From the depths of his extraordinarily vibrant imagination, he famously conjured up Mr Benn, Not Now, Bernard, King Rollo and Elmer the patchwork elephant.
Now a manuscript and rough sketches for a new illustrated story about Elmer has been in the archive of the late British children’s author and illustrator David McKee. It will be published next year by his family.
Dates on the handwritten manuscript suggest McKee finished writing and drawing the book shortly before he fell ill and died of a pulmonary dysfunction 10 days later on 6 April 2022 at the age of 87.
His son Chuck McKee said: “A couple of weeks later, I sat down at his work desk to go through his papers. There was stuff all over it. He’d pick up bills and doodle on them. You could see where conversations were going, you could follow things through, at what point he was losing track and going on to something else; a block of paint would suddenly start becoming a face and a body and breaking into something.” McKee’s son found handwritten pieces of paper with a story written on it, corresponding to numbered thumbnail sketches drawn in black ink. “When I came across the sketches, laid out page by page, I realised that he had a book going on.”
The final draft was labelled “Elmer + White Bear: 7th version.” It follows Elmer and his cousin Wilbur as they meet a mysterious white bear in the jungle who is trying to find his way home after floating from the frozen north on a tiny scrap of melting ice.
“I love where I live,” the bear tells the elephants, explaining that he is lost in the jungle “because of global warming. The world getting warmer”.
Chuck McKee thinks his father became concerned about the climate emergency at the end of his life and later discovered that he had consulted his publisher, Andersen Press, about writing such a story involving Elmer, to help parents talk about the issue with their children.
“So many people have wanted to use Elmer as a mascot – so many organisations – and he never wanted that to happen, because Elmer belongs to everybody. So the idea of doing something, of making a statement with Elmer about climate change, was a first for him,” he said.
He thinks his father was inspired to write the story during the summer 2021 heatwave after getting stuck in Provence in the south of France because of the Covid travelling restrictions.
“I reckon he was hot himself. Among the papers that were around the book was an early version, where Elmer says: ‘We’re going to have to do something about this [global heating]. We can’t just leave the fridge door open.’”
His father, he thinks, was reflecting on his own experiences of the heatwave. “It was super hot that summer. He had a huge fridge and I reckon he was going down there and cooling off every now and again.”
McKee’s ink sketches will be turned into colour illustrations in the forthcoming book, Elmer and the White Bear – and a second unpublished, undisclosed Elmer story that his son found that is set to appear in 2027 – by the painter and illustrator Marysia Milewski, a long-term friend and admirer of David McKee’s work.
“She asked me where my dad got his colours from and I picked up everything – the paper, the paints, the pencils, the whole lot. I bundled it all into the car and took it to her,” said Chuck, adding that his father, who was fond of French creme caramel, often used the dessert pots to mix his paints.
As well as having McKee’s rough sketches to guide her, Milewski found – inside a parcel of papers his son gave her – two incomplete illustrations for the book. “That was amazing and a great help,” she said.
In May 2020, in one of his last interviews, McKee spoke to the Observer about his desire to write discursive books that adults would want to talk about with their children.
“Picture books should be shared and I like the fact that you’ve got the adult audience,” he said. “And that idea of having something to talk about in the book, not just a little tale with a happy ending, I think is the area which interests me more.”
