The children’s author on the delights of living to 94, walking along the river and not watching rubbish TV

I don’t have any secrets to living this long. I’m just lucky. Walking has helped - it cheers me up. After my husband Tom died, I had friends who were kind, but life was very empty. You can watch rubbish on the telly if there are two of you, but it’s so difficult to watch rubbish on your own.

Now I walk along the river, often after supper when I’ve finished my work. I’m not sure what age it happens but this feeling comes up on one: ‘I’m not going to see all this forever.’

If you draw things, you just look at the world all the time, and it really is very beautiful – even a very ordinary row of shop windows lit up on a winter evening. Almost everything is interesting; I don’t know how I would manage if I couldn’t get out and look at things.

If you draw things, you just look at the world all the time, and it really is very beautiful

I love being 94; the fact that I can remember all these things that most people can’t, like a time before the war. I can remember Berlin in the 20s. It’s very alive still in my mind. I remember being worried about people starving, not in Africa but in Germany.

When I was 10, we fled to Switzerland to escape Hitler and I remember the roads were planted with apple trees. I was so pleased and I said: ‘Nobody can starve in this country,’ to which my mother replied, rather unkindly: ‘Well, not in autumn.’

It’s an amazing piece of luck in one’s life if people are prepared to pay you money for the one thing you really want to do most. I’m happy working; I go upstairs into my room, sit down and I know who I am; it’s like coming home. When I’m thinking of the next book to do I’m aware there’s a good chance this may be the last, so there’s a sense of: ‘What’s it going to be, this great last book?’

I’m not always happy. I get lonely, obviously. I worry about things. But I am infinitely happier than I would have expected.

Katinka’s Tail by Judith Kerr (Harper Collins) £11.04 from guardianbookshop.com