When Ellie was in one of her generous, indulgent moods, she gave Lyndon presents more extravagant and special than any little trinket her parents could afford. For her third birthday, Ellie presented Lyndon with a precious gift, a Royal Doulton bowl, with three little boys playing horses. The bowl later appeared in “Bad Wednesday,” a story in Mary Poppins Comes Back, as a christening gift given to Mrs. Banks by her Great Aunt Caroline.
Aunt Ellie was said to be disappointed in love, having fallen for one of her cousins, a member of Parliament, whom she felt she could not marry. After that, she never found the right man, but instead embraced in her fold many nieces and nephews, acting as the central pole of a familial merry-go-round, controlling all.
The old woman and Lyndon ate lunch together every day. The little girl was shocked by how much her aunt devoured, perhaps a dozen peaches at a sitting and most of the stew, leaving only what looked like a bundle of bones. She knew Ellie more intimately than her other great aunt, Jane. But both, in her adult memory, were forever linked as a pair of crows—much as she had seen herself as a hen—perched on a fence or outlined against the horizon, with an air of “terrible conviction, assurance and an unassailable knowledge that they were right,” as she wrote in an unpublished article. As Lyndon became a specialist on the meaning and origin of legends, she would know by the time she wrote those words that a crow is usually an omen, a warning of bad luck, but can also be a fairy in disguise, usually a fairy with trouble in mind.
She decided the great aunts were to blame for “my never being able to endure authoritarianism of any kind.” They were “huge cloudy presences…watching everything that transpired….I vowed when I grew up never to be like that. They are the authoritarian figures which have stayed with me…they were cruel, they wanted the world for themselves.”2 When she was told that Aunt Jane lived on her capital, Lyndon imagined her secretly living on her own person, gnawing at a finger or toe, or wolfing down an organ.
Aunt Ellie was not merely conjured up out of Lyndon’s imagination as a powerful woman. She really did have position and power in Sydney society. Ellie lived to a great age, surviving into her nineties, an independent woman who never leant on a man other than her father for financial support. She carefully nurtured a social network and took care not to fossilize; Ellie often visited the Goffs in Queensland and traveled to and from England more than fifteen times.
In her will, Ellie revealed the essence of both her character and her social circle. She listed thirty separate bequests, explained in exquisitely intricate detail. Her most loved possessions were to be shared by her sister, nieces, nephews, grandnieces, grandnephews and friends, who included the founding family of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, the Knoxes, who lived near Albert Street in the mansion Fiona.
These bequests, which might have come from Mary Poppins’s carpetbag, included a traveling clock, travel hold-all and travel rug, silver table napkin ring, sugar sifter, teapot, tea caddy and spoon, teaspoons and sugar tongs, a Danish china tea set, framed photographs, two large cameo brooches, a tantalus, letter weight scales, cream-and-gold Wedgwood, a cut-glass and silver smelling-salts bottle and a silver-topped scent bottle, both engraved HCM, silverplate cutlery, all with the Morehead crest, a copper preserving pan and ladle, candelabra, a Russian commemorative mug, Worcester vases, and a gold thimble in its own case.
Ellie left shares, as well, including stock in the Australian Gas Light Company and the Colonial Sugar Refining Company which had earned her a £150 annual dividend. The shares were divided between Lyndon, her sister Cicely Margaret (Moya), and other nieces and grand nieces. The Goff girls eventually received Ellie’s shares in the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney as well.
• • •
Lyndon celebrated her fifth birthday at Albert Street with Ellie, documenting for her parents the gifts she received in letters written in wobbly but careful penciled handwriting. The letters are eloquent with the silent presence of Ellie at her shoulder, supervising the five-year-old’s first attempts at composing a letter. She asked her mama if the new baby had blue eyes and curly hair (as she did herself), whether the baby cried when she was christened, and how much Biddy liked her new sister, who was known as Moya from her earliest days.
