The Paddington paradox

With a tip of his hat, he brings a trace of grace to every life he touches.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A cartoon bear, wearing a blue duffel coat and red hat, rests his arms on a rock against a mountainous background

Paddington ponders Peru.

StudioCanal.

It appears that Paddington, the nation’s favourite unaccompanied asylum-seeking bear, has finally been issued with a British Passport, 66 years after stowing away on a boat from South America and two years after eating marmalade sandwiches with Queen Elizabeth II on her Platinum Jubilee. In the brand-new film Paddington in Peru, we discover what happens when he uses his passport to return to his country of birth to visit his old Aunt Lucy.

Will Paddington be reunited with the kind-hearted bear who brought him up after he was orphaned in an earthquake? Where will this leave the Brown family, who have been fostering him for the best part of seven decades? Indeed, where will it leave the rest of us who have embraced Paddington as one of our own? Will Paddington even return to 32 Windsor Gardens, London?

It is not only his address and passport that evidence Paddington’s Britishness. This bear, who has captured the hearts of children and adults alike, has become as quintessential a British icon as Harry Potter and James Bond. This despite his Latino heritage, his status as an unaccompanied asylum-seeking bear, as well as his vast array of cultural faux pas. His earnestness, modesty, curiosity and unfailingly polite manners more than compensate, it seems, for his frequent dramatic mishaps and his uncertain immigration status. With a tip of his hat, he brings a trace of grace to every life he touches – from refuse collectors to antique collectors, from convicted criminals to window cleaners. Everywhere he goes chaos is met by kindness, compassion and positive transformation.

Paddington seems to typify the best of what Britain stands for. Everything about his story is a celebration of the power of British hospitality. His creator, Michael Bond CBE, was inspired by the incredible hospitality of the people of wartime Britain who gave sanctuary to evacuee children in the Blitz as well as the families that provided loving homes for Jewish children fleeing the Nazis via the Kinder Transport in 1939. He once told a reporter:

“We took in some Jewish children who often sat in front of the fire every evening, quietly crying because they had no idea what had happened to their parents, and neither did we at the time. It’s the reason why Paddington arrived with the label around his neck”.

Aunt Lucy in the first Paddington movie makes this connection most clearly. She reassures Paddington who is nervous about what awaits him at the end of his dangerous journey, saying:

“Long ago, people in England sent their children by train with labels around their necks, so they could be taken care of by complete strangers in the countryside where it was safe. They will not have forgotten how to treat strangers.”

Despite the xenophobia that frequently comes across in our media, there are many Great British people who haven’t forgotten how to treat strangers.

I wish I was as confident as Aunt Lucy about our country’s memory. When I watch the news and hear the anti-immigration rhetoric from some of our politicians, I fear that too many people in Great Britain have forgotten how to treat strangers.

The Bible recognises the enormous potential for amnesia on this issue. In its first five books there are no less than 36 reminders to welcome the stranger: hospitality was always supposed to be a priority of personal and national identity. Later on in the Bible we are shown what this looks like by Jesus, who welcomed the sort of strangers nobody else had time for – the poor, the downcast, the marginalised, the vulnerable, the sick, the homeless, the forgotten, the unpopular and the ethnically suspect. Finally, towards the end of the Bible there is another reminder in the book of Hebrews:

“Don’t forget to welcome strangers.”

Despite the xenophobia that frequently comes across in our media, there are many Great British people who haven’t forgotten how to treat strangers. Tens of thousands of families have made rooms available to Ukrainians fleeing war over the past three years. Churches and charities and communities and schools and workplaces seem to have a wonderful habit of embracing those who are different, or who need a helping hand.

This is what I call the Paddington Paradox: despite all the talk of tightening our borders, and reducing immigration, despite a summer of racist riots and yet another spike in hate crime cases, despite growing pressures on limited housing supply, and cost-of-living-related struggles, we love to think of our country as a hospitable one. We celebrate the welcoming of strangers – from the Kinder Transport to the Homes For Ukraine scheme. One of our most beloved national treasures is an asylum-seeker, albeit also a fictional bear.

This week is my foster son’s birthday and so I am taking him and some of his friends to the cinema to see Paddington in Peru. To my surprise nearly all his friends’ parents have asked to come too! We are all looking forward to seeing how Paddington and the Brown family fare as they make a perilous journey on a small boat into the Amazon rainforest, and are forced to rely, once again, on the kindness of strangers.

