'Paddington Is Always With Me'

Michael Bond, creator of arguably the world's most famous bear, reveals how he found inspiration for the childhood favourite. Helena Catwright reports.

- Helena Catwright

The door opens at Michael Bond’s un-showy London home. ‘I’ve been watching out for you,’ he smiles. Poetically, Michael lives in Paddington, with his wife Sue, a retired literary agent, and his guinea pigs, Oksana and Olga.

He leads the way to his ground-floor office where the desk is hidden under swathes of paper and tottering piles of books. The walls are hung with favourite illustrations and stacked with cases of books – many of which are his own. 

It’s been almost 60 years since a little bear from darkest Peru found himself homeless and alone in Paddington station, wearing a tag saying ‘Please look after this bear. Thank you’.

Two hundred books later, Bond, now 91, is still writing. ‘I do a seven day week,’ he says proudly. ‘I even write on Christmas Day.’

Michael wasn’t always a writer. During the Second World War, the 15-year-old got a job with the BBC, near Reading (where he grew up), switching radio transmitters on in the morning, then off at night. He was in an office at the top of the building when it was hit in an air raid. ‘I’m lucky to be here,’ he says.

After the war, Michael joined the BBC monitoring service and rose through the ranks to become a cameraman and work on the first series of Blue Peter. It was then that he started to dabble with creative writing.

On a snowy Christmas Eve in 1956, he went to Selfridges on Oxford Street to buy a present for his then wife, Brenda, when he came across a lone bear. ‘There was one little bear sat on the shelf in the toy department. There was no one around and I felt very sorry for it. I moved away, but when I came back, he was still there. I thought, ‘You can’t spend Christmas sitting on the shelf,’ so I bought him.’