HOWZAT

As a former BBC cameraman, Bond has a visual writing style, which has helped the stories translate easily into picture books for younger children. Collins (now HarperCollins) had the first books illustrated by Peggy Fortnum. “Her sketches were deceptively simple, a few lines creating a living breathing bear.” Later Bob (R.W.) Alley took over the colour illustrations.

Bond was paid £75 for the first book and still has the acceptance letter. His literary agent was Harvey Unna, a German refugee, and rather like Mr Gruber, the antique shop owner who befriends Paddington. “People don’t recognise themselves in books,” says Bond. “I based Mr Gruber on him and a number of Hungarian friends in the monitoring service at the BBC. Very civilised.”

Before that, Bond moonlighted writing short stories and features for The Guardian. He tried to write radio plays, “the sort of story where the statue of a beautiful girl comes alive in a French village…” He laughs. “I could have papered the room with rejection slips.”

The room was a tiny rented studio in Notting Hill, which he shared with Brenda. “It was so small it was like a caravan.” Portobello Road market and the local launderette and bakers all appear in the books, but the Browns’ house, Bond concedes, would now be worth millions and probably be owned by non-doms.

Paddington sometimes reminds Bond of his father, a civil servant who railed against regulations. The bear is politely but firmly anti-authoritarian, giving everyone from zookeepers to Beefeaters his hard stare. “I don’t like messages in children’s books – as Sam Goldwyn said: ‘Messages are for the Western Union.’ But you can say a lot with undercurrents, by implication.”

Mr Bond senior wore a trilby – so, like Paddington, he always had a hat to raise. “I remember my father saw someone playing the violin in the street, took off his hat to him, and someone put money in my father’s hat. Mother was furious. Father was also bad at odd jobs. When Paddington has to cut something in half, you know the chances are he’ll saw the table underneath in half, and the pleasure for readers is to see how he’ll get out of trouble.”

There is an adult world beyond Paddington. Bond has also written a culinary detective series for adults featuring Monsieur Pamplemousse and his bloodhound, Pommes Frites – 19 books so far, researched in French wine and food guides. For the past 30 years, Bond has rented an apartment in a modern block in Paris, overlooking a park behind Montmartre, and spends a week a month there, writing. He suffers from serious Francophilia.

“Any street I walk down in Paris makes me happy. I feel life is being lived with a capital ‘L’. Even though we never go into the café on the corner, the owner comes out and shakes us by the hand, the plumber comes out to talk. If you go into the bricolage (DIY) shop to buy rubber gloves, the queue joins in, discussing the best kind.”

Bond has also written a series of children’s books starring a guinea pig called Olga, and downstairs the real Olga lives freely in a cardboard box in the middle of the floor, and has eaten large holes in the carpet. Bond picks up the guinea pig and holds it to his chest. “She understands a few words, particularly ‘cucumber’. We had some blind children here the other day and they loved the guinea pig; they particularly loved feeling the shapes of the patches she’d chewed away.”

Aficionados of Seventies children’s television may remember the animated series The Herbs, another Bond creation. The BBC rang and said, “We’re getting rid of Bill and Ben. Have you got any ideas?” At that moment, Bond was looking out of the window at some parsley blowing in the wind, thinking that would make a great lion’s mane. He produced a script within a week, featuring herbs like Dill, whose catchphrase was: “I’m Dill the dog, I’m a dog called Dill” as he chased his tail. The Herbs used laborious Wallace and Gromit-style stop-start animation. Ivor Wood, the film-maker, told Bond: “Every time you write ‘Mrs Onion and all the Chives march on,’ it takes me days.”

When Paddington got his own television series soon afterwards, Bond found it hard to stay in control. “Having a character like Paddington is like having a child. You get protective of it; on TV, that’s another challenge.” To begin with, the merchandising went well. Shirley Clarkson, mother of the more-famous roadhog Jeremy, produced the first stuffed Paddingtons, using the best quality felt for the duffel coats and wooden toggles. The bear’s boots were Dunlop children’s Wellingtons, until the factory ran out of size fives. Her husband Eddie Clarkson drove round the country looking for classy toy shops. He was very strict. Selfridges (where, ironically, the original, yet-unnamed Paddington was bought) took Bond out to lunch to persuade him to let them sell him, “but it was up to Eddie and he already had Hamleys and Harrods. Creating the shortage made a demand”.

Meanwhile, the BBC was paying a pittance for the films, “and everyone was jumping on the bandwagon wanting licences. I was dealing with it all myself, making the tea and sandwiches, running down Baker Street because I couldn’t afford to walk. People wanted to put Paddington on all sorts of things – like toilet rolls. There was a particularly gruesome wastepaper basket idea where you took Paddington’s head off and threw the rubbish in.”

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy