It’s at the London Zoo that Winnie meets Christopher Robin. He went to Winnie and said in a serious way, ‘There’s somewhere we need to go.’ Winnie brushed the mud off her nose and nuzzled in close. His head argued one way and then the other. Winnie posed proudly with the men for pictures to send home to their families. It was winter when the order came: The time had come to fight. Should he bring Winnie to the front lines, possibly risking her life? Or should he find a new, safe place for her to live? Eventually Harry decides that Winnie should live in the London Zoo. When the order comes down the line for Harry’s regiment to move to the front and fight the war, Harry has a decision to make. She might have been the best navigator in the whole army. Even the Colonel agreed that Winnie was a Remarkable Bear. Harry taught her to stand up straight and hold her head high and turn this way and that, just so! Soon, she was assigned her own post. She stays with the men in Canada, sails with them across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, and lives with them until they go to the front. Initially, the soldiers have their reservations about the bear, but before too long Winnie becomes the mascot of the regiment. Then he said to himself, ‘There is something special about that Bear.’ He felt inside his pocket and said, ‘I shouldn’t.’ He paced back and forth and said, ‘I can’t.’ Then his heart made up his mind, and he walked up to the trapper and said, ‘I’ll give you twenty dollars for the bear.’ ‘That bear has lost its mother,’ he thought, ‘and that man must be the trapper who got her.’ It’s not every day that you see a bear cub at a train station. So begins his incredible journey with Winnie, who is named after Harry’s hometown of Winnipeg. While traveling across Canada with the other soldiers, he meets a trapper sitting with a cub - the trapper had killed the cub’s mother. The children’s book follows Mattick’s great-grandfather, Harry Colebourn, a veterinarian called to serve in World War I. Finding Winnie ( public library) tells the true story of the actual bear that inspired the character of Winnie the Pooh. “You have to go to them sometimes.” Now, thanks to author Lindsay Mattick and illustrator Sophie Blackall, we know where the inspiration for Milne’s historic story came from. Milne’s classic best-selling book Winnie-the-Pooh. “You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you,” said Winnie the Pooh in A.A. “Every so often, you become aware that a fictional story has an equally beautiful, real and true story behind it.”
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