This book was one of my very favorite books from childhood and I remember it vividly…

Whistle For Willie is about Peter, a little boy who really wants to learn to whistle his very long sausage dog - Willie. It is such a simple story but it meant so much to me, as it has to millions of other children since its publication in 1964. And still now I am just in love with Keats.

Just like Sesame Street did, Ezra Jack Keats and his picture books opened up a whole different world to me. I learnt about big cities on the other side of the world, urban landscapes that I had not experienced but they fascinated me.

The illustrations in this book are as vivid as my memories of it. The colours are loud and happy, the sky bright blue and the pavements gritty grey. There is funky graffiti on the streets and gorgeous 60s floral wallpaper on Peter’s walls at home. Keats used a spectacular technique of blending gouache watercolour with collage in his illustrations that gives the book an illusion of texture.

I don’t remember ever questioning  the fact that Peter is an African American child and I was interested to find this quote by Keats on his Foundation website…

“…None of the manuscripts I’d been illustrating featured any black kids—except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along. Years before I had cut from a magazine a strip of photos of a little black boy. I often put them on my studio walls before I’d begun to illustrate children’s books. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book.”

Peter is every child; he struggles with learning to whistle, he plays, he skips and he explores. His enthusiasm and joyfulness in life is infectious and irrepressible. His expressions and his movements are just delightful and just looking at this book makes me want to give him a big kiss.

This animation of Whistle For Willie was filmed in 1965.

Whistle For Willie was the second book written by Keats about Peter, the first being The Snowy Day for which he won the Caldecott Medal. The Snowy Day is also gorgeous; for me imagining a city covered in snow is still a dream and of course this book also taught me the art of making snow angels. Peter goes on to feature in four other books growing up to be a teenager. You can see that lucky Katie found a second hand copy of Goggles starring Peter in this photo from her loot at Booktown. The Keats books are actually hard to find in Aus.

There is a beautiful clip from a film made about Keats on the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation website. Watching it brought me to tears today as I discovered so much about the man who created these amazing stories from my childhood. Overwhelmingly what comes from this piece and the rest of the information on the website is that Keats just adored children. Although he never had a family of his own he respected children and really believed that all children have a place in the world and should be loved and treated well.

On this Mothers’ Day I feel very lucky to have had a mother and grandmother who instilled such a love for reading and literature in me. I know that I want the same for Ned and the best way to do that? I think I’ll share some stories about Peter with him.

||The Snowy Day is currently available from our online store||

||Ezra Jack Keats Foundation Website||