John Vane: London Fiction – A Bear Called Paddington

I’ve set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 18 in the series.

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The very first story of Paddington, the famous small bear, was published in 1958, the year I was born and just 13 years after the end of World War II. Michael Bond’s beautiful gift to children’s fiction is endlessly curious and unfailingly well-meaning, qualities which, when combined with an earnest naivety, lead him into a series of comedy scrapes from which he somehow always emerges sometimes triumphantly unscathed.

Named, of course, after the station of that name, is also a particular type of Londoner – one who is both of his own time and of all of times in London’s history. It wasn’t until quite recently that I began appreciating this. Reading A Bear Called Paddington properly, all the way through, for the first time has helped me to appreciate it more.

Look at it this way. The bear in question, real name unknown, was an overseas migrant who had stowed away in the lifeboat of a ship that sailed to Britain from his native Peru. How he came to fetch up in a London rail terminus for trains that link the capital with the west of England and south Wales is not revealed in his debut volume of adventures. Did he, perhaps, alight in Bristol or Cardiff and fare-dodge on a Great Western service from there?

Neither does Bond divulge how, naked but for his hat, the  young Peruvian national sustained himself on his long sea voyage with a single jar of marmalade. We are asked to believe, too, that a middle-class west London couple, waiting on the platform to meet their daughter on her return from boarding school for the summer holidays, would choose to take the bear into their home in the full knowledge, imparted by the bear himself – “I emigrated, you know” – that he was what some would now call “an illegal”.

But, hey, let’s take a liberal view. It is the spirit that counts, and the spirit of the book carries all before it: the spirit of the Brown family, which gives its new family member his new name and effectively adopts him; the spirit of London, which accommodates him, its cab-drivers and retailers seemingly unfazed by his ability, unusual in bears, to communicate in perfect English, and with immaculate good manners, too; and, of course, the spirit of Paddington himself.

Through the eyes, ears and emotions of his furry hero, Bond captures the excitement and intensity of London as experienced by eager newcomers:

“After weeks of sitting alone in a lifeboat there was so much to see. There were people and cars and big red buses everywhere – it wasn’t a bit like Darkest Peru.”

Paddington falls foul of the cabbie driving driving him and the Browns (“Bears is extra”) and, later, a ticket inspector on the Underground – the comic possibilities of first encounters between escalators and the uninitiated were not lost on Bond – and a lofty sales assistant in a department store called Barkridges (Oxford Street meets High Street Ken). However, when the young ingenue, winningly oblivious to the mayhem he causes, is taken to the theatre – his first, rather thrilling night on the town – he beguiles pompous stage villain Sir Sealy Bloom.

And there’s Portobello Road market, just round the corner from where the Brown family lives. Paddington is enthralled by the array of goods on sale there and the traders are enthralled by him. He becomes best friends with a Mr Gruber, who runs one of those Portobello shops that blurred the distinction between junk and antiques back in the day.

In A Bear Called Paddington, Mr Gruber is described only as someone who had “been in South America as a boy”, giving him and Paddington something in common. But in his postscript to the 2001 Kindle edition I’ve been reading, Bond adds that they also share the experience of “what it is like to be a refugee in a strange country”.

Bond, who died in 2017, aged 91, said in 2012 that Mr Gruber had come from Hungary. A couple of years later, he said he was based on his first literary agent, a Jewish German, Harvey Unna, of whom Bond recalled: “He was in line to be the youngest judge in Germany, when he was warned his name was on a list, so he got out and came to England with just a suitcase and £25 to his name.” Bond said during the same interview that Paddington himself was partially inspired by the Jewish refugee children he had seen arriving in Reading, where he lived at that time, by train. “Refugees are the saddest sight,” he remarked.

Paddington, famously, has adapted well to the passing decades, as shown by the Paddington movies and the publication in the year following that of Bond’s death of a new Paddington story, Paddington At St Paul’s. There have been judicious concessions to change along the way: the edition I’ve read for this piece has prices in pounds and pence; a the pre-decimalisation original would, I’m sure, would have contained a shilling or two.

Yet, for all the adaptations, one of Paddington’s wellington boots was planted by his creator in time before his birth. “Although Paddington’s adventures take place in the present,” Bond’s postscript says, “I always picture him going home at the end of the day to the rather safer pre-war world which I remember from my childhood.”

That’s Paddington: not just loveable bear, but a loveable Londoner bear and so much more.

John Vane is a pen name used for London fiction, for writing about London fiction and for sketches of London life by OnLondon editor and publisher Dave Hill. Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to his Substack here.