Lyndon’s father and mother had already told her they might call the baby Moya, which they said was Irish for Mary. Travers Goff was clearly hoping for a boy, whom he planned to call Brian Travers Goff. He wrote back to his little girl that he had heard from Aunt Ellie that Lyndon had grown “very fat. Why, little woman, you will be like a prize pig when you get home again. Never mind, we will all be delighted to see you home again after your nice long holiday. As you will be back so soon we are not going to send your birthday present to you but you will get it when you return.”3
Back home, the “fat” girl had only just opened her present when her mother told her she must stay with friends until things settled down. Baby Moya needed all her attention. Lyndon later wrote that she always suffered from being the eldest of three girls.
Three months after the baby was born, Travers Goff was transferred again, to the Australian Joint Stock Bank branch in Allora, a small inland town on the Darling Downs, eighty kilometers from Toowoomba in southern Queensland. He started work as the bank manager on October 16, 1905. The next eighteen months were the most critical of Lyndon’s early years. Most of her childhood memories came from that time and place, high up in the Darling Downs, where a sudden catastrophe was to change the direction of her life. She lived those days in Allora with the kind of intensity that often precedes either a triumph or deep disappointment.
Allora was a perfect place for dreaming. Quiet, far from anywhere, the town was bitingly cold in winter and intensely hot in summer—extremes that helped her imagination take flight as she sat before the fire and gazed into its flames or lay on the grass and looked at the heavens after summer’s late sunsets. Lyndon felt a sense of emptiness and loneliness in Allora, whose melodious name hid its more prosaic origins—the Aboriginal word gnallarah, meaning “the place of the swamp.”
The Australian Joint Stock Bank had maintained a branch in Allora for almost thirty years, its double-doored banking chamber opening onto the wide main street of the town, Herbert Street. The manager and his family lived in a residence attached to the bank, the whole surrounded by a veranda in the generously deep Queensland style. In summer, the sun wrinkled and burned the Allora townsfolk deep brown. Verandas and umbrellas provided the only shade. In winter, though, the wind swept through the bank manager’s house. The winds bit more deeply than they did on the coast; the maids did their best to keep fires burning in all the high-ceilinged oblong rooms leading off the wide, cool hallway.
The two older Goff girls liked to play in the warm kitchen, or in summer, in the big weedy paddock out in back. At dusk, their friends would drift home, calling to one another in fainter and fainter voices as they parted and ran home across the gardens and fields. As they climbed into bed, the two girls still called to one another until they began to fall asleep.
Before her eyes closed, Lyndon watched the shadows climb the wall, bend in half and slip along the ceiling. What was that tapping on the wall, that rustling, creaking, groaning? She feared that an ancient mariner or cruel army captain was hidden behind her bedroom door, scraping the wall with a pencil. He wore red breeches, a blue jacket and tattered epaulets, his knees were bent in pain, the result of an old bullet wound.4 Her mother reassured her the tapping was simply the wooden house “stretching itself luxuriously after the heat of the day.” “See,” she would say, flinging the door open, “he’s not there and you know it!” The trouble was, Mother was speaking of a real captain. Lyndon’s captain was inside her head, and her head was a door her mother could not open.5 She found she could conjure up from her own mind the most fearsome monsters as well as a host of fairy-tale creatures. Fairies, giants and djinns stalked the earth, as close as her shadow.6
In the garden and paddock beyond, she made tiny parks for poo
r people. The Lilliputians sat on blades of grass and took tea. She thought she might look like a giant cloud to these dwarves. Her finger would be as big and scary as a lion.7 The park became a story, “The Park in the Park,” in the fourth Mary Poppins book, Mary Poppins in the Park, in which Jane Banks makes a tiny park for poor people. There, everybody is happy and no one ever quarrels. Flowers were trees, twigs were benches, and plasticine men lived in the houses and played at the funfair. “I had a passion for making these miniature clearings, no more than a foot square, all over our garden.”8 A grown-up foot could blot out the whole fantasy at any moment.
