The first thing that one needs to know about bears; the cohort that share a bed, and not the ones that do unspeakable things in the woods; is that they have absolutely no concept of time. Uncle Muff looks substantially the same today as he did when the miner’s widow made him for me forty seven years ago: a little more Fred Bear than he was. Coming at the end of the Christmas run, Mrs Crooks had more or less used up her resources, hence he seemed part koala, and some of his stitching was unorthodox. Muff cost a pound, a fact that he has always been keen to share, him regarding this sum of money as a sign of how much he was, and always has been, valued. Inflation is another concept that bears are unfamiliar with.
To assert his authority, if he suspected mockery, he was quick to give a ‘clip’ to offenders of either gender. In his own mind, he was a grizzly, and we said nothing to disillusion him. Muff has always been the authority figure in ‘The Bed;’ that kingdom that bears regard as their own, and I am merely allowed to share.
The youngest member of the team (I’m afraid I do not know the communal term for a gathering of bears,) is Scruffi. He was spotted perched, completely alone, on a metallic shelf in a Wigan department store, looking sad and rather lost. I pointed him out, and to cut a long story short, could not go home without him. His label said ‘Scruffy Bear,’ but he never spells it that way, in much the same way that I am always referred to as ‘Dab’ on birthday cards, and he always refers to himself as ‘A Mistri Hadmyra’ on the Valentine’s cards that he sends to his favourite ladies. He has always been a lady’s man/bear. Sometimes, ‘A Hanonimus Hadmyra.’
At first, the smaller, more established bears, did not know what to make of this overwhelmingly gregarious, furry giant, but they soon realised that he was good natured, and his overwhelming shows of affection were meant in a fraternal way.
Scruffy Bear is a collector of waifs and strays, one of the most notable being Alfie the Inebriate Elf. This tiny white chap came wearing the uniform of one of Santa’s elves, complete with cap and scarf, but he was as unlike the commonly depicted elves on Santa’s sleigh, as anyone I have ever seen. To my mind, he was a small white bear whose liking for sherry made him more of a liability than a help, when it came to the distribution of presents to the wider population.
It is my theory – and it is only a theory, as I would not wish to malign Santa – that Alfie was abandoned in our bedroom, in the full knowledge that Scruffy would insist on adopting him. Many is the Christmas past, that I have found an empty sherry bottle under the tree, and even Scruffy wouldn’t like to smell Alfie’s breath.
In fact, one year, Alfie almost became a casualty of Christmas. Whether he was in fact, inebriated, I do not know, but Scruffy insisted on bringing him into the kitchen to see a chicken being prepared for the oven, and he fell directly into the washed and salted cavity. I scrambled to extricate him, but the brine and other unmentionables had quickly taken their toll on his tiny, fragile body, and his very fabric began to unravel before my eyes.
With head and limbs parting company with his body, and eyes becoming wilder by the second, it looked, for all the world, way beyond my ability to salvage him. The prospect of losing his inebriate friend made Scruffy turn his eyes to me. What could I do. I can refuse him nothing.
The first job was to wash the assorted fragments. To ensure that all of Alfie’s components remained roughly together, they were placed inside a sock which was knotted at the point of ingress. Once cleaned, the job of reassembly could begin. The eyes were reinstated by passing a thread from the back of the head to the front, threading the needle through the eye, ( as opposed to threading something through the eye of the needle) passing the thread back through the head from front to back, and securing with a knot. My skills as a seamstress are not great. It is not the neatest job in the world, but Scruffi was pleased to see his pal staring back at him.
Reattaching limbs proved more troublesome. The cotton that I was using seemed far too flimsy to hold limbs and torso together for long, and so I was forced to think more creatively. A much stronger, and more flexible alternative suggested itself when I happened upon a spool of sheering elastic, commonly used to keep the socks of children from gathering at the ankles. It seemed a great success at the time. He referred to himself as ‘Spring-Heeled Jack,’ and took pride in his athleticism. Sadly, this freedom was short lived.
Anyone who knows elastic, will have found to their cost, that it perishes; socks descend to ankles; knickers become worryingly unstable; and so it is with the limbs of small bears. Before long, the once prehensile limbs, became loose and haphazard. We are both building up the courage to try again.
