15:22

Yes, because one knew that so many hadn't.

Presenter15:26

Of course your your book that you um wrote well, you wrote the trilogy, but that first book, when Hitler stole Pink Rabbit, is now used, as I understand it, in German primary schools to to teach children about this difficult period in their history. How do you feel about that?

Judith Kerr15:39

Yeah.

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Well I think I'm uh

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As long as they don't have to write essays about them, which I always used to hate doing, I'm terribly pleased, of course, and I think my father would have been pleased.

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I think the business of

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Of the Holocaust. Um

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The one and a half million children.

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Who didn't get out?

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as I got out in the nick of time.

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I think about them almost every day now, because I've had such a happy and fulfilled life,

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They'd have given anything to have had just a few days of it.

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And um

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I hope I've not wasted any of it. I try to get the good of every bit of it, because I know that they would have done if they'd had the chance.

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Record number four.

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This um memorial prayer is for them.

Speaker 416:57

Molira Sami and Molly Rasa.

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Was a in a former one.

Speaker 417:16

I'm Italian who found it for not

Speaker 417:21

All I can feel.

Presenter17:26

The memorial prayer El Mali Rachamim, sung by Kantor Moshe Hashel with the Nee Ma singers, conducted by Mark Temelese for the inaugural Holocaust Memorial Day in two thousand and one.

Presenter17:39

So back to you, Judith, as a young woman here in England just after the war. You went to secretarial college, you worked for the Red Cross, you got a scholarship to Aunt College, became a teacher. And then at some point you met your husband, who was a scriptwriter at the BBC, which is where you ended up. Now, anyone over the age of fifty will recall a certain piece that he wrote for the BBC, um, because it's part of all of our youths. He wrote Quatomass, didn't he? And you helped him make the monster, is that right? Well, he made it really. All my contribution was to sit with two wash leather gloves on my hands for most of a day while he stuck little bits on these gloves, tendrils and twin twiddly things. And when it came to it, he stood behind a blown-up photograph which we'd taken from a guide book to Westminster Abbey of Poets' Corner and cut holes in. And he stood on a box with these gloves and stuck the tendrils through and very, very, very gently waved them.

Presenter18:49

and the entire nation was terrified.

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It's amazing, really. It was r real Heath Robinson stuff, wasn't it? It was extraordinary because uh it was all done live, of course, and then after the first one or two episodes

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One knew that everybody was watching it and um.

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We'd come out of Alexandra Palace.

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and it was still light, it was summer, and you'd look down on London, and you'd see all these television aerials, and you knew that everybody had been watching it. It was extraordinary.

Judith Kerr19:28

But

Presenter19:28

It was a Saturday night must. Anyway, you were married on the strength of the success of the first series. You had two children.

Judith Kerr19:33

Yeah.

Presenter19:36

But it wasn't until you were, I think, in your mid forties that you finally decided to write. Why did you wait so long? Well, i I think it was um

Presenter19:47

A sort of despair, really. I mean, the children were both at school, and I knew I had to do something, because I knew otherwise I'd turn into the sort of mother who says you use this house as a hotel.

Presenter20:01

And drawing was always my first love and um

Presenter20:05

I told this story to Tacey and I thought, well, let's see if I can make it into a picture book.

Presenter20:11

Which story was that?

Judith Kerr20:11

Which story?

Presenter20:13

The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Which was your first book? That was my first book. The Tiger Who Eats Up Everything in the House and the family has to go out to the cafe for supper. That's right. I just put in everything she liked, and obviously she had very normal tastes because it's gone on very well ever since. A hugely important decision in your life, really, wasn't it, to become an author? Well, I th I don't know. I think I hadn't planned to become an author.

Judith Kerr20:17

Time is

Judith Kerr20:20

Yeah.

Presenter20:43

I just thought I'd try to do a picture book. And indeed you did, and you did more, which I want to talk to you about, but let's pause there for record number five.

Presenter20:51

What is it? Well, this is the music from Quatermass and um still takes me back to this very happy time.

