![]() ![]() Judith Kerr wrote Mog the Forgetful Cat in 1970. “I was furious,” she said in mock seriousness, amid much laughter from the audience, “that they had hardly waited until I was dead to start eating junk food!” ![]() Soon after her 87th birthday she told an audience in Edinburgh that she’d had a dream about her own funeral and that after it her children had gone straight to McDonald’s. She always managed to speak of it with a matter-of-factness, neither too sentimental nor too brusque, and always entertainingly. It was brave to kill off a much-loved children’s character, although she was resurrected for a charity tie-in with Sainsbury’s and Save the Children, in Mog’s Christmas Calamity, in 2015.Īt the time of Goodbye Mog, and repeatedly in her later years, Judith explained to audiences that it was really about people, not cats, dying and she wrote it because she was thinking about her own death and those of her friends. She gave Mog the human traits she believed cats to have while managing never to detach her from her animal self. Both in the stories and in the talks she gave to very young children, Judith was most amusing about Mog and her endearing and infuriating characteristics. It was also to entertain her own children that Judith wrote Mog the Forgetful Cat (1970), the first of what was to become an enduring and hugely successful series about Mog, who was based on the progression of cats she herself owned – the last being the subject of Katinka’s Tail, in 2017. I made it up to amuse my children because we were bored and because their father was away filming for very long days at a time.” It was a view she dismissed flatly when chairing her at events across the country I frequently heard her say, in the nicest way possible, “It’s just the story of a tiger who came to tea. Later, it was subjected to much analysis, with many assuming that the tiger stood for the Gestapo, who had so vividly interrupted Judith’s own childhood. ![]() Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Imagesĭescribed as “a dazzling first book”, which would make children “scream with delicious pleasure at the dangerous naughtiness of the notion” by Antonia Fraser, one of the earliest reviewers, it was initially received as exactly what it was: a simple picture book that generated delight for children. When father comes home he cheers mother and daughter up by taking them out to dinner.Īn annotated page from The Tiger Who Came to Tea. There is no panic the tiger settles down to drink all the water and eat all the food, to Sophie’s delight rather than terror, before exiting politely. Characterised by its bold, naive-style illustrations and gentle anarchy, it tells the playful and imaginative story of how the everyday routine of a mother and her young daughter, Sophie, is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of a handsome stripy tiger. The bestselling The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968) was her first book. She always claimed that she was “a very slow” illustrator and that her work was “more rubbing out than drawing”, but in a career that ran from 1968 to this year she created more than 30 books, mostly about Mog, all of which have remained in print and which sell worldwide. The creator of the classic children’s books The Tiger Who Came to Tea and Mog the Forgetful Cat, Judith Kerr, who has died aged 95, was unusual in being equally successful as a writer and an illustrator. ![]()
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