KAREN: Since Paddington and I are the same age, people think my father wrote the book for me, whereas in fact he wrote it for his own amusement.

On Christmas Eve 1956 he ran into Selfridges on Oxford Street to shelter from the snow, and he saw this little bear sitting all alone in the toy department. He took him home and called him Paddington, after the station he used to commute from.

The story sums up our whole family really. It wouldn’t occur to any of us to leave a bear all alone on a shelf. That bear still lives with us. Other people might not understand that he really is a member of our family — he’s his own person and he’s completely real. We still address comments to him. When I was a child, he came on holiday and sat on the beach. He had his own place in restaurants and he tasted the food and sampled the wine. My parents have joint custody. He spends part of the year with my mother and part with my father, and it’s been like that since they split up when I was 13.

My father isn’t a man’s man, which I think is why women love him and why he made such a good father. He’s a very gentle person, with this wonderful sense of humour. There’s a lot of Paddington in him. He has a tremendous sense of right and wrong and quite a rare understanding of other people’s feelings. When I was a child my mother was the disciplinarian. My father hardly ever lost his temper, but when he did he’d bang his fist on the table — it was the most violent thing I ever saw him do — and it’d really upset me. Not because I was worried about what he’d do, just that I didn’t want to do anything to upset him. He’s always been a great observer of both humans and animals. The Olga da Polga books were based on my guinea pig, and apart from a brief foray into cats, he’s had a guinea pig called Olga ever since. The current one lives in the dining room and feasts on the carpet — as Olgas always have done. She adores my father and he her. He watches TV in the evening with Olga sitting on his chest.

He was a cameraman for the BBC for many years, then he gave up his job in 1967 to become a full-time writer. But I don’t think it ever came easily. He had to work at it and he never switched off. He used to have an envelope in his wallet, and wherever we were he’d jot down notes. I remember him seeing a sign directing people to a Norman church, and later Norman Church became a minor character in the Paddington books.

At school everyone assumed I would be a writer too. So I rebelled and went off to university to do mathematical statistics and operational research, which I hated. My father never assumed I’d get involved with Paddington & Co, but actually, it was natural that I should, because I knew Paddington better than anyone else could. My father had found himself swamped with decisions over marketing and merchandising that he really didn’t want to make and which took him away from writing. The company has been incredibly successful and I’d be crazy to say I’m not grateful, but really the money isn’t important

to either of us. Someone once said to me: “You’ll sell the company in the end. Everyone has their price.” But there is no price. It makes me really panicky to think of someone else looking after Paddington. I’d feel I’d let him down. My father still defers to Paddington himself on most things. Paddington’s mind is very black and white. He’s a very polite bear and he’s got very strong morals. He always tries to do the right thing. My father will often say: “What would Paddington do?”

And it’s invariably the right decision.

MICHAEL: I didn’t know anything about children when I first got Paddington.

I bought him as a stocking filler for my wife. He had a particularly beseeching quality about him — but then all bears do, don’t they? An actor friend of mine once said: “Dolls always look as though they’re wondering what they’re going to wear next, whereas bears, well, you can tell them your secrets and you know they won’t pass them on.” Paddington used to sit on the mantelpiece, sort of soaking things up, as bears do.

He was always very much a part of our family, but Karen also had her own bear — a very precious creature which spent a lot of time in hospital with her. She was born with congenital hip dysplasia and was in and out of hospitals from about eight months old. The first operation went wrong and the problems went on and on. Hospital visits in those days lasted only half an hour, and if the traffic was bad and we were late, we hardly saw her at all. One Christmas Day, when she was about five, the hospital decided there’d be no visiting. It was awful. And there was nothing we could do.

After years of surgery, Karen ended up with one leg shorter than the other, and so she had to have yet another, leg-lengthening, operation. She was taught to turn the screws in a rod through her thigh bone every two days, which she did without complaint. She read a lot — she never went to bed without having a story read to her — and she had an imaginary family that was very real to her. Having survived it all, the experience gave her qualities she might not otherwise have had. She has a huge amount of inner strength and she embraces life. She doesn’t let opportunities pass her by. When Paddington first went to TV, he suddenly had an audience of 6m, and I was doing everything: licking stamps, doing the Vat return. Karen came to work for me between jobs and never left. The Paddington stories still have resonance; he’s a refugee, really. I still think there is no sadder sight than someone with all their possessions in a bag.

Mr and Mrs Brown are a bit like my mother and father, who was a civil servant to the core. He was much more Paddington than I am. He was a very polite man who always wore his hat, even in the sea, in case he met someone he knew. And he wasn’t very good at decorating. I remember him decorating a room while I tried to help by adding water to his wallpaper paste, which got thinner and thinner. We stood back when he’d finished and watched all the paper fall off.

We’re all quite empathetic. My first thought is always for the other person and I think Karen is the same. She’s a typical Leo — very outgoing — and I’m a Capricorn. I keep things to myself but I get there in the end. There’s a particular father-daughter relationship between her and me. She can be quite bossy and I could be irritated by that, but then sometimes it just makes me laugh because she’s so optimistic. If I see a brown envelope on the mat, I’ll think: “Oh, God, it’s a bill!” Karen will think: “Oh, goody, a cheque!” She’s not a worrier, which I am, and that means there’s a good balance between us. I feel very protective of her. But then there comes a point with children when you start asking their advice. She’s got a far better business brain than I have, but I don’t want to burden her. I work every day because I don’t know what else I’d do, but she’s just had another hip operation, and I can see the time coming when she’s not going to want to be in business. It’s difficult, the thought of handing over to someone else. At the moment it’s quite simple: we’re on the same wavelength. We’ve never had a disagreement about Paddington. If

we think he wouldn’t like something, we say no. Paddington is family. You can draw up rule books, and say whatever you like, but you can’t really expect anyone else to feel the same way.

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