Paddington Bear, Refugee
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 refugeesbrought 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.