Wednesday 25 January 2012

Tea with Tigers


Recently I was reading the children’s classic, “The Tiger who came to Tea” by Judith Kerr aloud to my kids. A tiger arrives at the doorstep one day, asks itself in for tea, and the mother and daughter graciously look on as the animal eats and drinks everything in the household. My two year old is delighted and appalled at the picture of the tiger pouring tea straight into his mouth from the teapot, my 6 year old son likes the impossible idea of the tiger drinking all the water out of the tap, so that the little girl, Sophy, cannot have her bath. And me? I am secretly impressed by the way the parents let their little girl go out in her nightie, albeit with a coat over it, when they have go to a cafĂ© to have dinner, because the Tiger has eaten up all their supper. 

In the book, only one page is completely blocked through with colour, the scene where the family are walking down the high street, illuminated by street lights and car lights. On the other pages, the characters and the bare essentials of their surroundings stand out in pen and colour against white space. People sit on chairs and eat from tables, which could be floating in mid-air. A carpet, a front doormat gives occasional footing. Despite this, Judith Kerr creates a very homely and secure feeling in the pages, which has much to do with the characters expressions. Not even a tiger can disturb them.

Although the book was published in 1968, I wonder whether the illustrations were not even then a nostalgic picture of yesteryear in England. With the lovingly drawn pictures of a United Dairies milk float, a grocery delivery boy on his bicycle and the high street of independent little shops they create an atmosphere of stability and normality. But the tiger remains an enigma, strange and won’t be tied down to a normal life (‘and he never came again’).

Despite its surprise appearance, the tiger is not met by surprise, rather the mother and daughter accept the tiger in equal measures of curiosity and generosity. They do not protest when the tiger eats and drinks everything they had prepared for their afternoon tea. They are the politest of hosts and do not balk at his bad manners.  The little girl hugs the tiger and smiles upon him, as he continues to eat his way through the provisions, even the supper planned for that evening.

My friend, Vivian, lent me The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and hundreds of other children’s books by the way, so that I don’t have to translate German children’s stories into English when I read aloud to my kids, which is tedious and difficult and only delivers half the story anyway. She was also the one who told me about the semi-autobiography by Judith Kerr, which starts with the book, 'When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit'.  I have spent the last two weeks being glued not just to this, but the two following books in the trilogy.

It is a well written and moving story of how a nine year old Jewish girl has to flee Berlin with her family in 1933 because her father, a renowned theatre critic and writer, had opposed the Nazis. It shows a vivid portrait of the family, thrown upon it's own resources, as it were, to survive economically and emotionally a move to Switzerland, Paris and finally find safety in London, only to witness the daily raids of the Blitz during the war.

In the autobiography, there are no tigers, of course, but an uncle who is an eminent scientist.  When the Nazis take his job away as the curator of the natural history museum, his only solace is that he can still visit the Zoo to observe the animals and bring them food, until the Nazis take his Zoo pass away.  Then he takes his own life.

In the autobiography, a tiger doesn’t eat up all the family's food, of course, but the Nazis take everything the family are forced to leave behind in Berlin, including a beloved pink rabbit and the father's books are publicly burned.

In the autobiography, the mother doesn’t entertain a tiger, of course, but she manages to put on a brave face, to keep the family together and protect her children throughout.
“They made it feel like an adventure” Judith Kerr is quoted as saying about her parents. 


And despite the subject matter and experiences, she seems somehow to retain an optimistic voice in the autobiography, or perhaps it is her ability to observe everything that unfolds around her with clarity and keen perception that maintains her optimism.

I thought a lot about the tiger in The Tiger Who Came to Tea and about what it could possibly stand for. Could the tiger be not just any tiger, I wondered, but represent the uninvited and unexpected that enters lives, but out of which positive experiences can still emerge?
Judith Kerr has been quoted as saying “I much preferred it (her childhood as a refugee) to the sort of childhood I would have had had we had a so-called normal childhood.”

I thought about it again and again.
But I still I couldn’t work out what the tiger could be.


And then I realised. It was just The Tiger Who Came to Tea.
















Sunday 15 January 2012

Home, a Mini-Saga



For the next 'Trailing Spouses' art group meeting, one of our members, Coralie, asked us to write a mini-saga, a story in exactly 50 words on the subject of Home, an emotive theme indeed, even for the most seasoned of Trailing Spouses. Here is my offering, covering the 3 places, and counting, which I call and have called home in my life. 


Going home to Berlin(where I lived for 11 years)

I went home and looked up at the plants on my balcony, strange objects. I looked over at the playground, children from my son’s kindergarten, new faces. A neighbour came to greet me like always. I looked at my front door. How strange to think that I cannot go inside. 



