![]() ![]() Photograph: © Peggy Fortnum and HarperCollins Paddington Bear as realised by Peggy Fortnum. He bashed out the bear opus in 10 days in the spring of 1957 on a typewriter in a tiny flat off Portobello Road. Bond had been scribbling for over a decade – his first short story was completed in an army tent outside Cairo in 1946. Out of pity he bought a bear glove-puppet, rejected and alone on a shelf in Selfridges. Bond, who has died aged 91, was a BBC television cameraman who had nipped out to Oxford Street, London, late on Christmas Eve, 1956, for a stocking filler for his first wife, Brenda. ![]() This did not seem a fantasy when it was written. He is sitting on a small suitcase near the lost property office, wearing a hat and a label around his neck: “Please look after this bear. The Browns, waiting for their daughter to chug home from school for the holidays, find a creature from “darkest Peru” who has stowed away on a boat to Britain. Some of its trains are still steam, whistling away to halts as yet unaxed. Paddington station, as described in the opening chapter of Michael Bond’s book A Bear Called Paddington, has the melancholy of a departed world. ![]()
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