by Michael Bond
But it was Mr Gruber who paid Paddington the best compliment of all. He stood it on the table in his shop alongside the picture that had started it all.
“It bears out what I have always said about there being no such word as can’t,” he said. “I doubt if Picasso at his peak could have produced anything better.”
“So it could be worth a lot of money,” said Paddington excitedly.
“Not just yet, I’m afraid,” said Mr Gruber. “Very often it’s a matter of waiting until the creator is no longer with us.”
“I could do the rest of my shopping, if you like?” said Paddington.
“I think it might take even longer than that, Mr Brown,” said his friend tactfully.
For a while lots of passers-by dropped in to admire Paddington’s handiwork, but as the weather grew warmer it was noticeable that fewer and fewer actually entered the shop and if they did, they didn’t linger.
There came a time when even Mr Gruber began to have second thoughts.
“If you have no objection, Mr Brown,” he said. “I may find another home for your masterpiece.” And he hung Paddington’s work on a tree in the tiny patio behind his shop.
First of all he made a photocopy of it for his shop window, and alongside it was a notice saying: VIEWING BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
Acting on Mr Gruber’s advice, Paddington added his special paw print in the bottom right hand corner, just to show it was a genuine original.
ALTHOUGH MRS BIRD ran what Mr Brown often called ‘a tight ship’ (usually brought on by her sighs when he came in from the garden and deposited mud all over her newly polished kitchen floor), it would have been nearer the truth to say that she did her best to keep everything shipshape and tidy at number thirty-two Windsor Gardens, which wasn’t always easy.
Not that she was in the habit of laying down the law on such matters. In her view a happy household was one where everyone felt free to do as they wished; within reason of course. Also, it was a matter of territories.
That said, very little untoward escaped her eagle eye and she was a past-mistress in the art of raising her eyebrows to good effect. The Browns could tell at once by the look on her face when things were not to her liking.
So when she happened to glance into Paddington’s bedroom one morning and her eyebrows soared heavenwards to their fullest extent, he wasn’t at all surprised. In fact, for a moment or two he thought they might disappear altogether over the back of her head.
His own eyebrows had recently been doing much the same thing when he woke in the morning and he saw the state of his room. It always looked much worse by daylight, but by the time he reached his dressing table mirror his brows were usually in their normal place and try as he might he couldn’t see any joins.
The simple fact was that ever since the debacle over Mr Curry’s birthday present, followed by his efforts at creating the oyster montage, he had been putting off tidying up.
His Aunt Lucy, who in many ways was not unlike Mrs Bird, would have recognised the signs immediately. It was what she would have called a bad attack of the mañanas – the Spanish word for tomorrow, and as everyone knows, there are times when ‘tomorrow never comes’.
Paddington braced himself for the worst, but for once Mrs Bird seemed at a loss for words. Pursing her lips, she closed the door and disappeared downstairs, only to return a few minutes later armed with a dustpan and brush and a bucketful of cleaning materials.
“It’s the first day of the summer sales,” she said, “and Jonathan and Judy are coming home for the school holidays tomorrow, so Mrs Brown and I are going out to look for some new curtain material while we have the chance.
“That being so, I’m afraid lunch will be later than usual, which may be no bad thing. It will give you more time to make your room spick-and-span by the time we get back. And when we do, I don’t want to see any marmalade stains or dried oyster juice, and none of that dreadful shaving cream which seems to have gone everywhere except where it’s supposed to.
“I don’t know what Mr Brown will say if he ever gets to see the state your room is in.
“And don’t forget to clean under the bed!”
With that parting shot she closed the door.
“Do you think it wise leaving Paddington to his own devices for such a long time?” asked Mrs Brown, as they left the house. “Remember the old saying – ‘the devil finds work for idle paws’?”
“You haven’t seen the state of his room,” said Mrs Bird, “it’s worse than that of an average teenage boy, and that’s saying something. Remember what Jonathan’s room used to look like before he went off to boarding school?”
Mrs Brown gave a sigh. “You couldn’t see the floor for junk. He used to stand all his jeans in a row by the side of the bed and step into the pair he fancied most next morning.”
“Don’t remind me,” said Mrs Bird. “At least Paddington hangs his duffle coat on its proper hook at night. As for being left to his own devices, that bear’s paws won’t be idle for the rest of the day. It’s a long time since his room had a thorough going-over, and he can’t come to much harm with a dustpan and brush and a few old scrubbing brushes. Besides, the exercise will do him good.”
“How about the vacuum cleaner?” asked Mrs Brown, recalling the time when Paddington had put the tube in the wrong end and blown soot all over the dining room carpet.
“Locked away in a cupboard,” said Mrs Bird. “And the key’s in my handbag.
“As for the carpet… if you remember, when it was first laid it was done in a rush by Mr Briggs, and he didn’t even bother with any proper underlay. He left the old newspapers in place and added a few more for good measure. One way and another the room needs a good going-over by a proper decorator.”
“Oh dear,” said Mrs Brown. “I keep asking Henry to do something about it, but he can be very forgetful when it suits him.”
