'Paddington is a very REAL person' Michael Bond opens up on life with his most famous creation, sixty years on
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Big and small, stuffed and ­porcelain, there are Paddington Bears of every shape and size around Michael Bond’s home.
But for him, the real deal is currently shuffling and snuffling just inches from my seat. “He’s here, he’s in the room. He’s looking at you,” the smiling author ­assures me, peering over my shoulder.
As I stare hard, Michael shakes his head in disbelief. Paddington celebrating his 60th birthday this year makes Michael 91. “It is quite a sobering thought,” he grins.
“Paddington is to me very real. He’s a presence. Sixty years is a long time,” he adds.
“It’s hard to explain, but he is a very real person.”
(Photo: Peggy Fortnum and HarperCollins)
The stories about the bear from darkest Peru have been translated into 40 languages and the 15th novel, Paddington’s Finest Hour, has just been published.
But it won’t be the last. Michael is still at his desk before 9am each morning, “including Christmas Day”. He has just finished a new Paddington story, which is neatly stapled.
So unsurprisingly, the bear with the battered suitcase and famous fondness for marmalade sandwiches, has become a friend.
Today, more than ever, he brings comfort to his increasingly housebound creator. ­Michael says: “I don’t worry about death. I sort of feel it’s good to get to 91 and I can’t complain. And I hope Paddington might come with me, ­wherever we go. Up or down
“It wouldn’t be kind to tell Paddington to come with me if I was going down.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
Named after the London railway station around the corner from the author’s beautiful canal-side home – Paddington was inspired by a toy Michael bought for his first wife, Brenda.
“It was Christmas Eve and it had started to snow. I went to Selfridges for shelter,” he recalls, in a storybook tone.
“On this shelf there was this one bear. I felt sorry for it, fancy sitting on a shelf all by yourself all over Christmas?”
It sat on the mantelpiece of their tiny flat in Notting Hill, West London, until Michael, then a BBC cameraman who also wrote short stories, was grasping for inspiration. He says: “I had a day when my mind went blank. I rang my agent and said ‘I just don’t know what to write’ and he said ‘Tell me what you have in your room’. I said we had a small bear.
(Photo: PA)
“It was the first time I had written for children. But though it comes under being a children’s book I didn’t have any age in mind. I was writing it for myself.”
The couple would take the bear out, talk to it and wonder what it thinks.
Michael says: “If we went out to eat, the small bear would come with us and I’d ask what he thought as he is quite fond of his food.”
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Even today, Michael, married to second wife Sue, a retired literary agent, “shares custody” of the bear with his first wife. He has not ­“inflicted” Paddington on daughter Karen, son Anthony, or his four ­grand-
children but lets them come to the stories themselves.
But Karen shares his passion for Paddington, Paddington, whose adventures were turned into a hit 2014 film , starring Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, now a friend of Michael’s.
The writer would trust only her to continue writing the Paddington stories, once he is gone.
(Photo: DAILY MIRROR)
Michael’s undiminishing imagination was fostered as a boy growing up in Reading. He would play cricket with his civil servant dad, “a gentleman who wore a hat like Paddington everywhere so he could doff it – he didn’t even take it off if we paddled in the sea”.
But his mum was an avid reader. He says: “Books were part of the furniture. In those days Boots had a lending library and my mother used to go down and get six or seven books.
“She practically read a book a day.”
The idea of Paddington being abandoned on a railway platform with nothing but a label asking for someone to look after him “please”, was sown in that imagination during his wartime teenage years. Michael recalls Jewish refugees at Reading station – in fact, his parents took in two boys, aged around nine and 10.
“They very sadly used to sit by the fire and cry,” he recalls. “It’s a very big problem now,” he admits of the parallel refugee situation today. I feel sorry for anyone who is homeless or ­countryless.”
(Photo: Getty)
The first story in his latest Paddington book homes in on the way the bear is treated with suspicion. Michael says: “I think the world is in a bit of mess at the moment. One of Winston Churchill’s plans was to become part of a bigger nation, to join up together, and it was working very well.” He adds: “It’s very sad to come out of the ­European Union.”
In 1943, Michael was a BBC engineer installing a radio transmitter on the top floor of a seven-storey building in Reading when he nearly died in an air raid.
As he went down the stairs he saw a girl whose legs had been blown off and a man buried in rubble still holding his false teeth. Not knowing what else to do, he left. “I got on the bus to go home but nobody sat near me as I was so dusty. Funny times, really,” he shrugs, sadly.
He joined the Army and travelled the world but he was not alone. “A girlfriend gave me a little fluffy bear, which I carried everywhere, in my shirts,” he says.
Michael lost the little companion in Egypt.
But one day very soon he would never be without a bear again.