Review The Tiger Who Came to Tea

Review

The Tiger Who Came to Tea

Judith Kerr I knew little of this author or her wonderful book when I first read it 35 years ago. The text was enchanting and the illustrations vivid and colourful. I found the book deeply soothing and enjoyable and I read it often over the next few years. Like all picture board books for young children then and since, it was intended to be read to a child. I was fortunate with both my children. Firstly, he – and in turn she - held one edge of this book and clutched a soft toy while seated and snuggling close under a protective arm. Guaranteed on every occasion, whatever the book chosen, was a brimful display of delight at being read to – even before any reading commenced.

I recently lived again those long-gone but neverto-be-forgotten happy reading times when I visited ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea Exhibition’. It was held throughout the summer months – with free admission for both adults and children – in Hitchin’s splendid North Hertfordshire Museum. There was even an ‘Afternoon Tea with the Tiger’ available for purchase in the Museum’s cafe! Perhaps a possible joint exercise (or similar event) for Melbourn Library and the Bookmark Cafe to arrange in the Melbourn Community Hub where both library and cafe are located? I learned much about the book and its author Judith Kerr as the exhibition was based on her archive, which spans more than eighty years.

The book, first published in 1968 and in print continuously, has been enjoyed by millions across many countries. It was written and illustrated by Judith Kerr who settled in London in 1936 and wrote the story for her daughter Sophie, who features in the book. The illustrations are still superb and the story remains simplicity itself: Sophie and her mother are at home preparing supper; they are expecting Sophie’s father home shortly from work. Instead, a knock on the door reveals a tiger who joins them at the tea table and eats and drinks everything; and then consumes all the food and drink that is available in the house before leaving. Sophie’s father arrives home and suggests that he, Sophie and her mother should walk to a nearby cafe for supper, which they immediately set out to do.

Judith Kerr

This summary is a very poor telling. The book requires to be read aloud to a child with all the enthusiasm and drama a child expects – with lots of pointing out and explaining and questions for the child, and digressions about cooking, the nature of work, tigers and the noise they make and the world we share and so on. Judith Kerr’s ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’ quickly became a classic book and Judith Kerr, over a lifetime’s work, became one of this country’s best known author-illustrators for children.

Judith Kerr’s childhood and early life experiences also tell us much about Britain today: she escaped Germany aged nine in 1931 as Hitler came to power; was a refugee in Switzerland; then in France; before arriving in Britain and settling in London. Her recent death in 2019 – at the age of 95 and still writing and illustrating – leads one to reflect on the many more recent refugees today whose lives were taken from them as they sought refuge – a place of safety – among us. It leads one to reflect also on what we lost that might have been: gifted persons in the mould of refugee Judith Kerr who would rise in the public sphere to the top of a chosen profession perhaps; or all those less gifted refugees who would lead a life in socially useful toil contributing quietly and anonymously to our island society’s steady hum and daily routines.

As our Christmas Season draws close and a sea of “stuff” rises and swirls around us – mainly indestructible trash and tat we have somehow allowed to become central to celebrating Christmas – choose not to buy rubbish that pollutes our land and oceans. Choose instead to make a Christmas present of this wonderful classic book to a child you know and, more importantly, take the time to read it to them. In doing so you may also just give him or her a lifetime love of books and reading. That will be for them a source of great joy in the troubled, polluted world that they are certain to inherit from us. Hugh Pollock