Long before J. K. Rowling’s exhilarating invention, twenty years ago, of Platform Nine and Three-Quarters—the location at King’s Cross station where students bound for Hogwarts depart by marching full tilt at a wall—another children’s author had imbued another major London railway station with perpetual magic. When Michael Bond, a BBC cameraman and part-time writer, conceived of a story, in the late nineteen-fifties, in which a small bear from South America arrived in London, he chose Paddington Station as the place where the creature would be found, and thence adopted, by an English family, the Browns. Paddington Station—which connects Wales and western England with London—is named for the area of London where it is situated, a settlement dating back more than a thousand years. The precise etymology of the place name Paddington is obscure, though it most likely is of Anglo-Saxon origin, referring to a geographical area ruled by a now-forgotten chief named Padda. The name now belongs, of course, to Paddington Bear, the enduring and beloved creation of Bond, who died this week at the age of ninety-one.
The British seem particularly susceptible to fictionalized bears. Winnie-the-Pooh arrived in the national consciousness, with his pots of honey and his self-composed ditties, almost a hundred years ago, and has never departed. Rupert Bear, originally a comic-strip character who débuted in the Daily Express newspaper, in the nineteen-twenties, has had his partisans, though many readers over the decades have found Rupert—who wears yellow plaid pants and a matching scarf, and gets on abominably well with his parents—to be unforgivably cloying. The actor Ray Brooks, who provided the voice-over for a cartoon television series based on the character, revealed in the Daily Mirror, earlier this year, that he took to drinking a couple of pints of beer before the recording sessions, in order to fulfill his obligations. “He’s such a stupid little character,” he told the newspaper. Teddy Robinson, another storybook bear, who first appeared in 1953, has had a more limited cultural impact. Yet those of us who grew up thrilling to his provincial adventures—being left out in the garden overnight and bonding with the neighbor’s kitten; being the guest of honor at a doll’s tea party and becoming excessively “ex and shoff,” a very useful abbreviation for the state of being excited and showing off—would make a case for his appeal. And bears are not just for kids: there is Aloysius, the Teddy bear belonging to Sebastian Flyte in “Brideshead Revisited,” reputedly inspired by a real Teddy bear brought to Oxford by the young Sir John Betjeman, later the poet laureate.
Perhaps this rich legacy of fictional bears can be explained by the absence of real ones, Britain’s native bear population having been hunted into oblivion fifteen hundred years ago, before even Chief Padda was making his mark in what is now West London. The bear, then, is a blank slate—one might even call it a bare slate—upon which the British can project their cultural preoccupations, and through which they betray their national mores.
To revisit “A Bear Called Paddington,” in which Paddington makes his first appearance, and which was published in 1958, is to be transported to a very specific upper-middle-class English milieu. Mr. and Mrs. Brown encounter Paddington only because they are at the station to pick up their daughter, Judy, who is coming home from boarding school, an indicator of the family’s elevated socioeconomic status. They have domestic help, in the shape of Mrs. Bird, the indispensable housekeeper. It is Mrs. Bird who knows, intuitively or otherwise, that Paddington’s Peruvian heritage means that he is likely to have a predilection for marmalade, and who decides that Paddington, who does not know how old he is, should have two birthdays, one in the winter and one in the summer, “like the Queen.” (That the British monarch should have two birthdays, his or her real one and also an official one, observed in early summer, when the likelihood of good weather is at its highest, is a peculiarity of the national culture that might have been invented by a children’s author, perhaps Lewis Carroll.)
The surname Bird has deep English roots: it dates back to the seventh century. There have been Englishmen known as Brown since before the Domesday Book was compiled. But the land into which Paddington arrives, as many commentators have noted since the first book was published, was in the midst of a cultural change. Immigration to Britain from the West Indies, India, Pakistan, and other former corners of the British Empire grew in the late forties and into the fifties. Portobello Road, which features prominently in the Paddington books, lies in the heart of Notting Hill, where, in 1958, the neighborhood’s Afro-Caribbean population was targeted for racial attack by white youths, with rioting ensuing over two weeks. If this kind of real-life detail does not make it into the Paddington books, London’s burgeoning status as a multicultural metropolis is indicated by the presence of Mr. Gruber, the proprietor of an antique store that Paddington frequents. Mr. Gruber is Hungarian, as were thousands of new immigrants, refugees from the recent revolution, at the time of the book’s publication. He is also a cosmopolite: he and Paddington bond over discussing South America, which Mr. Gruber visited as a boy.
Paddington’s story is, like Mr. Gruber’s, an immigrant story, conveyed through the beguiling mishaps that he endures in his journey of assimilation. How do faucets work? (You need to turn them off.) What is meant when an attendant at the theatre asks if you would like a program? (You are supposed to pay for it.) This theme—of the immigrant’s arrival, and the natives’ initially wary but ultimately wholehearted embrace—was accentuated in the story’s excellent movie version, from 2014. But the problems that face immigrants were present in Bond’s imagination, too. In a new collection of stories published in 2008, to celebrate Paddington’s fiftieth anniversary, Bond pointedly included an encounter between Paddington and a policeman, whose initially benign attempts to interact—“It’s Be Polite to Foreigners Week,” he tells Paddington—turn darker as communication turns into miscommunication. When Paddington tells the officer that he usually only drives on the sidewalk, having never earned his driver’s license, “the policeman gave him a long, hard look. He seemed to have grown older in the short time Paddington had been there”—a precise and chilling metaphor for the implacable force of authority.
Bond would often tell interviewers that one inspiration for Paddington’s plight—he is found by the Browns with nothing but a hat, a suitcase, and a sign around his neck reading, “Please Look After This Bear”—was the groups of children he saw on station platforms in London during the war. The anecdote would, however, vary. Sometimes Bond recalled seeing British evacuees from London being sent to the safety of the countryside. Latterly, the way he described the children suggested that they may have been Jewish refugees brought from Europe during the Kindertransport. “Paddington, in a sense, was a refugee, and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees,” Bond told the Guardian, in 2014, when refugees’ status was becoming an increasingly volatile political issue in Britain.
In the second chapter of “A Bear Called Paddington,” Mr. Brown momentarily considers letting the authorities know about their unconventional guest, but is dissuaded from doing so by his family. “He might get arrested as a stowaway,” Jonathan, the Browns’ son, says. Mrs. Brown adds, “It’s not as if he’s done anything wrong. I’m sure he didn’t harm anyone traveling in a lifeboat like that.” The precariousness of Paddington’s immigrant status underpins his adventures—will he or won’t he be allowed to stay?—and, reread in the current climate, give his story an exceptional poignancy. Only a couple of months ago, Bond gave an interview in which he lamented the result of last year’s Brexit referendum. “It’s very sad to come out of the European Union,” he said, as thousands of immigrants to Britain wondered about their future legality in their adopted land. In the furry, marmalade-encrusted figure of Paddington, Bond provided an enduring object of sympathy, and offered an embodiment of the struggles that a new arrival to any land faces. He also gave us a salutary fable, showing how vital that new arrival’s contribution might be—how it might enrich a culture that extends back before even forgotten Anglo-Saxon chiefs—when good will prevails.
