When an 8ft bear escaped captivity on the Scottish island of Benbecula in 1980, it became worldwide news. For writer Bella Pollen, the events inspired her new novel

Hercules lived at the Big Bear Ranch near Perth with his devoted owners for 25 years until his death in 2000, was completely tame and was looked after by the Robins as though he was their only son.

That summer, the 8ft 4in bear was filming a commercial for Kleenex on Benbecula when he made his bid for freedom. Andy had taken him for a swim in the sea when his rope snapped. The Army and Navy were called out. His owners searched for him every day - Andy wore his wrestling pants and carried a bucket of fish - and accounts of the event by the islanders grew wilder as the weeks went on.

It was, unsurprisingly, the talk of the island, but for one teenager it was a story so magical that it stayed with her long into adulthood.

Bella Pollen was 19 when Hercules went missing. The Londoner was on holiday with her two younger siblings, in the family's small summer cottage on Benbecula, when the story broke. The three teenagers were used to finding their own fun on the island, but suddenly they were presented with a summer adventure to trounce anything Enid Blyton could dream up; a grizzly bear was missing and they would make it their mission to track him down.

They never did manage to capture Hercules, whose career included a role wrestling with Roger Moore in Octopussy and caddying for Bob Hope at Gleneagles. He was spotted and shot with a tranquilliser dart before being returned to his grateful owners. Thirty years on, however, 49-year-old Pollen's memories of that summer are vivid, and the events surrounding the bear's escape have formed the basis for her fifth novel, The Summer of the Bear.

Pollen's path to literary success has not been a straight one.

At just 18 she began a career as a fashion designer, gaining a rather unwelcome reputation as an outfitter to Sloane rangers in the Eighties after Princess Diana was seen in one of her creations.

She grew up in New York – where her father set up Sothebys – before returning to London in her teens. After her first marriage to Giacomo Algranti, an Italian antiques dealer, ended she became interested in writing. She contacted an old friend – publisher David MacMillan, the grandson of former prime minister Harold Macmillan – for advice, and later married him. Her earlier novels include All About Men and Midnight Cactus.

We meet in the airy North London townhouse she shares with Macmillan and their four children (the eldest two are from her first marriage) as she prepares to catch a flight to Colorado where she will spend a few months in the family's second home. She is chirpy despite a knee injury that's threatening to put a dampener on her trip, and slips into reminiscing about the summer of 1980 with ease.

"We had no idea that this was a story that was being carried across the world," she says with a laugh. "We were just tramping across beaches with picnics packed in Bakelite boxes looking for this bear.

"It was thrilling. We had maps, we would hide in dunes, we spent hours with the binoculars trained on the sea talking about where he might be. Lots of people would say they'd seen him, when of course they probably hadn't. We didn't know much about the backstory at all, other than that he belonged to a wrestler and that there was a degree of hysteria on the island that he would turn wild. And we were thinking, there really is very little to eat here, just crofters really... and us."

Pollen was brought up in New York, spending nine months of the year in the city that never sleeps before going straight to the sleepiest of Scottish islands for the summer. Simply finding the bear was not enough for the trio, however. Pollen and her siblings became consumed with figuring out why this otherwise tame and apparently content beast had escaped. Was he tired of being a wrestler, they wondered. Did he have a girlfriend on Skye? Was it a rite of passage for him?

"Increasingly we humanised him for our own amusement," she says. "But then one crofter who spotted him described this scene where he'd seen the bear and alerted Andy, who had stood there calling to his beloved bear and holding a bucket of food for him. And the bear ran off in the opposite direction. Probably in reality he was traumatised and confused, but the islander said to us at the time, 'it was as if he had unfinished business' and this idea sort of took root in my brain."

The Summer of the Bear is the story of a mother and her three children who retreat to the Outer Hebrides from London to try to make sense of the sudden death of the children's father, an incident which has been shrouded in secrecy and kept entirely from Jamie, the youngest of the three children, who struggles to understand where his father is and when he's coming back. Confused and uninformed, he comes to believe that this escaped bear is, somehow, his father.