Presenter22:02

Part of Mars The Bringer of War from Hulst's Planet Suite played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. And then Judith Carr came Mog the Cat in 1970. A great success from the off. I think there have been sixteen mog books altogether translated into lots of different languages. I never meant to do all those mog books, I just meant to do one. But then we kept acquiring more cats and they kept doing funny things, so that's why there were so many.

Judith Kerr22:18

Yeah.

Presenter22:27

The the text and the pictures, uh your illustrations, are very interwoven, aren't they? Sometimes one takes the narrative lead and sometimes the other. I started doing the mog books when my children were learning to read, and I thought that children shouldn't be made to read anything unnecessary. And so I would never put anything in the text that was in the pictures. You know, if you say he was wearing red trousers and you see a boy with red trousers, I mean it's a waste of their energy. I didn't want them to have to do that. So I

Presenter23:02

Try to use as few words as possible, as well as possible. Well, you say you had lots of cats yourself. You had lots of Mogs. She was more than one cat. Di did did any of your cats have views? Because Mog has views, doesn't she? Well, they all have views.

Judith Kerr23:11

She is more

Presenter23:19

They all have very clear views, and they change from day to day, so that you give them something one day, and they say, This is the best thing I've ever eaten, and you give it to them the next day, and they say, What on earth possessed you to offer me this terrible stuff?

Presenter23:36

They also have eccentricities. We had one

Presenter23:41

who was terrified of heights. She would start climbing up a very slender tree, and then look down and find that her bottom was all of eight inches off the ground, and panic and slide down in terror.

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Another one we had, Posy.

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Who had this toy?

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which he thought was a child.

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And when she had kittens she had five sons. We came in in the morning to find that she'd lined them all up in a row, and Bunny at the end.

Presenter24:17

Little tiny material bunny. And also I think some of your cats, or maybe all of them, sat on your lap as you wrote these stuff. That was just Mog. Mog would sit on my lap while I was drawing.

Judith Kerr24:17

Little tiny small

Judith Kerr24:18

Bundle.

Presenter24:30

and nudge the brush or the pencil with her nose and the extraordinary thing was that she only sat on my lap when I was doing a book about her.

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She knew.

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And then one day, just over a year ago, you killed her off, just like that. Goodbye, Mog, you called it. Why did you do that?

Presenter24:51

Well, I think it was really about myself rather than Mog.

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I was coming up to eighty and I was thinking about how I'd like to be remembered, if at all, and um I thought it would be good to be remembered

Presenter25:11

You know, as one really was not idealised. Also, I think our children had s so many pets and they kept dying. I mean, hamsters and fish. I mean, fish die constantly. So it was a lesson in dealing with death for little ones, too. Yes. Eggward number six. Well, this is the cat stuet, which is really the very least I can do for all those cats we had.

Judith Kerr25:27

Uh

Speaker 425:27

Please

Judith Kerr25:27

Um

Speaker 425:41

Me aw, me oh me a me.

Speaker 425:57

Yeah.

Speaker 425:59

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

Speaker 426:03

Oh.

Speaker 426:17

Yo

Speaker 426:19

Yeah.

Speaker 426:21

Yeah.

Presenter26:40

Part of the Cats duet by Rossini, sung by Elizabeth Soderstrom and Kirsten Meyer, with Jan Iron on piano.

Presenter26:48

Um you went on, as I said, Judith Carr, to uh write the trilogy, uh based on your experiences.

Presenter26:55

To explain them to your husband and to your children. Your father and mother were, of course, both dead by the time it was published, but there was that other important person who would have been deeply affected by what you wrote, because it was his history as well. That was your brother Michael. How did he react to your publishing this story, your story? Michael Michael. Well, he was very, very English by then. He was must have been a QC by then, at least. And his past

Presenter27:25

he felt would be a a disadvantage, so he hadn't mentioned it. I mean, we both wanted to belong. Uh, but he wanted to belong more

Presenter27:36

Even. And indeed he did, because he went on to become an appeal court judge, didn't he? Well, you can't belong more than that.

