He purchased it for his wife and they called him Paddington, because their apartment was near the train station of the same name. Their daughter Karen was born in 1958, the same year that his first children’s book, A Bear Called Paddington (HarperCollins) was published.īond had come across a small, lone stuffed bear in a London shop on Christmas Eve the year before. The following decade brought the end of the war, numerous freelance writing gigs, a return to the BBC (in television this time), and marriage, to his first wife Brenda. Months later he was given the option to enlist in the army and was stationed in Egypt, where he used any down time to write a short story that was published in a London magazine. On his 17th birthday, in 1943, Bond volunteered to fly for the Royal Air Force, though he discovered during his training that he did not have a stomach for flying. Bond described his mother as an avid reader and both parents read to him from an early age, in a home where “books were part of the furniture.” A favorite memory was Bond’s introduction to Magnet, a weekly comics magazine, by his father.Īs a teenager, with WWII already underway, Bond had a job doing clerical work in a lawyer’s office and later landed a position-by answering an advertisement-at the BBC, where he put his passion for building amplifiers and radio sets to good use.
In an autobiographical essay for Something About the Author, he described a tranquil childhood during which he enjoyed playing various street games in his neighborhood and cricket with his patient father. He was 91.īond was born Januin Newbury, England and grew up in the nearby town of Reading.
British children’s author Michael Bond, widely known for his books starring the duffle-coat-donning Paddington bear, died at his home in London on June 27 following a brief illness.
0 kommentar(er)
