In two accounts, one given in a letter in 1977, the other published in a magazine eleven years later, Lyndon told a story which was engraved on her mind. It concerned a magical white horse, but much more than that, the story signified the end of her childhood and explained, at least to her own satisfaction, this mystery: where did Mary Poppins come from? One night when Lyndon was about eleven, her mother turned in anguish from her children and rushed from the house threatening to drown herself in the creek. She had not recovered from her husband’s death and knew no one well enough to share the pain. The rain was drumming onto the tin roof of the cottage, the trees outside were heavy with the day’s downpour.
Lyndon was already mature enough not to panic. She stoked the fire, dragged an old feather quilt from the bedroom and wrapped it around herself, then Biddy and Moya. The three girls sat before the fire, watched over by the carved wooden fox on the mantelpiece, lit by their mother’s china lamp. As they perched on the hearthrug, Lyndon told her anxious sisters a story of a magical white horse.
The horse might have been Pegasus, a symbol of poetry that would have appealed to the poet in Lyndon, but while it had no wings, it could still gallop over the sea like a shimmering comet, “its hooves flicking the foam.” The colt was finely made with a neatly trimmed mane and tail. Was he going home, the girls wanted to know? No, the horse was coming from home to a place with no name. He could see that place in the distance as a great cloud of light. Can he do anything? Fizzle the world in a frying pan, fly into the air even without wings and dive to the bottom of the sea? Yes, yes, yes! Perhaps he will never even get to the light. What will he eat, what will he drink? Years later, Lyndon believed the magic horse ran underground, and came up eventually as Mary Poppins.10
The three girls cuddled tightly together as Lyndon thought of the creek. While her imagination flew to describe the horse’s adventures, her logical mind considered the reality. How deep was the creek? Surely not deep enough for a woman to drown? And yet, if you lay down and let the water cover your face, like Ophelia…But the creek does become a wider pool downstream. Anyway, what would happen to us if she never came back? Would we go to a children’s home and wear dressing gowns embroidered over to hide the worn holes in the fabric, or would Auntie Ellie take us back to Sydney? Maybe she would send Biddy to Aunt Jane and I would have to stay with Aunt Ellie and Moya would go to one of the cousins? No one would be the “little one” then. How long does it take to drown? Oh God, I will be good, if only Mummy comes back.
As the logs slipped sideways in the fireplace, the door opened. Margaret stood like Ophelia revived, her hair wet around her face, her clothes clinging to her body. Biddy and Moya rushed to embrace her, around the waist, the knees, tried to kiss her cheeks, crying and laughing, pulling at her clothes, pulling down the bedclothes for her, but Lyndon held back. She went to the primus stove, a place forbidden to the children, and boiled a kettle to fill the hot water bottle, which she silently took to her mother’s bedroom. Moya and Biddy were already tucked into bed with her, one on each side, giggling and whispering the story of the magic white horse.
Margaret looked up at her eldest daughter. Lyndon threw the hot water bottle onto the bed with as much strength as she could muster, just as Margaret had once smashed the china doll on the iron bedstead. “Oh, you cold-hearted child. The others are so pleased to see me. What’s the matter with you?” cried Margaret. Lyndon couldn’t answer. She went to her own bed and lay cold, in her heart and body, and still as a stone. The pain, then relief, were impossible to bear. She could not even weep.
She had seen herself as a tight green bud, unable to bend to another’s grief. Only as an adult, writing a letter to a friend, could Lyndon acknowledge the depth of Margaret’s grief, that what “had been borne by two now had to be carried by one. Fullness had become emptiness.” The empty bed symbolized the loss—the bed that once resonated with all the intimacies of marriage: “Yin breath and Yang breath flowing together, naked foot over naked foot, the day dissolved, absolved by night.”11 She realized that, far from being innocent, her mother knew a great deal. One day she saw Margaret looking down at her as she lay in the bath. Her mother was quietly weeping. “All the love had rushed to the gray eyes, they were black with concern and love and anguish and compassion, the desire to comfort. She said nothing. Neither of us could speak.”
• • •
In May 1912, Margaret Goff advertised in the local Wollondilly Press: “Cottage furnished, to let. Mrs. Goff, Holly Street, Bowral.” She intended to live for a while with Aunt Ellie while she enrolled Lyndon at a high school in Sydney. Ellie had insisted it was for the best; the child was bright and Ellie would pay the fees. Lyndon, who would turn thirteen in August of that year, was to be a boarder, returning to Bowral for holidays.12
Margaret fulfilled her duty by telling Lyndon (one day in Sydney’s Botanical Gardens) that she would soon be a woman, and explained the reason for the monthly flow of blood.13 Lyndon was quiet, full of unspoken resentment, which she was to unleash on her new teachers at Normanhurst Private Girls School in the inner west suburb of Ashfield. Normanhurst was considered “elegant” by Aunt Ellie. It maintained the pretense of being nondenominational but had links with St. John’s Church of England and was a sister school to Abbotsleigh on the North Shore of Sydney.14
Lyndon began to be naughty, inventive about breaking the rules. The principal called her into her study but instead of berating her merely asked, “Do you know why you do these things?” Lyndon lied that she was bored. “Well,” asked Miss Beatrice Tildsley, “what does interest you? Perhaps reading?” She ushered her into a corner of the study where she could read any book she liked. Lyndon began, she said later, with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and went on from there.15 She remembered Normanhurst as a place where she could read and learn, a preparation for the life of a writer and actress.16
Now she was apart from her mother, Lyndon understood that her father had definitely died. In fact, she thought he had turned into a star.