"The book isn't really about the bear at all," says Pollen. "It's about what happens when people lose the ability to communicate, and the fallout from that very dangerous position. Everything in the book is about lack of communication. It takes place during the Cold War. A father dies and nobody knows why. Has he committed suicide? Has he been murdered? That information is kept from his family, and in turn, the mother keeps the details of his death from her children.

"The culture of the day was that there was a much greater divide between children and their parents than there is now. I tell my children pretty much everything, and I don't keep information from them on the grounds that it might upset them. When I was growing up people did. I have seen the effect of non–communication in families and I think it's the most damaging thing in the world. And in all this I loved the idea that there was this bear that personified anything that anybody wanted it to personify. The islanders thought it was a sort of creature from the devil and everybody had a different idea of who it was, and I thought it was a lovely idea that it would come to be emblematic of this child's need to see his dead father."

The story of Jamie and siblings Georgie and Alba as they struggle to understand their father's death, while their mother puts on a rather perversely brave face and tries to carry on as normal, is heartbreaking.

The sadness, however, is interspersed with a knowing humour as Pollen captures – as only someone who has spent a lot of time in the Outer Hebrides can – the subtle witticisms of the islanders as they bend and twist the story of the bear until it takes on a sort of mythical status.

All the while, as Jamie, his sisters and the islanders search for the bear, they are unaware that he is watching them too. He sees their mother Letty crying in the sand dunes when they're not around. He observes them as they stand on a cliff top, scanning the seas for him. He whispers to Jamie over the wind, which in turn whispers back. He is a magical bear. He ponders the mysticism of the island. He knows what it is to be loved and to love in return.

Pollen finds very human reasons to explain his behaviour. She became obsessed with the "why?" of Hercules's escape as a young woman, and as an author, tries to answer that question, choosing to portray a beast whose instincts to love, to care, to rescue are stronger than any primal instinct to feed or to kill. She humanised him as a teen, and she does so again in the telling of this story.

When Hercules escaped, his killer instinct didn't kick in. He didn't eat for a month, lost half his body weight and nearly died of starvation. He may have been raised in captivity, but the will to survive should be so strong that it overrides all others, even though he had never killed before. Yet he simply didn't revert to the habits of the wild, and this fascinates Pollen. Indeed, so accustomed was Hercules to eating roast dinners at the Robins' dining table that he was as repulsed by raw meat as any human would be. He had a particular fondness for Marks & Spencer prawn cocktail sandwiches, and tuna mayo.

On one occasion, he was filming with David Bellamy and the broadcaster wanted Hercules to kill and eat a fish. Andy insisted he wouldn't do it, and after a few attempts was proven right. A runner was sent to the local shop for a tub of tuna mayonnaise, which was duly stuffed into the carcass of a salmon. It was only then that Hercules showed any interest in the fish. And the most aggressive he ever got was the occasion when he ate the windscreen wipers on a car belonging to an uppity health and safety officer.

"The more I ran with this idea that the bear could be half-human, the more I wondered how close to reality that might be," says Pollen.

"It's such a far–fetched idea, and yet the whole story of Hercules seemed to lend itself to that in the first place. So I went to talk to the Robins to find out what it was that made this bear so completely unique and how they raised him and kept him on that borderline between bear and human. They told me how they behaved towards this bear as if he were human, they trusted him as a human, and it all really lent itself to this idea that I created in fiction."

It wasn't just the fairy tale story of the bear that captivated the young Bella Pollen, but the mystique of the island. "My mother once said to me that there's a magic on the island but you can't take it with you," she says. "You have to look for the magic. It's not immediately apparent at all. If you look at those islands from a cosmetic point of view, they're not very beautiful, so it was really hard to explain the magic of the island, even in fiction because it does truly belong there.

"I suppose it's just an incredibly elemental place. If you're unhappy up there, you're miserable. If you're happy, you're ecstatic. Every emotion you have is to the power of ten. And so the things that happened up there I have remembered all my life. There's this incredibly strong feeling of community, a sense of belonging and a lack of interest in the rest of the world, a lack of need for the rest of the world which I think is unique."

Pollen has chased that solitude ever since. She says she simply doesn't "get" the English countryside. She likes big storms and bleak skies, open spaces and cruel landscapes. She feels a sense of belonging in the wildness of the Outer Hebrides. Her home in Colorado is an attempt to merge her memories of the isolation of those Scottish islands with her childhood in America.

