More Than Marmalade: Michael Bond and the Story of Paddington Bear
viii Michael Bond and Paddington Bear pose for a picture at the Men zies Hotel Nigel Peter Todd Fairfax Media via Getty Images better life Paddington Bear was seeking a fresh start in a foreign land He arrived in London alone knowing no one but hoping to begin anew The refugees fleeing to safer places were part of Paddington’s story too Even more than his favorite marmalade sandwich AUTHOR’S NOTE
ix Many of the details in the Paddington book series are based on real events The fictional bear’s story emerges from war trauma and remains as relevant today as it was when Bond created him in the 1950s Bond who died at 91 in 2017 was a young teenager in London when World War II broke out Before the fighting began and for months afterward he watched German Jewish children struggle to escape the Nazis Thousands arrived in Eng land leaving their parents behind The British people promised to look after them These children uprooted from their homeland often had nothing but a knapsack full of clothes Like many of them Paddington Bear was an orphan He’d lost both his parents in an earthquake With no family to help Paddington hid on a ship bound for Eng land Arriving in London with only a small suitcase and everything he owned tucked inside the stowaway cub stood alone on Platform 1 in Paddington Station There he waited patiently for a family to adopt him A tag around his neck read Please look after this bear Thank you The tag was a real-life detail Bond remem bered from the war Refugee children and evacuees sent to Britain wore tags displaying their names and ages Though he was just 13 when war broke out Bond had seen news reels about terrible things the Nazis were doing to their own citizens He knew these things were AUTHOR’S NOTE
x wrong When he wrote A Bear Called Paddington 19 years later he gave Paddington a warm shelter with a loving family something he wished for those frightened Ger man Jewish children Throughout his life Bond sympathized with refu gees His stories reflect the confusion of coming to an unfamiliar place Immigrants need to learn new lan guages They have to figure out customs that differ from their own In a letter from Paddington written a decade ago Bond protested the United Kingdom Border Detention Center’s unjust treatment of young refugees Whenever I hear about children from foreign coun tries being put into detention centres I think how lucky I am to be living at number 32 Windsor Gar dens with such nice people as Mr and Mrs Brown Mrs Bird who looks after the Browns says if she had her way she would set the children free and lock up a few politicians in their place to see how they liked it Fortunately for Paddington the Brown family adopted the bear from darkest Peru and helped him adapt Of course Paddington’s life still wasn’t easy He tried hard to do the right thing but often he ended up making a mess The trouble he caused always needed to AUTHOR’S NOTE
xi be untangled which is much of what made Paddington’s escapades so much fun Altogether Bond wrote over 150 chapter-length sto ries for the books Fifteen Paddington novels have been translated into 40 languages and have sold more than 35 million copies By writing about Paddington’s adven tures Bond gave all those lost and lonely children from World War II a happy ending Today Paddington is as adored as ever thanks to the recent success of big-screen movies based on the series The debut film released in 2014 and simply titled Pad dington delighted Michael Bond himself Like his hopeful bear the author’s remarkable story begs to be told in this time of domestic and international unrest Though details of Bond’s childhood are limited it was possible to piece them together using his own words While some of the author’s quotes in this book have been adapted to better fit a middle grade biography they have been taken from verifiable sources This book is a rare account of his life with fictionalized scenes based in fact to paint an intimate picture of a modest man Bond really did carry on lengthy conversations with Paddington Bear In fact Paddington was so much a personal friend and part of the family that to this day the original bear rescued from a store shelf on Christ mas Eve has never appeared in public AUTHOR’S NOTE
