Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers

by Valerie Lawson

  In the grand house Cintra, at Bowen Hills in Brisbane, he lived in style with his wife and seven daughters, touring his country properties and tending his city businesses, which included, from 1876, his directorship of the Queensland National Bank.11 This was no ordinary bank; it was more like a cross between the Bank of England and the opulent palace of a London bank which appeared in the film version of Mary Poppins. The Queensland National Bank was run by Edward Drury, an associate of Sir Thomas McIlwraith, who became Queensland premier in 1879. As premier, he transferred the government’s account to the Queensland National Bank.

  The Queensland National Bank was more than just the government banker. While it raised money for Queensland in London, it was also a plaything—a money box—for the businesses of government members. Its shareholders included eighteen members of the Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly. In 1891 the Queensland government and the Bank of England fell out with one another over a loan the government tried to raise in London. The tension undermined London’s confidence in both the government and the Queensland National Bank, which had to be propped up with government deposits. English investors in the bank started to withdraw their deposits and the bank’s shares fell well below par.

  As a director of the bank, Boyd was deeply involved in the crisis. He and his fellow directors took out an account to purchase the bank’s own shares. Over the years, Boyd had invested much of his own inheritance and much of his niece Margaret’s in bank shares and deposits. In May 1893, the bank closed its doors while it tried to restructure. It reopened for business late the same year, but its most damaging secrets were not revealed until three years later when the general manager died, and an investigation revealed that the bank was insolvent. By 1898, Morehead and other directors of the bank were cleared of charges of negligence. The bank was restructured again but many depositors were unable to withdraw their funds for years.

  For the Morehead clan, it had all been too close a call for comfort. Lyndon later told a trusted friend that her mother’s uncle invested his money and Margaret’s without due care, and so by the time her mother was married, she had very little of her own inheritance left.12

  Margaret had grown into a timid, pretty woman in her early twenties when she met Travers Robert Goff in Sydney, before he took up his banking job. He must have seemed safe, steady—reliable enough to provide an income for life. Not only that, he would have appeared sophisticated, a traveler who told her tales of Ceylon and how he dressed every night for dinner, a sahib with servants around him. From Queensland, he wooed her with witty, lighthearted letters, many written in simple verse. They chose to marry in Boyd Morehead’s hometown, Brisbane, on November 9, 1898, in the pretty Anglican Church of All Saints. Boyd gave the bride away.

  Exactly nine months later, on August 9, 1899, Helen Lyndon Goff was born in Maryborough, in the residence attached to the AJS Bank. She was named Helen after both her maternal great-grandmother and her great aunt. But no one ever called her Helen, preferring Lyndon, an Irish name much used in her father’s family for boys and girls alike. It was shortened to Lindy or Ginty. It pleased her that the name was Gaelic, meaning water and stone.13

  Lyndon was never, in her own mind, an Australian, always an Irishwoman with a Scots mother. In her middle age, she found something slightly shameful about being born in Australia, explaining that her birth there came about “almost by chance.” She regarded Australia as the “southern wild” and herself as a woman displaced. In a speech to the U.S. Library of Congress in the 1960s, Lyndon told the audience: “You remember [William] Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’?…my mother bore me in the southern wild….In that sense I was a little black boy too, born in the subtropics.”14

  From this sense of misplaced birth, Lyndon felt a compulsion to travel away from the southern sun to the mists of Europe. That drive was fueled by her father’s romantic ideas of Ireland. But, like every child, her personality was set long before she made her escape in her twenties. Lyndon was formed by a combination of three adults—her parents and her Great Aunt Ellie—and by the interconnections of those three. None of the three was direct with her, none supported and nurtured her wholeheartedly.