Perhaps the quietest and most well behaved of all the bears is Lovely, named because he is precisely that: lovely inside and out, well behaved, and not a bit of trouble. I think that is maybe why he appears far less often in this story than perhaps he should. He is beautiful, wonderfully articulated, and a soft golden colour. The kind of bear that every mum wishes her daughter would bring home to meet the family. Isn’t it strange that the least troublesome of bears also seems to be the least remarkable.
Bear maintenance is an ongoing problem, and can be stressful. How to produce a new nose without losing the character of a much loved friend, or replace the pads on worn paws, and what with? It all takes a great deal of consideration, but more of that later. For now, I will concentrate on the acquisition of my magnificent seven.
Mrs Pennington, Penny to her friends, was Headmistress of the school where Susan taught a class of seven-year-old children. The school was the hub of the village, and for the summer fete, it was ’all hands to the pumps.’ Penny expected all parents and the partners of her staff members to volunteer their services for the good of the community. I already knew Mr. Turner, as he and I had been called upon many times to join guided walks in the Lake District, but today I was to meet Mrs. Turner for the first time.
Mrs. Turner was not only a remarkable seamstress, but a Winnie-the-Poo fan; and not only did she love to read the stories to her children, but she developed a pattern for creating bears in his likeness. She created a whole stall full of Poo bears to be raffled off at the school fete. Knowing that bears come to life in my hands, Penny insisted that I was to run the stall.
All was going well, until a particular bear caught my eye, but having said that, I think that it was perhaps a mutual affinity. Every time someone came to the stall with the intention of winning a bear, I found myself placing this particular bear in an obscure position so that the chances of us becoming parted were diminished. This rather unethical ruse worked for most of the afternoon, until my fiend was the only bear left. Mrs. Turner was on hand when the last ticket was drawn, and it was a winning ticket.
She could see how upset I was. Some little kid with a snotty nose, had just become the custodian of a bear that I had grown fond of; developed an affinity for. But there was nothing that I could do about it. It appeared that a major selling point for this fund-raising stall, was a growing competition to win the bear that I coveted. It made a lot of money for school funds, but at my emotional expense.
It was perhaps a week later when I turned up to collect Susan from school. Penny took me aside and thanked me for my help with the fund-raiser, and then presented me with a yellow bear that Mrs. Turner had hand-made especially for me. It never even struck me that he was made in the likeness of Winnie-the-Poo: he was, and always will be, Custard, and he is much loved. Whenever the smaller, and more boisterous bears get into trouble with Uncle Muff, they always scurry to Uncle Custard because they know that he will mediate on their behalf. He cannot protect them from ‘The Hard Stare,’ be he has saved them from many a clip.
The two reprobates in question came within Uncle Muff’s jurisdiction in roughly the same way; included as decoration within the packaging of other purchases. I have not seen the practice for some years now, but everything from chocolates to fancy stationary, used to come in ‘window packaging’ with something small and furry gazing out from behind cellophane. I have to take sole blame for the first of these purchases. I was entering a shopping arcade, when I happened to glance into a shop window. Although this was primarily a chemist’s shop, it had packaged presents in the window, as Christmas was approaching, and a pained face caught my eye. A small brown bear was giving me that pleading look that he has become renowned for, imploring me to rescue him from his confinement. Being a complete soft touch where bears are concerned, I entered the shop and made the purchase.
The actual present was so unmemorable that neither I nor Susan can recall what it was, but our lives were to change forever with the introduction of the ‘free gift’ into the bed. His Sunday name is Marmalade, but his behaviour marked him out as a ‘Pookie.’ This is one of Scruffie’s terms to describe someone with an impish nature, guaranteed to lead others into trouble, and invoke a degree of rebellious behaviour in even the meekest of individuals.
In other words, Pook leads his little pink friend astray. The pink friend in question is called Limpy.
I have a feeling that this particular gift was edible. It may even have been an Easter Egg. This time, the transparent packaging constrained a small pink chap, visible only from the waist up. Whether this was done accidentally, or with the intention of misleading the purchasing public, I do not know, but when the packaging was removed, the tiny bear had a deformed leg.