As she heads off to Canada, she is considering the idea of writing a film version of The Summer of the Bear, since the story refuses to leave her. She travelled to the Outer Hebrides to research the book, meeting old friends to hear their memories of that summer in 1980, but chose not to write in the draughty cottage where she spent so many holidays. She may have managed it from London, but can she really write about the Outer Hebrides from as far away as Colorado?

"Ah, it's not so far," she says. "I get that same wonderful sense of isolation there as I do in Scotland. Those dark skies, the big landscapes, the funny little local community. And of course," she adds with a laugh, "there are bears there too." At just 18 she began a career as a fashion designer, gaining a rather unwelcome reputation as an outfitter to Sloane rangers in the Eighties after Princess Diana was seen in one of her creations. She grew up in New York - where her father set up Sothebys - before returning to London in her teens. After her first marriage to Giacomo Algranti, an Italian antiques dealer, ended she became interested in writing. She contacted an old friend - publisher David MacMillan, the grandson of former prime minister Harold Macmillan - for advice, and later married him. Her earlier novels include All About Men and Midnight Cactus.

We meet in the airy North London townhouse she shares with Macmillan and their four children (the eldest two are from her first marriage) as she prepares to catch a flight to Colorado where she will spend a few months in the family's second home. She is chirpy despite a knee injury that's threatening to put a dampener on her trip, and slips into reminiscing about the summer of 1980 with ease.

"We had no idea that this was a story that was being carried across the world," she says with a laugh. "We were just tramping across beaches with picnics packed in Bakelite boxes looking for this bear.

"It was thrilling. We had maps, we would hide in dunes, we spent hours with the binoculars trained on the sea talking about where he might be. Lots of people would say they'd seen him, when of course they probably hadn't. We didn't know much about the backstory at all, other than that he belonged to a wrestler and that there was a degree of hysteria on the island that he would turn wild. And we were thinking, there really is very little to eat here, just crofters really... and us."

Pollen was brought up in New York, spending nine months of the year in the city that never sleeps before going straight to the sleepiest of Scottish islands for the summer. Simply finding the bear was not enough for the trio, however. Pollen and her siblings became consumed with figuring out why this otherwise tame and apparently content beast had escaped. Was he tired of being a wrestler, they wondered. Did he have a girlfriend on Skye? Was it a rite of passage for him?

"Increasingly we humanised him for our own amusement," she says. "But then one crofter who spotted him described this scene where he'd seen the bear and alerted Andy, who had stood there calling to his beloved bear and holding a bucket of food for him. And the bear ran off in the opposite direction. Probably in reality he was traumatised and confused, but the islander said to us at the time, 'it was as if he had unfinished business' and this idea sort of took root in my brain."

The Summer of the Bear is the story of a mother and her three children who retreat to the Outer Hebrides from London to try to make sense of the sudden death of the children's father, an incident which has been shrouded in secrecy and kept entirely from Jamie, the youngest of the three children, who struggles to understand where his father is and when he's coming back. Confused and uninformed, he comes to believe that this escaped bear is, somehow, his father.

"The book isn't really about the bear at all," says Pollen. "It's about what happens when people lose the ability to communicate, and the fallout from that very dangerous position. Everything in the book is about lack of communication. It takes place during the Cold War. A father dies and nobody knows why. Has he committed suicide? Has he been murdered? That information is kept from his family, and in turn, the mother keeps the details of his death from her children.

"The culture of the day was that there was a much greater divide between children and their parents than there is now. I tell my children pretty much everything, and I don't keep information from them on the grounds that it might upset them. When I was growing up people did. I have seen the effect of non-communication in families and I think it's the most damaging thing in the world. And in all this I loved the idea that there was this bear that personified anything that anybody wanted it to personify. The islanders thought it was a sort of creature from the devil and everybody had a different idea of who it was, and I thought it was a lovely idea that it would come to be emblematic of this child's need to see his dead father."

The story of Jamie and siblings Georgie and Alba as they struggle to understand their father's death, while their mother puts on a rather perversely brave face and tries to carry on as normal, is heartbreaking.

