One day Elmer, the patchwork elephant, decided he'd had enough. The uninteresting-looking grey elephants with whom he lived at the river had been teasing him for his dazzling skin of many colours. Ashamed of his appearance, he painted himself grey.
Why, I ask David McKee, the creator of Elmer, did he want to write a story about an elephant trying to fit into a monochrome society? By way of an answer, McKee, 79, tells me a story. One day he was walking down the street in Plympton, Devon with his late wife, Violet, and daughter Chantel. "There was another family on the other side of the street and the boy said: 'Look, there's a nigger!' My daughter was upset. I thought, he's talking about my daughter. I couldn't believe it. She is darker skinned because her mother was Anglo-Indian, but my daughter is beautiful – as was my wife."
Later in Elmer, the elephant realises that his attempt to fit in has backfired. Not only do the other elephants fail to recognise the grey Elmer, they don't accept him as one of their own. Then it starts to rain, and the grey paint washes off Elmer, revealing his true colours. The other elephants are happy to have the fun-loving, brightly coloured elephant back.
This story, the first of 22 books about Elmer McKee has written and illustrated since 1968 – and published from 1989 to the present day by Andersen Press (hence Elmer's 25th anniversary celebrations) – has been praised for instilling into young children respect for others' differences and stressing the virtue of being oneself. The Elmer franchise has become an international success, selling 7m books worldwide in 50 languages.
The Guardian even recently hailed Elmer as an LGBT hero by highlighting respect for difference. "I never intended to do that," McKee says from his apartment on Paris's Left Bank, "but I suspect there are subconscious processes at work I only discover later."
That said, McKee can be a more self-conscious moralist. In Elmer and the Hippos (2003), for instance, the grey elephants tell our patchwork hero to get rid of some new arrivals at the river. But Elmer, after meeting the hippos, decides not to banish them. Instead he and cousin Wilbur plan to remove the rocks that are damming the river. The result is that elephants and hippos work together to make the river flow.
"I wanted to write about immigration," he explains. "I hated what I saw, people rejecting immigrants. We keep saying, in Britain and in France, there's not enough room. But instead of saying no we should be asking why they are here."
Again, the storyline has personal resonance for McKee. His second wife, Bakhta, a French-Algerian art dealer, he says, has experienced racial prejudice because of the colour of her skin.
Lest this article seem a love-in for David McKee's work, let's remember the drubbing Polly Toynbee of this newspaper gave his 2010 book, Denver. In the book, Denver is a rich man who gives away his money generously and is beloved by his community – until a suspicious stranger arrives in town asking why everyone can't share more equally. Denver shares out the money equally but the locals squander it. Then, having got the hump, Denver sets up in another town, successfully takes up painting, and dispenses largesse there. The people of the original town are rueful. McKee's moral? "As for the stranger, he's still wandering around breeding discontent. If he comes your way, don't listen to him."
Toynbee, whose granddaughter had borrowed Denver from the library, excoriated this anti-socialist allegory as "Ayn Rand for baby beginners, trickle-down economics for trustafarian toddlers, a nursery Hayek for every little Conservative."
McKee is unrepentant and says this story was inspired by his opposition to France's wealth tax, and by his childhood sense that the lord of the manor, dispensing largesse to a grateful local population, could be a good thing: "I've never believed that Robin Hood thing about forcibly taking from the rich and giving to the poor."
He was raised in Tavistock, Devon, by parents who met when they were 16. His mother was working, "for the lady of the manor and he was the gardener's boy". What does he remember of them? "They both left school aged 14, but were very well-educated and very well-read. My mother was a great storyteller and I had a big family of uncles and aunts who were great storytellers too. It rubbed off.
"But I've always felt that, just as the air is full of TV and radio programmes, it's also full of music and stories. Tavistock was a town full of ghosts and stories about them, and stories about the haunted parts of Dartmoor were always being told. It was a matter of just being receptive to what was in the air."
The extended McKee family also inspired some of the characters in the Elmer books – his ventriloquist of an uncle, Wilbur, becomes Elmer's ventriloquist of a cousin of the same name, while Aunt Zelda in the books echoes something of his mother. "The colours of Aunt Zelda are the colours my mother liked to wear," McKee explains.
Nowadays, though, Elmer stories are more likely to be inspired by his three children and three grandchildren. "Elmer and the Monster was inspired by my grandson Blake. We call him Blakey Blue Blue so I called the monster [whom Elmer finds sobbing at the outset because of his alienatingly terrifying roar] Bloo Bloo."
As a boy, Aesop's Fables and parables from the Bible were David's favourite reading. "I'm only now realising how much they affected me. People have said that I write modern fables and the reason I do that, I think, is because the attitude of my parents was very moral. They showed me to be conscious of what you have got, but not to be beholden to your possessions."
At Plymouth College of Art, where he enrolled in 1950, McKee's first love was painting, but he couldn't see how to make it pay, so he started sending cartoons to newspapers. "I also followed my family and became a storyteller." His first illustrated book, published in 1964, was entitled Two Can Toucan and told of a bird who can carry two tins of paint on his enormous bill.
But it was Mr Benn that made him famous. For television viewers of a certain age (mine for example), Mr Benn is apt to give one a Proustian rush, thanks to the 15-minute adventures that McKee made for the BBC in the early 1970s.
Each week the bowler-hatted hero would enter a mysterious fancy dress shop (modelled, McKee says, on one in Plymouth that he passed each day on his way to college) and a mysterious fez-wearing proprietor would offer Mr Benn a costume.
Our hero would retreat into the changing room, and find himself in an adventurous location dressed for the part (the changing room was to Mr Benn what the wardrobe was to the Narnia stories).
How did he come up with Mr Benn? "I imagined a man who hated fancy dress parties, going into a fancy dress shop. He tries on a knight's outfit and then found himself not in the changing room but fighting a dragon. That's how it started."
Each week, Mr Benn would emerge from his adventure in the changing room with an edifying moral and a little souvenir from his trip (sheriff's badge, clown nose, etc), "just to help me remember".
Today, McKee describes himself as a full-time carer for his second wife and still paints and writes. He is working on Elmer and the Floods, which he describes as "kind of Biblical but drawing on the floods earlier this year".
Will it have a moral? "Probably, but what I like about stories is that you can go back to them, reread them and get different things from them."
A 25th anniversary limited edition of the first Elmer book has been published by Andersen Press in hardback, £14.99.
• The subheading on this article was amended on 15 July 2014. An earlier version said McKee wrote the first Elmer story 25 years ago. The first Elmer story was published in 1968 and then went out of print until the character was resurrected by a different publisher 25 years ago.