Judith Kerr27:37

Uh

Judith Kerr27:38

Uh

Judith Kerr27:41

Well you can't believe it.

Presenter27:43

No, it was quite interesting because in fact he really had kept pretty stum about uh his past. But then when the book came out and was you know quite successful, he started giving it to all his friends, which was very nice and really opened a whole new world up for him, which was good.

Presenter28:07

And you've lived in the same house in a leafy suburb of London for forty two years. I wonder if you stayed there all that time because of the nature of your peripatetic childhood. You needed to put your roots down.

Judith Kerr28:18

I think it's a good idea.

Presenter28:22

relish it now. I relish the fact that I can drive past my children's primary school and there they are still wearing more or less the same uniforms. Um I think of my mother who was never able to do that, who all the past disappeared totally for her. It's funny because I certainly didn't mind my peripatetic, if that's the word childhood. I loved it. I thought it was terrific.

Presenter28:52

But that's the other point, isn't it? That both of those family existences your parental family and then the family you created yourself have been such happy existences, and to that extent you are incredibly lucky.

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But I've been

Presenter29:07

So very lucky I

Presenter29:11

I don't know what I have done to deserve it.

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I found Tom, and we've had these terribly nice children. I've been able.

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To do the work I love. And I suppose, um.

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We've lived through one of the

Presenter29:33

In this country one of the

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most peaceful and affluent periods there have ever been in the world.

Presenter29:43

Tell me about record number seven.

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Well, this is um

Presenter29:50

Partly because Tom used to play it when he was writing, so we always.

Presenter29:58

I know it well. And I also once saw a film in which it was used to accompany.

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a scene in which a very mature couple were dancing, and they were really a bit past it, but they were still dancing. And I thought, well, this is Tom and me.

Presenter30:18

after fifty years of marriage.

Presenter31:20

Dance of the Knights from Kofiev's Romeo and Juliet with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Mark Ermler. Quite a hefty old dance. Well, they were a hefty old couple.

Judith Kerr31:28

Were they

Presenter31:31

So to your desert island, Judith, tell me how you imagine it will be.

Presenter31:36

Well

Presenter31:38

I think what I'd miss most is talking to people.

Presenter31:43

And I think what I would like to take with me

Presenter31:48

Is a a whole lot of pencils and paper.

Presenter31:54

Because most of our marriage Tom and I have worked in adjoining rooms and we've talked.

Presenter32:03

And we still find things to talk about.

Presenter32:06

And if I were able to write down any sort of thoughts I might have or anything I'd noticed, if I could do that, I think I would feel less out of touch. So you could draw, you could write, just as you do now, but no conversation, and that would be purgatory, wouldn't it?

Presenter32:28

Yes, it would. It would. Uh you imagine all those

Presenter32:33

Thoughts, I mean, they're not very interesting thoughts, but you do have thoughts, would sort of choke one up if one couldn't

Presenter32:42

Get rid of them in some way.

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Last record.

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Well, this is just the most beautiful music I know. I love it.

Presenter32:52

And I would want to take that with me, I think.

Presenter33:55

Part of the Kyrie for Mozart's Great Mass in C minor, sung by Kathleen Battel, Peter Seiffert, and Court Moll, with the Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by James Levine. Now, Judith, if you could only take one of those eight records.

Presenter34:10

Just a little bit.

Speaker 234:10

Just a second.

Judith Kerr34:10

I take the

Presenter34:12

Yes. You have the Mass in C minor. Now you've told us your luxury, the the papers and the pencils, but what about your book? Because we give you the Bible and Shakespeare, and you can take one book.

Presenter34:23

Yes, well having had this very irreligious upbringing, I think the Bible would keep me busy for quite a long time and uh

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I think

Presenter34:35

With the whole of Shakespeare, I don't think I can't think of anything else I would really want to read. It would be a bit of a come down. So I thought what would be very nice would be

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A very big

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Beautiful coffee table book.

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of Impressionists.

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Uh no text, just the pictures.

Presenter34:58

Judith Carr, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Speaker 235:09

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio forward.