“That’s as may be,” said Mrs Bird, “but as for taking Paddington with us, he would be bored stiff in no time at all. Besides, he’s probably hard at work already.”
Mrs Bird spoke with the voice of experience, although for once she failed to take account of a bear’s priorities.
The sound of the front door being closed had hardly died away before Paddington hurried downstairs in order to make a plentiful supply of marmalade sandwiches ahead of the day’s work.
Once he was back in his room, he looked for a safe place to put them in case any dust clouds landed on top while his back was turned.
Only then did he fill the bucket with hot water from the bathroom, and having put his pyjamas back on in case he got his fur wet, he rolled up the sleeves and began work on his bedroom walls with a scrubbing brush and a bar of soap.
Paddington was an optimistic bear in many ways, but he had to admit it was a bit of a setback when no sooner had he applied a scrubbing brush to the paper than it began to come away from the wall. Worse still, the more he scrubbed the worse it became. In what seemed like no time at all, he was literally knee-deep in paper, and even allowing for the fact that bears’ knees were fairly near the floor, it was still a sizeable amount.
Having decided that perhaps it had been a mistake to use the hot tap rather than the cold, Paddington sat down on the edge of his bed and gazed around the room.
In many respects it was the reverse of what had happened soon after he went to live with the Browns and offered to help Mr Brown with the decorating.
On that occasion, apart from adding too much water to the paste, he managed to paper over the door by mistake and had been unable to find his way out. Now the same door was practically the only part left untouched.
Unfortunately he spent so much time wondering if perhaps his adding too much water to the paste all that time ago was the cause of his present problem, he failed to notice some large chunks of paper had somehow or other contrived to stick themselves back on the wall again. Some had done so at a very peculiar angle indeed, and when he tried to straighten out the worst of them, bits
came away in his paw and stuck to his pyjamas instead.
Catching sight of his reflection in the dressing table mirror, Paddington decided to give cleaning walls a miss for the time being and concentrate instead on doing the dusting.
Pushing the bed to one side, he found Mrs Bird was right about one thing. The area of carpet where it had been looked particularly fruitful, and the pan was soon half-full of dust, not to mention several old Liquorice Allsorts into the bargain. They had gone missing some months previously, along with various other small items he had forgotten all about.
By then the dust was making his nose itch, and one of the Allsorts was on the point of going down the wrong way. Fearing if he didn’t do something quickly he might drop the pan, he glanced around the room and noticed that in moving the bed away from the skirting board the carpet had risen up at one point.
At first sight it seemed an ideal place to store the contents of the pan for the time being, especially as there appeared to be some newspapers lining the floorboards, so in desperation he opened up the gap still further and managed to upend the pan a split second before the inevitable happened.
A loud tishoooo echoed round the bedroom, and as it did so a small cloud of dust rose from the very spot where it had just landed.
He waited a moment or two for it to settle before bending down to brush it back into the pan and while he was doing so he glanced idly at the papers.
Paddington wasn’t normally a great reader of newspapers. On the whole he much preferred magazines. Newspapers were rather difficult with paws. Even if you did come across something interesting to read, more often than not the pages were stuck together, and no amount of blowing would make them come apart.
However, for once he had to admit the papers on the floor looked unusually inviting. Some of them were fairly up-to-date, whereas others must have been there for a very long time because in the pictures everyone was wearing a hat, and motor cars looked different; like a lot of boxes on wheels. Some were even drawn by horses, and in one picture there was a man on a bicycle that had one enormous wheel at the front and a tiny one at the back.
Those things apart, there wasn’t a coloured picture to be seen; everything, including the advertisements, was black and white.
Pulling back the carpet still further, Paddington couldn’t help thinking Mr Gruber might like some of the older newspapers for his antique shop, and he was wondering whether or not he should mention it to the Browns, when his eye was caught by an item on cookery in one of the more up-to-date editions.
But it wasn’t just any old cooking… it was all about food in foreign countries, and… Paddington grew more and more excited as he read on… It was about things people ate in South America… including… he nearly fell over backwards with excitement… there was a picture of a special cake they had sometimes been given for a treat in the Home for Retired Bears. It even had the recipe printed below it.
Having taken a quick look over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching, he carefully removed the item from the newspaper, and as he did so he had another idea.
Paddington was very keen on cooking. Of late Mrs Bird often let him help out with things like stirring the batter when she was making a Yorkshire pudding to go with the Sunday lunch, and by general agreement he was a dab hand at making gravy. But she usually drew the line when it came to doing anything more complicated by himself, largely on account of the fact that he was always wanting to test the results long before they were ready, and she didn’t want him to singe his whiskers by opening the oven door too soon.
It struck Paddington that he might never again have such a golden opportunity to do-it-all-by-himself. After a hard day at the sales, what could be nicer for Mrs Brown and Mrs Bird than to arrive home loaded with shopping only to open the front door and be met by the smell of freshly-baked cakes?
It would also make a nice change from tidying his room.
He read through the list of ingredients: two cupfuls of self-raising flour, the same amount of cornflour, icing sugar, butter, the yolk of an egg, sugar, condensed milk… He wasn’t too sure about the condensed milk, otherwise he felt sure Mrs Bird would have all the other items in her larder.
