Sonning Finds a Home

This is Polar's story about how I met her and Grizzly.  It was first published here:

Sonning - at Sonning

He decided that, although he was hanging in a tree and swaying backwards and forwards in the breeze, he probably wasn’t a leaf.  He could see that he had furry paws and a furry tummy.  He could just about focus his eyes close enough to it to see that he had a furry nose too.  He realised that he must be an animal of some sort. 

He was, in fact, a small beige bear.  He was wearing a blue and white striped jersey and it was this that held him in the tree.  A long twig was threaded through the back of it and the small bear was suspended underneath.  The small bear couldn’t remember how he came to be in the tree.  He thought someone, or something, must have put him there, but he had no idea why.  He wondered if one of the big birds with big, sharp beaks, nasty claws and forked tails had carried him up there, to have for dinner later.  The bear had seen them catch other furry animals out in the fields, which were not much smaller than he was. 

In front of his tree was a little patch of green grass and, in front of that, there was a big, shiny river.  The small bear watched as a big white bird which had been sailing along on the water started to flap its wings, then to run along the surface of the river and finally to lift into the sky.  It flew over his tree and its wings made a funny whistling noise as they swept through the air.  The bear had seen it eating grass and river weeds so he didn’t think it ate small bears.  He waved at it, hoping it would rescue him before the forked-tailed birds saw him, but it didn’t seem to see him.

‘Oh dear!’ said the bear.

He wondered if the river might have put him in the tree during a flood, but he couldn’t remember being carried along in the water and although he was a little bit damp, he thought he would be wetter if he had been swimming for his life.  There were people out on the river but they weren’t swimming.  They were in boats.  Some of the boats were very big with lots of people on them, being noisy.  Some were very small and fast, moving over the surface of the river like pond-skater insects, with the people in them pulling long wooden sticks backwards and forwards.  Some were sleek, white boats with smartly-dressed people on them, laughing loudly.  Some were long, thin boats which sat low in the water.  They were brightly-painted in all sorts of cheerful colours and some even had flowers or vegetables on the roof.  One of these boats was coming close to his tree.  It was blue with a cream-coloured roof and there were red flowers growing in pots on the roof and painted on the side.  A man jumped off it, holding rope.  The boat stopped moving and another person got off.  The small bear waved at them but they didn’t see him.  They were too busy knocking metal sticks into the grass with hammers.

‘On dear!’ he said again.

At least with people this close to his tree, the small bear thought, the fierce birds would stay away.  There were some more boats along the bank, also tied by ropes to metal sticks.  The small bear realised that the sticks stopped the boats from drifting away with the current.  The people came and went from the boats, going over to talk to each other and having picnics on the grassy bank.  The people from the blue boat stayed close by it all afternoon, cleaning it and watering the plants on the roof.

‘I wonder if they’ll stay here for ever?’ the bear thought.  Even if they didn’t see him in his tree, they would keep him safe just by being there.

They stayed all night.  When it started to get dark, the people went inside their boats and lights came on in the windows.  The small bear though it looked very cosy inside the little blue boat.  Even when the lights went out, he could still see the shape of the boat, dark against the silvery sheen of the river under the stars.  The small bear fell asleep, still swaying gently in the breeze that rocked his branch.  He started dreaming about travelling down the river on the little blue boat. 

Very suddenly, he woke up.

‘What’s this?’ said a voice, close to his face.

The small bear opened his eyes in panic.  Something had seized hold of him round the middle.  There were two big green eyes staring at him, either side of what he thought was a huge beak. 

‘Oh no!  One of the big birds with the forked tails has got me!’ he thought. 

Then he saw that the beak was actually a human nose and the eyes were human eyes, and he wasn’t being held in a claw but a large, tanned hand.  Another large hand was unthreading his jersey from the tree.

‘There’s a teddy bear in this elderberry bush!’ said the person holding him, who he now recognised as one of the blue boat’s people.  She was tall enough to reach him easily and was talking to the man who had jumped off with the rope.

‘A what, love?’ he said.

‘A teddy bear!’  The small bear was held out for the man, who wasn’t quite so tall, to see.

‘What a dear little chap!’ he said.  ‘I wonder how he got up there?’

‘I expect a child dropped him and someone else found him.  They must have put him up there for safe keeping, in case the owners came back to look for him.’  The tall lady frowned.  ‘Perhaps we should leave him there?’

‘No!  Don’t leave me!’ said the bear, but the people didn’t seem to hear him.

‘He’s a bit soggy,’ said the man, poking the bear’s tummy.  ‘He must have been there for several days as it hasn’t rained recently.  If someone was going to come back for him, I think they would have done so by now.’

‘Then we’ll take him with us!’ said the tall woman.  She smiled at the small bear and carried him onto the blue boat, which was making a sort of rumbling noise.  There was a big red and white ring on the roof.  She sat the small bear in it while she and the man hit the metal sticks on their sides with a hammer and pulled them out of the ground, keeping hold of the ropes.  The man threw his rope onto the front of the boat and got onto the back with his metal stick, the woman got on with her metal stick in one hand and the rope coiled up in the other, then the man pushed a little lever, which changed the boat’s rumbling noise so it was higher and a little louder.

The boat started to move away from the grassy bank.

‘Fancy that being Yuri Geller’s mansion!’ said the woman, pointing back at a huge house behind a high fence, a little way from the bear’s tree.

‘And the gardener said George Clooney and Theresa May have houses here too,’ the man said.  ‘You don’t think this little fellow belonged to anyone famous, do you?’

The small bear had no idea who any of these people were or what famous meant.   

‘He’s part of Uppie’s crew now,’ said the woman.

The small bear guessed that 'Uppie' must be their nickname for the boat.  He had read the words Uplander II and Kidsgrove on its side and thought Uplander II must be the boat’s name. 

‘What are we going to call him?’ asked the man, looking at the little bear.

The woman thought for a moment.  ‘I think we ought to apply the Michael Bond principle for naming lost bears,’ she said seriously.  ‘Paddington Bear was called Paddington because he was found at Paddington Station.  According to that rule, this little bear should be called Sonning, because that’s where we've found him.’     

The small bear couldn’t remember if he’d ever had any other name but he thought Sonning sounded quite dignified.  He sat up a little bit straighter in the big red and white ring and looked around him.  The boat was right out in the middle of the river now, passing all sorts of swimming birds, big and small, and was heading downstream with the current.  The Thames twisted and turned, glinting in the summer sunshine.  The small bear felt his fur starting to dry as the day grew warmer.

Sonning didn’t know what was around the next bend.  He didn’t know the names of the boat people or where they came from or were going to.  However, they were clearly on an adventure of some sort – boat journeys are always adventures - and he was going with them!