#3 The Tiger Who Came To Tea

And all the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their lights on, and they walked down the road to a café.

At the risk of sounding a) heartless and b) disgustingly twee, I will admit that one of my favourite aspects of parenthood has been revisiting the books of my childhood (often literally: my mum hung on to a load of only slightly dog-eared copies from the 90s, which I have just about prevented my own children from ripping to shreds). And the reason I love it is because it makes me feel so desperately sad, in the best possible way. 

I can’t fully track the emotional journey that leads me to sob my way through Peepo or Old Bear, but it must be some composite of the almost painful innocence of the stories, a newfound appreciation of the guilelessness of children in general and an elemental nostalgia for my own childhood. Obviously there are the books that are designed to tug on the heartstrings - I mean, Dogger, don’t even - but I’m crying through Ten Little Chickens here. Often, I’m choking back tears to the extent that I can barely get the words out - just a few strangled vowels here and there - but strangely the child on my lap has never once noticed. Talk about the invisibility of motherhood.

The other reason these books feel bittersweet is that I can now grasp how much they shaped my internal barometer of how home, and even life itself, was supposed to look. Most influential in this regard is the work of Shirley Hughes, whose Alfie and Annie Rose books are (I presume) set in 1980s Notting Hill, where Hughes really lived, a place of beautiful white-washed townhouses with normal, lived-in decor, overgrown gardens and helpful neighbours (big shout out to the McNallys). Once I’ve silenced the voice in my head that says “that house would go for 10 mil nowadays!” I can appreciate how influential these stories and drawings were in creating my own idyllic mental picture of London that I still hanker for today. My own home wasn’t a million miles away (in fact, it was precisely five miles away, in west London suburbia), but these snatches of sketchy illustration made more of an impression than the real houses I lived in. I admit to occasionally scouring the background for interiors inspiration. 

Yet it was another book - or rather a single spread in another book - that stopped me in my tracks when I saw it again. In Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came To Tea, I discovered a scene that had been living deep in my psyche for decades - a perfect invocation of the feeling of living in Britain as a child. After the tiger has cleared out Sophie’s kitchen cupboards, the family decide to go to a café for dinner. They wrap up warm, and set off down a dark high street, dotted with closed shops, where “all the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their lights on, and they walked down the road to a café”. 

There is something so immeasurably evocative (and to me, you won’t be surprised to hear, devastatingly emotional) about this sentence alongside its accompanying illustration that, despite having read this book approximately three thousand times, I can’t not stop and savour it, wanting to inhale it with my mind. It’s partly to do with the syntax of the line - all those ands, both childlike and fairytale, a gorgeous romanticisation of the mundane. But it’s also the literal scene it describes. You can feel the nip in the air, the glow of the street lamps. It’s small, it’s humdrum, it’s cosy but full of possibility - perhaps it is simply the way the evening looks to a child unused to being out at that time: magical, thrilling, a little bit threatening. This is the ambience I most associate with childhood, looking at London at night through a car window. It goes hand in hand with a yearning for the past, but no particular era: this book was published in 1968 - my own essentially unrooted nostalgia is directed towards the London suburbia of the 1990s.

Although The Tiger Who Came To Tea is now a foundational childhood text in this country, I had (and still have) absolutely no idea if this bit of the book was a “thing” or not, so I was oddly thrilled to see the music writer Pete Paphides mention it in his brilliant memoir Broken Greek, about growing up in a Greek-Cypriot family in Birmingham and his childhood obsession with the charts. At one stage, he watches as children and parents walk towards “the glowing shop fronts of Yardley Road, the sort of bustling twilit street scene that Judith Kerr depicted in The Tiger That Came To Tea” [sic].

I know that in the last newsletter I also spoke about nostalgia and street lamps, which means my working hypothesis is that British culture is defined by nostalgia and street lamps (elsewhere in Broken Greek, Paphides describes The Jam’s quintessential 1980 Britpop-before-it-was-Britpop anthem That’s Entertainment as glistening “like a wet Cortina under a street lamp”). Obviously there’s more to it than that. But only a bit. 

NOTES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

• This Wednesday sees the finale of if not the greatest (although probably the greatest) then certainly the cleverest British TV show of the past decade: Inside No. 9. In my Guardian review of the first episode of this series I said that considering creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton hadn’t been definitive in interviews that the show was actually ending, a huge conceptual twist was unlikely. Now it looks like I was embarrassingly wrong, but I’m so excited to find out what they’ve come up with that I don’t really care.

• It’s been 30 years since the British dramatist Dennis Potter died, as observed by Francisco Garcia in this Guardian feature. In the 1970s and 1980s, Potter made TV the medium for his idiosyncratic, iconoclastic art - watching it back today it still seems almost illegally innovative, bending genre and narrative into baffling shapes, and funnelling autobiography into fantasy. His career high point, The Singing Detective (which, a few years ago, determined to swot up on his work, I tracked down a second-hand DVD of on eBay, but am pleased to report is now on iPlayer), exemplifies all those things - whilst doubling at points as a fascinating, hyper-local nostalgia trip to 1940s Forest of Dean. Yet watching it for the first time during the pandemic, I was also struck by how much it had in common with dramedies like I May Destroy You and I Hate Suzie in its embrace of trauma, blurring of reality and fiction and its visceral evocation of consciousness itself.

• James Blake’s new single Thrown Around - which has a gratifyingly old-school London-set video satirising the pressures of social media on musicians - combines his trademark melancholic falsetto with a beat that brings to mind Madonna’s William Orbit-produced Ray of Light and also Fatboy Slim. It’s clearly nodding to that kind of brash, broad but defiantly eccentric mid-tempo dance music that defined turn-of-the-millennium Britain, which is sometimes called big beat, and includes acts like The Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada. As a teenager, I remember this music being overwhelmingly ubiquitous and therefore pretty uncool, but the 20 year-rule suggests its reclamation into hipness is well overdue.