Paddington didn’t believe in doing things by half, and it took him some while to assemble all the ingredients. In fact he soon lost count of the number of times he went up and down the stairs carrying them all, and he began to wish he had set to work on making it in the kitchen rather than his bedroom. Wide though his windowsill was, it now resembled the display counter in a grocery shop. On the other hand, he didn’t want to be caught in the act if Mrs Brown and Mrs Bird arrived back early.
Having emptied a whole bag of flour into a large mound on the sill, he did the same with the cornflour before turning his attention to the rest of the instructions.
For a second or two he stared at the piece of paper in his paw as though he could hardly believe his eyes. In fact, he turned it over several times in order to make sure he had the right side.
But no, in black and white at the end of the list of contents were the words ‘. . . continued on page 22’.
Paddington stared at it in disgust. The page he had removed the recipe from was number 7 and there were so many other newspapers mixed up together the chance of finding number 22 would have taken a month of Sundays. Instead of saying ‘continued on page 22’ it might just as well have said ‘continued next week’ or ‘next month’, or worse still… ‘never again in a million years’.
Worn-out, and hot and flustered by all his exertions, Paddington reached up to open the window for a draught of fresh air, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
Over the years he had often wondered why some flour was called ‘self-raising’. Now, in the space of a few seconds, the answer lay before him. It didn’t seem possible that such a small quantity of white powder could cover such a large area in such a small amount of time all by itself, but everything in the room now had a thin coating of white.
Hastily closing the window before anything worse happened, Paddington drew the curtains in the vain hope that it might improve matters, and took to his bed.
Tired out, hungry and at the end of his tether, he flopped down on it and lay where he had landed for a moment or two, gazing at the ceiling.
To say that his room was in a worse state than it had ever been before was putting it mildly. It was like a nightmare. In fact it was much worse; at least with a nightmare you woke up at the end and found there was nothing to worry about.
In the past Paddington had often noticed that relaxing wasn’t always as easy as it sounded. Flies, for example, often waited until you had settled yourself in the most comfortable position, before landing on the end of your nose. Or, worse still, some part of you developed an itch which wouldn’t go away.
Today was no exception, except it wasn’t a fly or even an itch, it was more of a lump, and it was in the middle of his back. He couldn’t remember there ever being a lump in his bed before and he began feeling underneath his pyjamas to find out what it could possibly be.
Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t hard… if anything it was soft and… not so much soft, as wet and sticky. It was oozing stickiness, the kind of stickiness that was all too familiar and could mean only one thing.
He remembered now where he had put his marmalade sandwiches for safekeeping!
“I didn’t realise you’d washed the sheets before we came out,” said Mrs Brown, when they arrived back from their shopping.
Mrs Bird joined her at the kitchen window. “I didn’t!” she said grimly, as she surveyed a range of assorted linen hanging on the revolving clothesline.
Her eyes softened as she couldn’t help but notice on a line separate from the rest, a small pair of flowered pyjamas.
She glanced around her kitchen. “Nor, for that matter, did I leave half the cupboard doors open, or a sink full of egg shells.”
“Oh dear,” said Mrs Brown.
“Oh dear, is right,” said Mrs Bi
rd, making her way upstairs.
“You can come out now, wherever you are,” she called, as she entered Paddington’s room.
The wardrobe door slowly opened and a head appeared. “How did you know I was in here, Mrs Bird?” asked Paddington.
“Little birds know these things,” said the Browns’ housekeeper, “and one of them told me.” She gazed round the room. “I said you wouldn’t be idle while we were out shopping, but I didn’t expect to find quite such a mess when we got back.”
She hesitated for a moment, lost in thought. “I’m sure you did your best,” she said at last. “And you meant well. Those are two of the most important things in life.”
“I think I did my worst, Mrs Bird,” said Paddington sadly.
“Well at least you tried,” said Mrs Bird. “I’ve no time for people who say they can’t do things when they haven’t even tried.”
While she was talking she caught sight of Paddington’s recipe lying on the bed.
“Alfajores!” she exclaimed.
“Bless you!” said Paddington.
“That wasn’t a sneeze,” said Mrs Bird. “It’s a dish. I don’t believe it. I’ve been looking everywhere for that recipe ever since you arrived. I wanted to make some for you so that you would feel at home, but I couldn’t remember all the ingredients.”
“I didn’t know that’s what they are called,” exclaimed Paddington. “But they are very popular in Peru. Everybody has their own recipe. You make a top and a bottom. Then you stick them together with manjar blanco.”
“What’s that when it’s at home?” asked Mrs Bird.
“I don’t know,” admitted Paddington, “Aunt Lucy used to use condensed milk boiled up until it was really thick. They went down well in the Home for Retired Bears.”
“I was thinking of using marmalade,” said Mrs Bird. “Thinly spread.”
Paddington licked his lips.
“Jonathan and Judy are coming home tomorrow,” she continued. “I shall need help from an expert if we’re to have enough ready in time. That is, if you wouldn’t mind lending a paw.”
