This part of west London was a key site of immigration, its cosmopolitan population associated with the arrival of Caribbean workers in the post-war era and refugees from across Europe. Nick Ansell/PA Archive/PA Imagesīond bears witness to experiences of the huge number of people displaced by the war and of refugees and migrants in the post-war era who combine to create a sympathetic character in Paddington and a strong ethical message in Bond’s writing of the value of hospitality.Īt the time of writing the first Paddington book in 1962, Bond lived in a flat on Portobello Road with his first wife, not in the large middle-class house with housekeeper that he imagined for the book. Michael Bond, author of the Paddington Bear stories, after he was awarded a CBE in 2015. Bond recalled watching images of evacuee and refugee children wearing labels at train stations. But the bear’s famous label is also very important, signalling his role as a figure for a series of memories about the trauma of World War II. The stowaway and his labelĪs a stowaway Paddington travelled illegally by boat and was taken in by comfortably off London family. For, although he sets his Paddington stories in a safe middle-class house in West London, Paddington himself comes from elsewhere, somewhere so far-flung to be the other side of the world – “Darkest Peru”. Still a child himself, the war transformed him and perhaps also globalised him, pushing back the borders of his vision of the world to encompass other places and peoples. But flying didn’t agree with him – so, after suffering chronic airsickness, he moved to the Middlesex regiment of the British Army. He joined up after surviving a serious bombing raid in Reading that killed many of the people working in his building. He left school very young and was 17 when he volunteered for aircrew service in the RAF. There had been no shortage of trauma for Bond himself. Refugees are the saddest sight I still think that,” Bond said in 2014 – just as his creation was about to reach a new generation with a big-screen adaption. Newsreel footage of the Nazis moving people out of their homes in the 1930s stuck with Bond: “Footage of elderly people pushing prams with all their belongings in them. Paddington comes out of a certain kind of war trauma.
His story is that of the refugee – and it remains as relevant today as it was when Bond, who died aged 91 on June 27, created him in the 1950s.
But Michael Bond’s Paddington was born into a world torn to pieces by a destructive conflict. A children’s story about a bumbling bear with a heart of gold is perhaps not the first place you would expect to glean insights into the trauma of World War II or the plight of the refugee.
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