Political events diminish for me, and are now just rather dull distant scenes viewed though the wrong end of a telescope. What and who are these people? How on earth did they find them? Why can’t they grow up? Why should I care?

These last few days I have been much more powerfully affected by the loss of two authors, utterly different, but both part of my life because their words have helped to expand it.

The first was Herman Wouk, author most notably of ‘The Caine Mutiny’, who has just died aged 103. The second was Judith Kerr, author of ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’ and ‘The Tiger Who Came To Tea’, whose death aged 92 has just been announced.

I think the hearts of millions will be pierced by the news that Judith Kerr has died. The two books of hers I named above must have delighted and informed so many lives, of the children to whom they were read aloud, and the adults who read them to them.

How shocking, unsettling, distressing that the mind which conjured them out of the air is now still, at least in this world, and the hands which drew those deceptively simple pictures of the (rather sinister) Tiger have ceased to draw, or move, or touch.

On the day Charles Dickens died, one of the great London newspapers placed on its front page a drawing of his empty chair and deserted desk, the pens and paper waiting forever for the next sentence, the next chapter, the never-to-be-written books.

The picture still has the power to move. It is in the enjoyable Dickens Museum in Doughty Street in London (whose kitchen also features a pet hedgehog, common in those days, which I think Judith Kerr would have liked). Dickens was of course a titan, a maker and changer of minds, the creator of a small but unforgettable moral universe almost as potent as scripture, a man who made us see ourselves and our country differently forever. Perhaps Russians felt the same about the death of Tolstoy, but did even he reach so deep?

Could any other author, then or since, have produced such a national sense of loss? Yet the deaths of authors, even when they are not Dickens or Tolstoy, add to our loneliness, probably more than the deaths of any other strangers. We have invited them into our homes and thoughts, and come to know them better than we know many of our actual relatives, friends and colleagues, or so we think.

I once had the great honour of meeting Judith Kerr, shaking her hand and muttering some incoherent expression of admiration, in a BBC studio. I had always meant to write a letter of appreciation to Herman Wouk (it is pronounced ‘Woke’, a fact that is now quite amusing) and now feel a fool for having put this off too long.

I identified his profound conservatism indirectly, before it became obvious to me. I was, like anyone who has had anything to with Navies, especially drawn to him because he wrote about war at sea. And he is a fine guide to that oddly romantic world of grey paint, gruff orders and the stink of fuel oil.

Wouk’s obituary in the Guardian , available on line https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/17/herman-wouk-obituary

rightly mentions an astonishing passage in his vast epic ‘War and Remembrance’, which on first reading filled me with a sort of shame for not having previously understood what courage and sacrifice in my father’s generation actually meant:

‘The forgotten story of the third and sixth torpedo squadrons, flying from the USS Enterprise, and the eighth, from USS Hornet, locating and attacking against overwhelming odds the Japanese carrier force of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, embodied what Wouk meant about patriotism. It seemed to him “the soul of the United States of America in action”’.

‘He listed the names of each of the pilots and their home towns. Few other American writers could have written those pages or would have chosen to do so in such an openly patriotic tone’.

This is true. He clearly regarded the event as a modern Thermopylae, in which the courage unto death of a few selfless young men altered the fate of the civilised world for the better. Yet it was already fading from the sight of men.

Wouk may have been a bit too patriotic about Vietnam, but his conviction that without patriots, he and all his relatives would have ended up being murdered by Nazis may have made him swing too far in that direction. It is hard to object to this point of view.

As I recall, even by then, many decades ago, these details of the small band of men whose individual courage turned the war in the Pacific were becoming harder and harder to discover, the whole event, vast in its significance, was already almost buried beneath the dust of human forgetfulness.



I think I have mentioned these books - ‘War and Remembrance’ and ‘The Winds of War’- here before. Just as George Macdonald Fraser’s scurrilous and incorrect ‘Flashman’ thrillers are an excellent introduction to Victorian history, Wouk’s volumes are (in a different way) an equally easy and pleasurable way in to understanding the Second World War. (Though he is not always wholly historically accurate. See if you can spot the blazing, shrieking error in his otherwise very striking and credible passage about the evacuation of neutrals at the end of the German siege of Warsaw). The understanding is of course an American one, in which Britain’s last sad, shabby appearance upon the stage of power is seen from the outside, but to British people used to our mythical and often rather vain version of events, this is no bad thing.

Wouk’s Jewishness is not especially obvious most of the time, but in some parts of the plot, especially the slow but inexorable doom of two Jewish characters, one a silly, deluded old intellectual and the other a beautiful young woman, it is essential.

His strong religious feeling also emerges in the moment where the not-very-heroic main character in ‘The Caine Mutiny’, Willie Keith, receives a delayed letter from his father, some time *after* getting the news that his parent has died. In it is the great, booming, warning verse from Ecclesiastes 9:10 ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.’ Arriving when and where it does, the verse changes his life. Is this autobiographical? I have no idea. Surely much of his work must be. Yet there is, apparently, no factual basis for the actual mutiny described in the novel. If so, it is an even greater feat of imagination than I had at first thought.

Judith Kerr’s Jewishness is likewise essential to ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’. We know, as we read this, what will happen if Hitler ever catches up with this particular family. It isn’t just what the head of the family thinks and says, but who they unalterably are, which will do for them all.

Of course, I love ‘The Tiger Who came To Tea’ (which is obviously about a Tiger who Comes to Tea, and nothing else) , but it took me some time to realise that its author was the same Judith Kerr who had also written ‘Pink Rabbit’ and its sequels. Despite the cosy name, these years were far from cosy in reality. Flight and exile may seem fun in a story, but they are cruelly hard in reality. Her parents presumably shielded her from the worst, and children often never realise how much unhappiness lurks in their parents’ lives till too late, but her father’s life in exile was especially hard to bear. As one of her obituaries records ‘He never found a satisfactory role and, in 1948, on returning to Germany where he was welcomed as a hero, he suffered a stroke. Soon afterwards he took his own life’. Hitler stole a great deal more than Pink Rabbit.

The England in which she grew up, and eventually met and married the genius Nigel Kneale (inventor of Quatermass, and often mentioned here) was (as I fear it is no longer) a place of astonishment for continentals. Britain before the 1960s was utterly distinct from the rest of Europe. She told the story of their arrival. As they approached London on the train the children thought that every station was called ‘Bovril’, until their mother explained that it was an advertisement for “some kind of English food; I think they eat it with stewed fruit”. It was not just the food and the language that were incomprehensible. The law, the wholly different nature of the police, the education system, the layout of the towns and cities, were all completely distinct. The casual attitude towards passports and identity papers was also baffling for foreigners to whom such documents were vital for survival. We must have been an utter puzzle to them. Yet they became part of us. It is a great pleasure to me that one of the Kerr children grew up to be a beloved author while the other flew for the wartime RAF while still officially an enemy alien, then became an appeal judge and was knighted. How proud I am that we let them in, in their hour of need. How I hope that our doors will never be shut to those in genuine peril. I sometimes think we can learn more from obituaries than from anything else in the newspapers.