  Lyndon made the first journey in her lifetime of restless journeys as a baby in her mother’s arms. They traveled by train from Maryborough to Sydney, where Lyndon first encountered her Great Aunt Ellie. In the next decade Ellie was to represent a fixed, reliable support for Lyndon, whose father was the first of several men whose drinking almost ruined her life. Lyndon later believed that her mother realized early in her marriage that Travers Goff drank far too much. The habit of “deep drinking” he had learned in Ceylon increased over the years and “cast such a shadow on our lives.”15

  In 1900, with his wife and baby tucked away at Aunt Ellie’s, Travers Goff became sentimental for his courting days. In his affectionate letters sent to Margaret in Sydney, he wanted to take “a peep at you both and the aunts and Emily and Eliza [the maids] fussing over her. Fancy a baby being at No. 2 Albert Street, what a difference that must make! I am delighted the aunts have taken to the wee one. Mrs. Goff, your offspring does you proud. Good old Margaret, pat yourself on the back for me. What do they call her, Baby or Lyndon? It was good of the aunt to give you such an expensive frock. You may give her my love if you like. Poor you having your hair done up, but as you say, it’s best to please the Aunt.”16

  Goff clearly deferred to “the Aunt” who had always provided money and a second home to his wife and daughter. From her earliest years, Lyndon was often dispatched, alone, to Aunt Ellie or to another relative when either her mother or father went away. The separations helped create in Lyndon a form of self-sufficiency and stimulated her idiosyncratic form of fantasy life. Once, when Margaret left home for a long holiday, her father wrote to his wife of Lyndon’s “great game.” From the age of four, she pretended to be one of the household’s hens, sitting on her eggs and brooding. These birds were not ordinary fowls, but friends of the family, named after the Goffs’ neighbors and friends, Mrs. McKenzie, for example, or Mrs. Starke. Goff wrote, “It starts when she wakes in the morning, goes on til it’s time for me to go to the office, and recommences as soon as I get home again and lasts til bedtime.”

  For most of her childhood, Lyndon was absorbed by the experience of being a bird, brooding, busy, purposeful. She sat for hours, her arms clasped tightly around her body.17 “She can’t come in, she’s laying,” her family and friends would say. Often her mother would drag her from her nest, but instead of squashing her little girl’s fantasy with ridicule, she sometimes played the game as well. “I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times, no laying at lunchtime.”18

  The vision of herself as a mother hen suited Lyndon’s theory that to write, one must brood, and to be a real woman, one must be a mother. When interviewers spoke to her of inspiration, she often said “I hate the word creative. Brooders. That’s the word. I would say there are brooders in life. That’s why I’ve always had this attachment to hens and nests, not because of the eggs, but the quiet brooding, pondering.” In the kitchen of her last home in London, the dresser was covered with pottery hens.19

  Lyndon’s brooding was not just a product of her loneliness, but a protection against a certain coolness in her parents. Travers and Margaret Goff were typical of their own time and place. Smalltown parents of the early twentieth century taught their children self-sufficiency and subservience. But more than that, Travers and Margaret were also caught up in their own self-importance. If parents are “a child’s first gods and responsible for many seeds of fate,” as Lyndon later wrote, then the Goffs planted too many seeds of doubt and mystery. They left clues, but they were too simple, too rudimentary to be of much help. Lyndon fell back on her parents’ proverbs, rules and random lines from poems, as well as their books, to elaborate, fantasize and help create sense.

  She came to believe that her mother and father lived in a state that W. B. Yeats called, in his 1919 poem “A
Prayer for My Daughter,” “radical innocence.” “In our family life, if there were moods to be respected, it was not ours.” Her parents were absorbed in “their own existence, busy, contained, important” and that left the children of the marriage “free for ours.” “I was allowed to grow in the darkness, unknown, unnoticed, under the earth like a seed.” She could never remember that her father or anyone else explained anything. If Lyndon cried, Travers Goff would say, “Let her weep, we need the rain.” She saw her mother, a woman with a passive face, as benign and generous, with doelike, soft eyes, yet she used to wonder, as a child, “if she was more like a doe or a serpent.”20

  Margaret Goff did not really want to know what Lyndon was doing. Rather, she issued instructions, “her voice full of clocks and water heaters.” Lyndon told interviewers that her parents weren’t scholars, but loved life, which meant “they left you to yourself a great deal.” Her great sorrow was that both her grandmothers had died before she was born. These wise old women, as she called them, “carriers of tradition,” might have answered who she was, why she was born, how did she get born—ordinary childhood questions but important ones. “I wanted the important answers, but the grown-ups around me were disappointing in their answers… I used to feel if only I had a grandmother she would know these things.”21