The sadness, however, is interspersed with a knowing humour as Pollen captures - as only someone who has spent a lot of time in the Outer Hebrides can - the subtle witticisms of the islanders as they bend and twist the story of the bear until it takes on a sort of mythical status.

All the while, as Jamie, his sisters and the islanders search for the bear, they are unaware that he is watching them too. He sees their mother Letty crying in the sand dunes when they're not around. He observes them as they stand on a cliff top, scanning the seas for him. He whispers to Jamie over the wind, which in turn whispers back. He is a magical bear. He ponders the mysticism of the island. He knows what it is to be loved and to love in return.

Pollen finds very human reasons to explain his behaviour. She became obsessed with the "why?" of Hercules's escape as a young woman, and as an author, tries to answer that question, choosing to portray a beast whose instincts to love, to care, to rescue are stronger than any primal instinct to feed or to kill. She humanised him as a teen, and she does so again in the telling of this story.

When Hercules escaped, his killer instinct didn't kick in. He didn't eat for a month, lost half his body weight and nearly died of starvation. He may have been raised in captivity, but the will to survive should be so strong that it overrides all others, even though he had never killed before. Yet he simply didn't revert to the habits of the wild, and this fascinates Pollen. Indeed, so accustomed was Hercules to eating roast dinners at the Robins' dining table that he was as repulsed by raw meat as any human would be. He had a particular fondness for Marks & Spencer prawn cocktail sandwiches, and tuna mayo.

On one occasion, he was filming with David Bellamy and the broadcaster wanted Hercules to kill and eat a fish. Andy insisted he wouldn't do it, and after a few attempts was proven right. A runner was sent to the local shop for a tub of tuna mayonnaise, which was duly stuffed into the carcass of a salmon. It was only then that Hercules showed any interest in the fish. And the most aggressive he ever got was the occasion when he ate the windscreen wipers on a car belonging to an uppity health and safety officer.

"The more I ran with this idea that the bear could be half-human, the more I wondered how close to reality that might be," says Pollen.

"It's such a far-fetched idea, and yet the whole story of Hercules seemed to lend itself to that in the first place. So I went to talk to the Robins to find out what it was that made this bear so completely unique and how they raised him and kept him on that borderline between bear and human. They told me how they behaved towards this bear as if he were human, they trusted him as a human, and it all really lent itself to this idea that I created in fiction."

It wasn't just the fairy tale story of the bear that captivated the young Bella Pollen, but the mystique of the island. "My mother once said to me that there's a magic on the island but you can't take it with you," she says. "You have to look for the magic. It's not immediately apparent at all. If you look at those islands from a cosmetic point of view, they're not very beautiful, so it was really hard to explain the magic of the island, even in fiction because it does truly belong there.

"I suppose it's just an incredibly elemental place. If you're unhappy up there, you're miserable. If you're happy, you're ecstatic. Every emotion you have is to the power of ten. And so the things that happened up there I have remembered all my life. There's this incredibly strong feeling of community, a sense of belonging and a lack of interest in the rest of the world, a lack of need for the rest of the world which I think is unique."

Pollen has chased that solitude ever since. She says she simply doesn't "get" the English countryside. She likes big storms and bleak skies, open spaces and cruel landscapes. She feels a sense of belonging in the wildness of the Outer Hebrides. Her home in Colorado is an attempt to merge her memories of the isolation of those Scottish islands with her childhood in America.

As she heads off to Canada, she is considering the idea of writing a film version of The Summer of the Bear, since the story refuses to leave her. She travelled to the Outer Hebrides to research the book, meeting old friends to hear their memories of that summer in 1980, but chose not to write in the draughty cottage where she spent so many holidays. She may have managed it from London, but can she really write about the Outer Hebrides from as far away as Colorado?

"Ah, it's not so far," she says. "I get that same wonderful sense of isolation there as I do in Scotland. Those dark skies, the big landscapes, the funny little local community. And of course," she adds with a laugh, "there are bears there too."

The Summer of the Bear by Bella Pollen is out now, published by Mantle at 12.99.

When an 8ft bear escaped captivity on a small Scottish island in 1980, it became worldwide news. For writer Bella Pollen, the events of that summer inspired a novel based on an ENCHANTING experience she would never forget

This article was first published in The Scotsman on Saturday, August 28