Wartime child evacuees who inspired the creator of Britain’s politest bear
BRIAN VINER on the death at 91 of Paddington author Michael Bond
The young Michael Bond would never forget the hordes of evacuee children from wartime London he saw passing through Reading railway station en route to temporary new homes with strangers.
With labels bearing their names around their necks, and gripping little suitcases, the heart-rending images loomed large in his mind when, years later, he created an accident-prone little bear from darkest Peru, with a penchant for marmalade sandwiches, whom he named after another railway station.
Like the evacuees, Paddington Bear left home carrying a small case and wearing a luggage label that read ‘Please look after this bear. Thank you’.
Today, it is hard to think of a more lovably singular children’s character than Paddington, whose 91-year-old creator died yesterday after a short illness.
It is similarly difficult to picture too many other authors of children’s fiction who might themselves have stepped out of the pages of a storybook as a twinkling, grandfatherly figure — enid Blyton was a famously cold and indifferent mother while A.A. Milne was a remote, inattentive father to his son Christopher Robin.
But Michael Bond’s past appears to have been blissfully straightforward. he grew up the only child of adoring parents, with a mother who taught him the joys of reading, and a father who always found time to take him to the park.
In due course, Bond became an exemplary parent of a son Anthony and daughter Karen. Yesterday she described him as ‘funny’ and ‘delightful’ in person as he was in print, and ‘the most wonderful father you can imagine’. She had never, she said, encountered anyone who hadn’t been charmed by him.
BOND did, however, threaten to issue a Paddington Bear-style hard stare from beyond the grave, in the direction of any other writer who might, after his death, be prevailed upon to give his famous creation a new spin. Indeed, he paid a lawyer to stop it ever happening.
For Bond was always fiercely protective of his furry protege. nobody, not even the Brown family of 32 Windsor Gardens who adopted Paddington, took more seriously that exhortation ‘Please look after this bear’ in more than 20 books.
he finished his last Paddington story in April.
happily, he loved the cinematic version of Paddington.
Bond declared the hit 2014 film, which brought the character a whole new generation of fans, ‘a delight from start to finish’. What a pity it is that he won’t see the sequel released later this year.
By the time the first film came out, Bond had long stopped mar- velling at the weird and wonderful ways in which Paddington caught the public imagination — or how others attempted to cash in.
In the early years, he declined to approve Paddington- themed toilet paper, but after initial reservations, was happy to let designer Shirley Clarkson and her husband eddie produce soft-toy versions of Paddington.
These came complete with blue duffel coat, red hat and red wellington boots (added by the Clarksons so the bear could stand up). They gave the very first toy bear as a Christmas present to their young son Jeremy — who later became the Top Gear presenter.
his expensive public-school education was funded by the handsome income that rolled in from replica Paddingtons. Bond’s upbringing was gently, aspirational lower middle-class.
he was born in 1926 in newbury, Berkshire, where his father, norman, was a Post office manager. Bond recalled him as ‘a mild sort of person’ but a stickler for rules and unfailingly polite — the precise qualities he gave Paddington, whose characteristics and adventures owed much to Bond’s life.
Paddington’s best friend Mr Gruber, a hungarian refugee who runs an antique shop and empathises with Paddington because he is an outsider too, was based on Bond’s Jewish literary agent, harvey Unna, who’d fled nazi Germany.
nothing, however, influenced Bond more than his own child- hood memories, those family holidays on the Isle of Wight where his father would paddle with rolled up trousers but ‘keep his hat on in case he met someone he knew and would have something to raise.’
Pure Paddington, as was his father’s tendency to fall off his bike while raising his hat to a female passer-by.
Much later, when his mother died, his father came to live with Bond and his (second) wife Sue. ‘I’d make him a boiled egg for breakfast every morning,’ Michael once recalled, ‘and every morning he’d tell me it was great. I sometimes would yearn for him to tell me it was a ****ing awful one — I’d have loved that. But he was far too well-mannered.’
Michael left full-time education — at a fee-paying Catholic school in Reading — at 14 and got a job as a ‘ youth in training’ with the BBC, which had set up a small transmitter in Reading. By then it was wartime and Bond volunteered for the RAF. It was while serving in egypt that he wrote his first short story for a magazine called the London opinion, which paid him seven guineas.
he continued producing short stories, even after resuming work for the BBC, where eventually he became a cameraman, working on dixon of dock Green and Blue Peter. In 1965 he left the Corporation to write full-time, however he loved television and understood its potential. Those of us of a certain age also owe him a debt of gratitude for another of his creations, the 1968 children’s TV series The herbs, featuring Parsley the Lion and dill the dog.
Later, he created characters including a detective called Monsieur Pamplemousse, and a personable guinea pig called olga da Polga inspired by a family pet. But none could ever rival Paddington. It was in 1957, while sitting at his typewriter and searching for inspiration, that he spotted a bear glove-puppet on his desk — a last- minute Christmas stocking-filler for his first wife, Brenda. his imagination ran riot, dreaming up the bear’s exotic origins and arrival at Paddington station near Bond’s tiny flat in notting hill. It took him ten days to write his first story. And so an immortal children’s character was born. But seven publishers rejected the idiosyncratic little bear before Collins took a chance, paying Bond £75.
It wasn’t until 1976 that he started to make serious money with the animated TV series, narrated by Michael hordern, who later liked to recall that the three most challenging roles in his illustrious career had been King Lear, God and Paddington Bear.
More than 35 million Paddington books have now been sold around the world, in 40 languages.
Bond never forgot the origins of his good fortune. he and Brenda divorced in 1981 but remained friends — and shared custody of that original glove-puppet.
‘We ring each other and say “he feels like coming to you now”,’ Bond once said of the inspiration for that small Peruvian bear who has become a true giant of children’s fiction.