Lyndon was much closer to animals than people; she took care not to step on an ant or a beetle. They might be princes in disguise. She also was close to an imaginary friend, a child her own age and size. That Friend, she called him. She loved the big paddock with its spare, sunbaked trees and its slip fence. This paddock was later transformed into the Chelsea park visited so often by the Banks children and Mary Poppins. There, the slip fence became an elegant iron railing, the lean grass of the paddock a juicy lawn to be watered, and the kookaburras dissolved into nightingales. The horse mushrooms in the middle of the paddock grew into a merry-go-round.9
Lyndon felt surrounded by the spirits of the trees, by the grass and stone, but most of all by the stars. In Allora, the stars in the night sky seemed closer than in Brisbane, so close Lyndon thought she could hear them humming.10 One of her father’s odd-job men, Johnny Delaney, taught Lyndon basic lessons about the constellations until she “knew the southern sky at night like a book.”11 The heavens seemed “a celestial suburb…inhabited by a circle of friends,” among them the two pointers of the Southern Cross, Berenice’s Hair, Venus, and Orion with his studded belt.12 Her favorite star was Hesperus or Venus.
She liked to imagine a great community at play in the sky. Friends and families must be circling, meeting and dancing. She knew Castor and Pollux, brothers and heroes, had been made into twin stars so they could be close forever. Lyndon hoped that might happen to her parents.13 The heroes and creatures from ancient Greece who gave their names to the constellations were her first lesson in mythology, which grew to become a comfort, then an obsession in her later life.
The view of the heavens by night was both friendly and all-enveloping, but before the dark blue washed over the sky, there was that hour or more to be endured. Twilight. Dusk. For Lyndon, this was a time of melancholy and sometimes panic, when the “long rays of the sun lay across the earth like stripes on the back of a zebra.”14 “Will the sun come up tomorrow?” was one of the many questions her parents brushed off. “Of course . . .” “If someone knew and understood how anxious I was about the sun, what a help it would have been to me.”15 She would flee into the lighted house for comfort.16
How much of this anguish was created in retrospect is hard to know. It certainly sounded a romantic idea. As an adult, Lyndon wrote of twilight as the prime hour of childhood when anything can, and indeed does happen, when the game passes and the child sets out alone on the “glowing tide of dusk, a feeling of melancholy and sweetness possessing his spirit.”17 The feeling was reinforced by the poem she loved by the Irish writer George William Russell, who imagined a child playing at dusk, the moment when the grown-ups call him in from his dream.
Call not thy wanderer home as yet,
Though it be late.
Now is the first assailing of
The invisible gate
Be still through that light knocking,
The hour is thronged with fate.
Such dreams, she wrote, could be smuggled into the house and kept alive in some secret cupboard. Her father, too, was intrigued by the dusk. He stood by her, head tipped back, searching the sky for the first star.18 At such a moment, the child was making her plans for life, while the romance was twice as fabulous for a Lyndon, a future writer, who was “building a storehouse from which she could draw her treasures.”19 But Lyndon went even further along this romantic path. She claimed her own journey and search for meaning arose from these moments at twilight.20
The night sky and the sunset grew into a ribbonlike theme in her articles and books. The tales of Mary Poppins are studded with stories of the Banks children playing in the stars, Poppins descending from the stars and ascending in a trail of stardust, and the various children in her articles puzzling over the moon—what was on the other side? Why was the moon broken when it was not a full moon?
Lyndon said she was happiest living in houses where she could actually see the sun set,21 and she felt she wrote best at twilight. She often quoted other writers as having similar thoughts, including Georges Simenon, who said his children feared sunset, and the children’s writer who later became her literary heroine, Beatrix Potter. The fascination with and fear of the dark remained with her into old age. She even panicked at blackouts in theatres.22
Lyndon also dwelt on the feelings of melancholy that washed over her at twilight, feelings that anticipated how an adult might feel at the frustration over a day lost, or much worse, a life wasted. At each sunset, she thought there must be something else.23 Lyndon did not know what this something was, but…“as far as the wind blows and the sky is blue, I would go and find it…I seized on any opportunity that would set me on my way.”24
At first, her escape route might have come with the gypsies. Lyndon had heard they walked the world and stole children. Her story, frequently told, never varied: a miragelike group of tall men in blue gowns and their veiled women, perhaps Mohammedans, were camped in peaked tents near her home. She stood nearby, hoping to be picked up like an item from a bargain counter, as she said. Lyndon offered the most stately man one of her sandals. He inspected it, but quietly returned it to her foot and directed her back to the road. Whether fantasy or reality, the dreamy quality of the story gives it a sexual undertone, as if the man were inspecting the young girl’s wares, but found them wanting. “They didn’t take me!” she told her parents. “Not surprising,” scoffed Margaret and Travers.
