Читать книгу Love from Paddington - Michael Bond - Страница 8

Thank you very much for your postcard showing Lima harbour with the tide coming in, which arrived yesterday. I’m sorry if my letter made you (anxious ).The funny word you came across at the bottom and you didn’t understand is my NEW NAME! I hope you are sitting comfortably so that I can tell you how it came about.

When I arrived in England I had no idea where I was or which way to go, so I waited in the lifeboat until all the people on the Karenia had disappeared. Then I stowed away on a train marked to LONDON, which is where you hoped I would end up.

I sat very still and when the man who collects the tickets came round and saw the label you tied round my neck, he must have thought I was a parcel.

It’s lucky bears are good at stowing away because when the train reached London it couldn’t go any further and I found myself on a strange railway platform near the Lost Property Office.

It was very busy. Everybody else was in a hurry and they seemed to know where they were going, so I sat on my suitcase and waited for something to happen.

Which was how I met Mr and Mrs Brown.

They were there to meet their daughter, Judy, who was coming home for the school holidays, when Mr Brown spotted me. Mrs Brown didn’t believe him at first, but when she saw my label and read the words ‘PLEASE LOOK AFTER THIS BEAR.THANK YOU!’ she said at once I must come home with them. I think your adding the words ‘thank you’ must have made all the difference, because if they had left me where I was there would have been nothing to thank them for.

After all, they could have left me in the Lost Property Office, or left me where I was and gone on their way, but they didn’t do either of those things.

Mr Brown asked me what my name was, but when I told them Mrs Brown had trouble saying it, so she decided to call me after the place where we met, which is how I came to have such an unusual name for a bear, because PADDINGTON is the name of the station.

I like it myself, so I hope you do too. Mr Brown says it sounds important and Judy’s brother, Jonathan, told me I might have ended up with a name like CHARING CROSS or WAPPING, which are nowhere near as nice.

Another thing, Aunt Lucy, it’s good that you taught me to speak English when I was small, because not many people in England speak Peruvian.

I went on an Underground train yesterday for the very first time. We were going on a shopping expedition so I asked everyone in the carriage if they spoke Peruvian and no one did. Mind you, not many of them spoke English either!

Mrs Brown bought me a dark blue duffle coat to keep out the cold and Jonathan gave me something called an INK PAD so that when I write a letter to anyone I can make a paw mark to show it is genuine. I don’t suppose many bears have their very own ink pad.

I think perhaps it means I might be staying with them for more than a few days. I do hope so. Judy hopes so too. She says WATCH THIS SPACE!