Review

Books

Culture

Ethics

Film & TV

8 November 2024

4 min read

Small Things Like These: putting the spotlight on backstage goodness

What it means for a film to be good.

Kevin Hargaden

Kevin is a social theologian studying ethics and economics.

The gaunt face of a dishevelled man stares into the distance

A ‘stellar’ Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong.

Lionsgate.

Small Things Like These is a novella by the Irish writer Claire Keegan. Published in 2021, it compresses a remarkable story into 128 pages. Acclaimed widely by critics and readers, it follows Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant living in the small County Wexford town of New Ross in 1986, as Christmas approaches. While delivering coal to the local convent, Bill makes an alarming discovery. Memories of his childhood begin to press in on him and he finds himself in an existential crisis.

Like her previous (very short) work, Foster, Small Things Like These is an understated book with a searing moral clarity. And just as Foster was adapted for the screen – in the astonishing Irish-language film The Quiet Girl – a movie version of Small Things Like These is now likely showing at a cinema near you.

The movie is built around a stellar performance from Cillian Murphy. It would be criminal if his name is not featured among the shortlists when awards season comes round. Many of the film’s most arresting scenes feature close-ups of his face as Bill wrestles with the implications of his discovery and the phantoms of his past. The effect is that the film serves as an almost literal portrait of what it means to be a decent person.

The story begins with Bill making a delivery to the convent. He sees a mother drop off her screaming daughter to the back door, where she is met and manhandled inside by a nun. The teenager protests passionately, but to no avail. The viewer understands that this girl has “fallen pregnant”, to use the Hiberno-English idiom that was so common in the twentieth century. She has been dispatched by her family to this institution to serve out the months of pregnancy and to remove any shame or taint from their reputation. Bill watches as the girl shouts out for her father, who is entirely absent.

And, after a tense interaction with an aggressive nun, he goes home to his five girls and his wife, clearly shaken.

A few days later, unable to sleep, haunted by memories of his own childhood being raised by a single mother, with an absent father, relying on the kindness of a wealthy local landowner, he begins his deliveries before dawn. As he deposits peat briquettes in the coal shed of the convent, he discovers a teenaged girl abandoned in the corner of the tiny, filthy room. She is in deep distress and Bill responds instinctively, wrapping his coat around her shoulders and bringing her inside to the convent.

While the existence of Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes were not a secret in twentieth century Ireland, the exact details of their operations were not widely understood. With these two encounters, so close together, and his own personal biography as the son of a woman who was subject to exactly the same marginalising dynamics, Bill can no longer be satisfied to turn a blind eye to the oppression and alienation endured by those sent for reformation.

It evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

The film gathers momentum as Bill is forced to confront the way his mother had been treated for “falling pregnant” and the reality experienced by girls the same age as his daughters who were in a similar situation. In the midst of his existential angst, he finds little solace in the no-nonsense pragmatism of his wife who reminds him “there are things you have to ignore” to get on in life. He is taken aside by his local publican, a woman who has similarly scrabbled up from humble origins to establish a thriving business and cautioned to not make trouble for the nuns since “their fingers are in every pie in the town”.

I will refrain from fully revealing every detail of the film’s plot. But this element of the screenplay – where Claire Keegan along with Enda Walsh – draw out the sense in which the oppressive ecclesial institutions were enabled and even sanctioned by the wider population is exceptionally well done. The film does not pull any punches on the evils that were committed in the name of churches in Ireland. Indeed, if anything, the presentation of the nuns veers too far towards caricatures of pure malevolence. But with surgical precision, it evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

And that is the lasting significance of this film. Toni Morrison has spoken about how it can seem harder to write about goodness than evil. “Evil has a blockbuster audience; goodness lurks backstage.” In Small Things Like This, Claire Keegan introduces us to a hardworking small business owner who treats his staff well, a loving father who seeks to care for his wife, a man who lives down a back street of a provincial town in an overlooked part of a small island on the periphery of Europe. And in this very definitively backstage context, he is presented as heroic in his pursuit of the Good.

We all fancy ourselves to be the one person who would stand up and oppose systems of oppression if we ever found ourselves enmeshed in them. Cillian Murphy’s depiction of Bill Furlong whispers to us that we likely are enmeshed in just that way and are choosing not to notice. Small Things Like These is a heavy film that somehow liberates. It reminds us that there is, within each of us, this appetite for seeing the Good and bring brave enough to do it. It is worth your time far more than any competing blockbuster.