  The Goffs’ life in Maryborough was simple, not indulgent, not centered around possessions. Lyndon had few toys or personal treasures. Each week her parents gave her a penny; Lyndon had no way of knowing the value of the mysterious object called a sovereign, encased in a small square contraption on her father’s watch chain. Her mother might buy her little things, a roll of blue ribbon, or a delicate fan with shining pink roses. Her dolls were made of wooden spoons, dressed up, but they lived adventurous lives. In any case, it was not things, but words, that stirred Lyndon—the stories, ballads, and old wives’ tales shared among widely scattered neighbors.

  Her mother was forever casting around in her pool of maxims, which were passed on to Mary Poppins. Margaret liked to say “anything worth doing is worth doing well.” Lyndon didn’t believe it as a child. Her father was the greater force in her life, or rather the memory of her father. Although she liked to recall the cane fields father, the bright and witty poet drenched in Ireland, the real Goff could be maudlin and difficult, especially when drunk and reminiscing about his “homeland.” “I had been brought up by a father who was a very poetic Irishman. It seemed nothing but Ireland would do, everything round you was Irish, if we had a horse it had an Irish name, and an Irish pedigree, the lace for our clothes was brought from Ireland, and I grew up and was nurtured on the Celtic Twilight, Yeats and all. Therefore Australia never seemed to be the place where I wanted to be. My body ran around in the southern sunlight but my inner world had subtler colors…the numberless greens of Ireland, which seemed to me inhabited solely by poets plucking harps, heroes…cutting off each other’s heads, and veiled ladies sitting on the ground keening.”22

  In time Lyndon came to see him as a man who was full of Irish dissatisfaction, who never quite found his heart’s desire. He was “proud and haughty, terribly gay and terribly amusing and poetic and always singing and quoting poems and weeping over them. But I’ve come to know he was melancholy and sad and that he needed someone to understand him. His melancholy was the other side of his Irish gaiety,” inheritable and catching. “Whenever he had taken a glass he would grieve over the sack of Drogheda in 1649 [the scene of Cromwell’s infamous massacre of civilians] until everyone round him felt personally guilty. He was Irish and determined in argument to have the last word even or perhaps specially with children.”

  Lyndon’s refuge was books. She claimed she could read at the age of three. The alphabet was gradually revealed to her through household packaging, Sunlight Soap (Mary Poppins’s favorite), which was used to wash “floors, clothes and children,” letters stamped on flour bags, labels on boxes of Beecham’s Pills, or the words “Jumble Today” on the church noticeboard. She even tried to decipher the stencils on tea chests, embossed with Chinese ideograms.23

  Now that she could read, Lyndon finally understood that “grims” were not just fantastic stories told by the Goffs’ washerwoman, Matilda. She had been “notorious throughout the district for telling these grims,” which Lyndon thought was “a generic term for narrative, tarradiddle.” Now she realized that Grimms’ were fairy tales bound in two volumes, “squat, red, sturdy volumes, coarse of paper, close of print, discovered in my father’s bookcase.”24

  Lyndon left Maryborough when she was three. Forever after, she remembered the town she wished it had been. From the Goffs’ two-story home near the Mary River, she could see the Maryborough sugar factory. She imagined the factory for the rest of her life as a cane field, even transposing it to a dry, high, inland wheat town. “We lived by a lake,” she once recalled, “by a sugar plantation….At night, when the moon was shining, there was a small bright lake beyond the cane fields, the tin roof of the sugar mill absorbed the light of the moon and stars and set off a whitish shimmer, so our house and the mill roof appeared to be flush with the land.”25

  Within this fairyland cane field, she later wove semi-autobiographical books around two servants, including Ah Wong, named after a Chinese cook who worked for the Goffs (at the time, it was customary to have Chinese cooks on sugar plantations) and Johnny Delaney, named in honor of their hunchbacked Irish groom, stable boy and carpenter. Johnny Delaney was so important, Lyndon wrote, that “when we were young we thought we had three parents: mother, father, and Johnny.” He taught them how to hide from Kate Clancy, “our gorgon nurse.”

