The Trigger Who Came to Tea
The Tiger Who Came to Tea is a desperately bleak depiction of adultery and highly eroticised sexual mania seen through the eyes of a little girl called Sophie. Grotesque and depraved, it is a book that by rights should be kept in a locked cabinet but that instead at bedtime we murmur direct into the ears of society’s most vulnerable in the safest space imaginable, the nursery. Until I confiscated and set fire to it, it was my daughter’s favourite bedtime book. Now I’m terrified the damage I’ve done is irreparable.
The book begins with a scene of domestic order, the last Sophie will know. She is drinking tea and having cake with her adulterous mother. True, mummy’s cheeks are a little flushed, her skirt sits above her knee and she is not wearing her wedding ring, but there is no way merely from this tableau of innocence for the reader to discern what is to come.
“Suddenly there was a ring at the door”. Sophie watches as mummy struggles to remember whose turn it is this time to visit her. The milkman has already come, we are told, and the boy from the grocer doesn’t come today. It can’t be daddy — and now we start to establish what is going on here — because although he is not at home, he has keys. “We’d better open the door and see.”
It’s Sophie, of course, who opens the door. Standing behind it is a large, exotic man, grinning in anticipation at what is to come. In her trauma, Sophie will later recollect that this man was in fact a tiger, a characterisation with which author Judith Kerr is likely referencing his extreme beauty and power to terrify. He comes straight on in. “I’m very hungry,” he says darkly. And for the briefest time — no doubt for Sophie’s sake — the pretence of normality is affected. The ‘tiger’ sits at the family table with both Sophie and mummy, whose hands are clasped together in excitement.
It’s now that the filth really begins, graphically related through gossamer-thin metaphor. Sophie’s mummy offers the visitor something to ‘eat’ — in the accompanying image we see the tiger running his tongue over the proffered food (heartbreakingly, proffered by Sophie) — but it’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. Tiger wants everything mummy’s got and more, and he wants it right now. Over the kitchen table he eats and he eats and he eats. All the sandwiches, all the buns, all the cake. He devours everything, “until there was nothing left.” Now mummy, still desperate to please, offers fluids to slake his thirst. But in no time at all, tiger has drunk mummy dry. “Tiger drank all the milk in the milk jug and all the tea in the teapot.” The illustration shows tiger tipping his head back and grinning ecstatically as he lets the golden liquid gush into his open mouth.
Events now take a turn for the worse. Tiger has consumed everything mummy has to give. “Then he looked around the kitchen to see what else he could find.” In the drawing we see that tiger’s eyes have become slitted and sly. His tail is very much erect and Sophie — mummy now nowhere to be seen — is hugging him. Tiger commences eating once again.
Hunched over, tongue extended, he slurps from a pot. Lying on top of the opened fridge, he paws hungrily at its contents, green and blood red vegetables lie fallen on the floor. Standing and smiling with his mouth closed in deep satisfaction, he ransacks a cupboard. Nothing is out of bounds, he takes everything he can find. Were the allegory not obvious enough already, Kerr now becomes unequivocal in her use of imagery. Tiger does something no man would ever do in another, absent man’s home. He drinks daddy’s beer. He drinks all daddy’s beer. Not since Remus jumped over Romulus’ wall has one male signalled his disrespect for another so totally in literature. The cuckolding of daddy is complete. Now tiger leaves.
Exhausted, mummy begins to try to repair the scene of domestic devastation left behind. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. She cannot even muster the energy to bathe her daughter. As daddy comes home, presumably from work, she is blaming her failing on a supposed lack of water. Sophie now has to watch as mummy, unable to hide the evidence, confesses. As daddy sits glum faced in an armchair, “mummy told him what had happened.”
What follows is a reckoning, of which Sophie in her innocence is oblivious. The family go out into the cold night. We see them in a cafe — a neutral space — mummy’s head bowed in shame, daddy wearing a melancholy smile. But he is supping a beer — that which was taken from him is returned — an indication perhaps that forgiveness is possible.
The next day Sophie and mummy “went shopping and they bought lots more lovely things to eat.” Has mummy mended her ways? “They also bought a very big tin of Tiger Food, in case the tiger should ever come to tea again.” In the book’s final scene, we see tiger, holding his instrument — a trumpet — to his lips, his back turned to us disdainfully, head cocked over his shoulder, eyeballing the reader. Tiger doesn’t care what we think of him.
We’ve been reading this book to small children since 1968. It’s sold a million copies. Can we really be surprised the world is the way it is? Angry millennial snowflakes, it’s not your fault. You were triggered before you were out of nappies.