Instead, the path to escape came through books. One of her Morehead relatives in England sent her a special issue of the Children’s Encyclopedia, along with a letter from a certain Mr. Arthur Mee soliciting further book sales. The letter, apparently handwritten, was addressed “Dear Child.” It was, she thought, her first love letter. The grown-ups, however, rudely assured her that the handwriting was done by some sort of machine and that thousands of children had received the same letter. Lyndon did not believe them. A friend would not betray her. She wrote to Mr. Mee, explaining who she was, and asking him to send her the fare to England. “The answer was long in coming, and when it came, unsatisfactory. I was reprimanded for bothering that dear Mr. Mee.”25
Lyndon had already read all the fairy stories, “the great set pieces, to be wept over and doted on,” about the Snow Queen, the Little Mermaid, the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, all full of nymphs, crones and strong mother figures. These Grimms’ tales curdled her blood with delight and horror, as the women dispensed justice or found romance. Lyndon preferred the maidens who were brave rather than ciphers, like the Goose Girl and the fearless Sleeping Beauty. All the villains, dwarves, giants and stepmothers, wicked fairies, dragons and witches stayed with her for life. She liked the wickedest women most. Her mother wondered why Lyndon preferred “Rumpelstiltskin” when “The Miller’s Daughter” was “so much nicer.” Much nicer, yes, but much less interesting. She was fascinated by the evil forces of the stories, the black sheep, the wicked fairy. The Grimms’ tales were black, in contrast to the blander, saccharine whiteness of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy stories. She did wonder sometimes if she, too, were a wicked witch, one of the “devil’s party,” as Blake said of Milton.26
Once she had devoured the Grimms’, she rummaged through every book in her parents’ library, the hodgepodge of Dickens and Scott, Shakespeare, Tennyson and the Irish poets. Through the children’s stories of Beatrix Potter, Alice in Wonderland and Kingsley’s Heroes. There was just
one Australian author there on the shelves: Ethel Turner, who wrote Seven Little Australians.
Most of all, she loved the little books she bought for a penny at the local store in Herbert Street. The fairy tales were printed in green binding; the story of Buffalo Bill came within red and blue covers. On the backs of the penny books were marvelous advertisements for alarm clocks and air rifles. Lyndon planned to buy both, but never quite managed to save enough for either.
One of her favorite books from her father’s collection was Twelve Deathbed Scenes, which she read so often she knew it by heart. Lyndon thought how pleasant it would be to die—if only she could come back. From her mother’s bookshelves, she read Home Chat magazine with its store of recipes, knitting patterns and colic remedies. But her best, most secret, pleasure was to read her mother’s library books, when Margaret took her half-hour siesta. Though the characters in the romances seemed like waxworks, she loved those stolen half-hours as a drunk loves his secret hoard of liquor.27
She was puzzled by the meaning of concubines. Father and daughter discussed the word but Travers was so evasive she thought concubines must mean servants. At this childish mistake, Travers stormed out of the room. She talked of Esau and Jacob with her mother. Lyndon preferred the bad son. Margaret explained that Esau was the black sheep of the family. Oh, Lyndon understood this—she always liked the black sheep: Dan in Jo’s Boys, Peter Rabbit and her Uncle Cecil who had married a lady her mother described as “some sort of Hindoo.”
Lyndon was fascinated by the Bible, the blackness of it, and its air of something forbidden. She relished what she called the “enormous terrible facts” of the Bible, its potent brew mixing in her mind with fairy tales and myths. The Goffs were pious churchgoers, worshiping each Sunday at St. David’s Church of England. There, Travers wore his white suit, boomed out the old hymns in his best baritone and solemnly carried the collection plate up to the altar. To the children, God seemed to live nearby, not just in the town but right at home, in Herbert Street. Lyndon nagged her father about God. Why didn’t he have a title, Duke God, say, or Mr. God? And why did he call God “Harry”? “I do not!” said her father. “You do…you say ‘by the Lord God Harry.’ ”28
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers Page 4