  Only much later, and only to trusted interviewers, did she confess that these stories were an amalgam of her childhood memories and that not everything she said should be taken for granted.

  Early in 1902, Travers Goff was transferred—demoted, Lyndon later believed—to a new job with the AJS Bank in Brisbane. The Goffs traveled south early in the year. As an employee, but not the boss of the bank branch, Travers Goff’s annual salary was shaved by £50, and he had no servants allowance.26 The family lived on Brisbane Street, Ipswich, where their second daughter, Barbara Ierne (known as Biddy), was born in April that year. This was the start of a great deal of ferment and change in the Goff household. Travers Goff was soon forced into the disruptive job of standing in for other employees when they were on leave, first at Clifton on the Darling Downs near Toowoomba during August 1903, then during May 1905 at the bank’s branch at Killarney, northwest of Brisbane. By then Margaret Goff was heavily pregnant with their third child. The family lived at “Heytor,” Lisson Grove, Wooloowin, and Travers was officially a mere “bank clerk.”27

  Before the birth of the Goffs’ third daughter, Cicely Margaret (Moya), in July 1905, Helen Lyndon, then five, was sent to Sydney to stay once again with Aunt Ellie. She never quite knew why she was sent away to her aunt. She thought it might have been a treat just for herself. In any case, that was how she decided to take it.

  The journey from Brisbane to Sydney lasted all night. The guard lifted the five-year-old onto a makeshift bed in the luggage rack of his van. Lyndon heard the train’s whistle as the carriages slid through the darkness, watched lighted windows in the little settlements along the way before drifting to sleep. The train was an iron thread, a fiery necklace, linking Mother in Brisbane with Aunt Ellie in Sydney. She liked to think that Ellie had sent the train herself. It was her own carriage taking her to the haven of a fairy godmother.28 Many children would have clung to their mothers, the separation too much to bear. Helen Lyndon, though, was an adventurer even then.

  2

  Ellie and Allora

  There she stood on the platform. Tall and gaunt, lips pursed tight. Her hat was almost airborne, its two pigeon wings bracketing the crown. Aunt Ellie leant on an ivory-and-ebony walking stick. “Hurrumph! Here you are at last!” The train was two minutes late. That greeting again! Lyndon had heard it before. Ellie’s contralto never changed. Lynd
on thought she sounded like Father Bear when he saw someone had been eating his porridge.

  The driver ushered Aunt Ellie, her maid Elizabeth and the little blond girl into the carriage, and drove to Number 2 Albert Street. Lyndon vaguely remembered the special wallpaper—“one of the best you’re likely to see”—the rows of photographs in close military formation on the piano, on the table tops and the mantelpieces, the way Miss Elizabeth grumbled about her “daily burden” as she scrubbed Lyndon’s face until it burned and bundled her into frilled dresses and fur-collared coats. And how Aunt Ellie’s mustache prickled her when she stooped to kiss her good night.

  Aunt Ellie, a bulldog with a sentimental core, remained fixed in Lyndon’s adult memory even more vividly than her parents. In a little book about Aunt Ellie’s life, she described her as stern and tender, secret and proud, anonymous and loving. Her great aunt “stalked with her silent feet” through the pages of Mary Poppins.1 Ellie lent her mannerisms to more than one woman in the Mary Poppins adventures. Not only did she live again in the starched and bustling figure of Mary Poppins herself, but she could also be found in the fearsome Miss Andrew—the nanny of Mr. Banks—and in Miss Lark, the Banks’s arrogant yet romantic neighbor. Miss Andrew and Miss Lark—two fictional women of a certain age, neither burdened by husbands—represented the two sides of Aunt Ellie’s character, bossy and benign.

  Like Miss Lark, Ellie had two dogs, or rather a succession of dogs, always called Tinker and Badger. Although a child might be dismissed into thin air with a word, Ellie would dissolve into sentimentality over “anything with four legs, a patch of fur, a tail or a bark.” And while the pet was often placed in the best spare bedroom, the child would be sent to a cot in the attic.