With a seam severely twisted at the knee, he limped badly. With all of the spontaneity that we have come to expect from, and to love him for, Scruffi said, “We can call him Limpi,” and Limpy he has been called ever since, the spelling being fairly arbitrary. This small pink chap had no self-confidence whatsoever, and was very aware of his disability. For some reason, he thought that we would love him less than the others, but thank goodness for Scruffi.
Within no time at all, the furry giant, that the pink chap was so wary of at first, and who showed absolutely no prejudice at all, made Limpy realise that in no way did his disability define him. Anything but, and as his confidence grew, so did the influence of the Pooky man.
I have never known a bear who could disarrange his bow so frequently. This is one reprobate bear we are talking about; disrespectful, untidy, and always ready to share the blame for some misdemeanour or other, with the pink man.
These seven have allowed me to share their bed for a good number of years now. Other companions have come and gone, but we eight have been inseparable. The only thing that has ever threatened the stability of our relationship, can only be described as ‘wear and tear.’ On several occasions, it is me that has had to go into hospital to be mended, and the one brave bear never to forsake me, has been Uncle Muff. No matter how incapacitated I was, or what instrument of torture I had been strapped to, Uncle Muff has always been at my side. But it has often worked the other way.
The outer fur from which Muff is constructed, was not of the finest quality. He must never be allowed to know this, but pieces of his fur were partially cut through, and had all the hallmarks of what a seamstress might call ‘off cuts.’ Over the years, some of these weak spots have threatened to rip, allowing stuffing to escape. It has fallen to me to repair such weak spots before they could become gaping holes, hence Uncle Muff has several rows of neat brown stitches. He is often heard lecturing the little ones: “Seven scars maketh the man.” I think he may have picked up that piece of wisdom from my father; a veteran of the wars, and himself no stranger to stitches.
As for the rest of the team, all I can say is, thank goodness for superglue. Custard was the first to show wear on his nose. I have to take a good deal of the blame, but he is just so cuddly that it is hard to resist hugging him, and his nose bore the brunt of my affectionate outpourings.
After considering the situation for a while, I decided to amputate the damaged nose and stitch the wound that it’s removal left. He was very brave. Using the old nose as a template, I created an identical copy out of black felt. To instate the new nose, I was faced with two possibilities: firstly, I could attempt to stitch it on using a kind of clumsy blanket stitch, or I could attempt to glue it in place.
I opted for the latter, me being particularly inept with a needle, especially on the face of a beloved bear. I was amazed at how well my plastic surgery succeeded. Even after several intervening years, Mrs. Turner herself would never know what I had done. A tip to all you cosmetic surgeons out there, there is more that one way to reinstate a threadbare nose.
My other piece of cosmetic surgery, was on the pads of Limpy’s paws. Even though his legs leave a little to be desired, scruffy would be the first to point out that the pink chap is a man with ‘big arms.’ Giving all those hugs left his pads threadbare. I considered both of the options that I considered for Custard’s nose, and in the end plumped for both. Using his worn paws as a template, I made new ones out of pink felt. So that they didn’t drift about whilst I was trying to sew them, I used superglue to attach them, and then blanket stitching around the edges to give him a neat appearance. Again, no complaints so far, but the felt is not as hard-wearing as we had hoped.
This concludes my bibliography of the main bed-dwellers, but I cannot really end this chapter without mentioning some of the waifs and strays that Scruffy has surrounded himself with over the years, or explaining some of his other idiosyncrasies. To start with spelling: he is always convinced that his version is correct. For example, Dad’s (Dab’s) cardigan, is always referred to as ‘Carbi.’ Upper case letters are fine, but ‘a’ is frequently inverted, and the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’ are interchangeable, hence the tiny man who turned up one Christmas, wearing a woolly hat and a cardigan, will always be ‘Bob Carbi.’
Finally, my friend Tess was always saying that I should get a dog for company. I itch at the very thought, and the very mention of ‘poo,’ other than the yellow variety, turns my stomach. To create a happy medium, she purchased a small stuffed toy dog to keep me company. I had it in my possession for less than a minute, before Scruffi had commandeered him, and called him Nipper. He now sleeps on the small pillow known as the ‘King’s Cush,’ well within stroking distance. Incidentally The King’s Cushion was part of a game that Scruffy invented, not that there was ever any doubt that he would be king of the castle, and Pook and Limp would be the dirty rascals.
Lucia.
The Yorkshire Poet & Friends 