Going home to London where I lived from 0 – 29 years)

For my holidays I go home to London. I was born here. At St Pancras I buy a ticket and speak German! On the train, the familiarity of people takes me aback. A snippet of friends and family, that’s hardly enough. But better than Facebook and all of that stuff.



Going home in Bielefeld, Germany, where I have lived for 3,5 years.

I’m registered at this address, a German formality. Think of those who’ve stood at these windows before me! Who will move in? We move out, less than a year, possibly? View from my kitchen, a three hundred year old tree. Some people don’t appreciate it, blocks the light, you see.



Going home to Bielefeld, Germany (sometime in the future)


Seen through shop windows, fancy goods I could never afford. Outside the school, where Eric spent one year. One street of the square mile, walked again and again. The patisserie, they still know my name. Broken gate, lift it, feels the same. Ring the doorbell, old friends, ask me in.



Check out this mini saga on the theme of Home by Piia Rossi, which inspired me, on her blog, Trailingspousesdotcom.

Sunday 8 January 2012

Rude Health



Sometimes, when I am least expecting it, a phrase pops into my head. As I was hauling the buggy up the front steps this morning, I suddenly thought of the expression, 'to be in rude health'.  These words conjure up images of ruddy cheeks and boundless energy, and a smug feeling that while others around are felled by coughs and colds, I remain in a magic bubble of 'rude health'.  Unfortunately, it is usually just at that moment of feeling invincible that I get a sore throat and within a day I am floored by a nasty bug.

When you have children the chances for remaining in “rude health” remain slim. In December last year, my children and I took part in a kind of relay race of illness. When one was getting over a cough, it would be passed gaily onto the next contestant, who would add a stomach bug to it. Then, in the next lap a high temperature and general feeling of nausea would be handed to the next participant for good measure. It was a marathon, lasting over a month. Like all worthy sporting events, it wasn’t about the winning, it was about the taking part, but in the end Eric was awarded a mighty dose of antibiotics, which did us all a lot of good.

Before I had children, I didn’t realise how much of my time would be devoted to feeling under the weather. When Eric started Kindergarten, I had more bugs in the first year than I had ever had in my whole life. The nursery teachers had developed super-human immune systems, after years of exposure to this unique breeding ground.  Unfortunately, it takes at least five years to build up this kind of immunity, so by the time you have some sort of protection your child has left. Then something comes along which even the most robust immunity cannot fend off.

That something or some things, rather, come along in the form of little six-legged parasites otherwise known as head lice. Come on, it is nothing to be embarrassed about! Everyone has had it, even if you can’t remember it. I remember it, as I had them about six months ago.  Again, I was feeling in “rude health” and invincible, so I was probably asking for it. Nits had been going around the school for weeks, but that my child could have them let alone me was unthinkable. When I discovered to my horror that I had them it was a weird feeling, like 40 going on 8 years old again. I was transported back in time, sitting in school assembly where the head teacher was talking about a nits outbreak and I was trying desperately not to scratch my head, although, in fact, I actually had them. The smell of disinfectant dripping off a metal comb came back to me, used by the school nurse to inspect our hair. It just couldn’t be true that I had nits.

Sadly it was, and as I showed the wiggling proof, isolated in a glass, to my husband he still didn’t believe it, saying that it was probably just an insect that rather resembled a head louse that had wandered into my hair. I found this quite an absurd idea that there were insects that were in the habit of impersonating head lice but I had other worries. Suddenly, I was aware of the other people I could have passed them on to, and weighed up whether I was going to tell them or not. After all, you say to yourself, it is nothing to be ashamed of. Remember what it said on the pamphlet that came with the nit-lotion: it is a myth that nits prefer dirty hair.  But still, you feel ashamed. The next few days the world around me shrank to the task of nit extermination and prevention. I spent literally hours every evening picking out nits from my son’s hair, washing bedclothes at 60 degrees and putting garments in the freezer and trawling through the internet for any tips or hints that I could glean. I began to get quite interested in the subject discovering, for example, on a webpage entitled a Brief History of Lice Combs that nit combs had been discovered in Egyptian tombs and that there is an 11th Century ivory example  held in the British museum. I subsequently spent one hour on the phone getting down to the nitty gritty with one of my best friends in England, who told me that since the British government had stopped providing free nit lotion, the head lice situation had become an epidemic. I wondered if there was a hairdresser equivalent of Jamie Oliver who could convince the government to turn this problem around, say, for example, Trevor Sorbie MBE.

At the moment, touch wood (or our trusty black plastic lice comb) we are nit free, and we are not suffering from coughs or colds or being attacked by any kind of bug. In short, we are in ruder health than we have been for a while. Hopefully we will remain in the rudest of health to the point of offensiveness for the foreseeable future.  And there is nothing more to say on the subject, apart from that I hope that you all remain ruddy healthy throughout the rest of the winter.