Lyndon dutifully studied music, passed a Trinity College theory exam in 1913 and fell passionately in love with the stage, thrilled by her first taste of watching a play when the hero was brought in wounded, his forehead covered in tomato sauce. (Her years at Normanhurst coincided with the Great War.17) Her first published article, under the byline Lyndon Goff, in the Normanhurst School Magazine, was a report of the “Grand Variety Entertainment” held in the third term of 1914. “As the different items were rendered, we were thrilled to find that these stars of the first magnitude had dwelt among us incognito, in some cases for years,” she wrote. The proceeds from the concert went to war funds.
Lyndon progressed from acting to directing with her production of a fund-raising school concert in November 1914. It began with the “Marseillaise” followed by “Bravo!,” a war recitation, and included “Gossip,” a sketch for two old women (no doubt modeled on Aunt Jane and Aunt Ellie). The highlight of the evening was a melodrama, starring Lyndon and depicting kings, beautiful ladies in distress and dueling knights. The concert ended with the kaiser being toppled by the united efforts of England, France, Belgium and Australia, before the girls and teachers sang “God Save the King.”
By 1915, the school magazine chronicled the loss of brothers at Gallipolli and earnestly reported that the girls’ “hearts were full of reverence for those who have made, or are ready to make, this greatest offering of all.” Lyndon’s report of a masked ball at the school later that year praised the flags of the Allies suspended from the ceiling and, in each corner, miniature flags intertwined with palms and ferns. At the Head Dress Dance of winter 1915, “the bedrooms rang with cries for pins, cotton, etc. as everyone rushed hither and thither in a wild state of excitement…the cauliflower and turnip had to be led in, the holes made in their paper head coverings not large enough to see through.”
Lyndon wrote well, in the direct clear style of a budding journalist, but it was becoming clear that while writi
ng came naturally, acting would come first. Through her fascination with acting, Lyndon was to meet the first of a long chain of men who would, in her words, “pass her from one to the other.” These men were not just her mentors, but substitute fathers and lovers, who would play Mr. Banks to her Mary Poppins.
He was Lawrence Campbell, a London-born actor in his late forties who had taught drama and public speaking in Sydney for twenty years. As a so-called elocutionist, Campbell coached students at several schools, including Normanhurst. In 1915 he cast Lyndon as Bottom in Normanhurst’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which opened in October at the Ashfield Town Hall. Box office sales went to the Red Cross and Belgian Funds. Lyndon wore a red wig, then an ass’s head, “quite transforming her,” according to the school magazine review.
That year she also played the title role in Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon, and passed the Junior University Examination. By 1916, now a school prefect, her thoughts skipped toward escape from Normanhurst and a career as an actress. In May 1916 Lawrence Campbell took the fifth-form girls, including Lyndon, to see Richard III at the New Adelphi Theatre. The production was part of a six-play Shakespearean season presented by entrepreneur George Marlow. The star was an English actor, Allan Wilkie, who played Malvolio, Shylock and Romeo in the season but excelled as Richard III, whom he portrayed with both a limp and a horribly distorted mouth. Lyndon and her friends had a marvelous view of the tragedy from the stalls.18
Campbell was more than just a teacher who took his pupils on excursions. He was a professional actor, as well as a director of the Palace Theatre where he gave recitations of poems. He also played Jaques in As You Like It, in Allan Wilkie’s 1916 Shakespearean season. He had an extraordinary suggestion to make to Lyndon. Why didn’t she move into his home? His wife would be a sufficient chaperone, and he would train her as an actress.19 When she later told interviewers about this suggestion, Lyndon gave no hint of a sexual motive but indicated that such a thing would have been impossible “in my kind of family,” as Aunt Ellie and her mother were such snobs. For them, a life on the stage would have been a shocking thing for a girl to take up, tantamount to prostitution.20 Instead, Lyndon said, “I had to earn my living and help my family…I had no choice.”
Aunt Ellie took charge. There were no decent jobs for a young lady in Bowral. She must work in Sydney. There could be no choice; Margaret, Biddy and Moya would all move to the city, and Lyndon would live at home once again. Margaret Goff rented a modest cottage at 17 Pembroke Street, Ashfield, and the two younger girls were enrolled at Normanhurst. Aunt Ellie marched Lyndon along to the Australian Gas Light Company where she knew a board member, Thomas Forster Knox, a brother-in-law of her friend Edith Knox.21 Ellie suggested Lyndon might become a shorthand typist. Thomas Knox only briefly protested, “My dear Miss Morehead, she might be too young . . .” before Ellie shouted him down with “Nonsense, she’s perfectly competent and she needs to work.”
Lyndon was sent to work as a secretary in the cashier’s office. She dreaded having to make the money tally correctly at the end of each day. “Probably because of my early association with money, or rather the lack of it,” she wrote later, she never once got the balance right. Somebody came to the rescue with an old adding machine and the management never knew of her incompetence. Lyndon was recommended for a raise. At the big black typewriter each day she heard Aunt Ellie’s voice urging, nagging: Be a good girl. Help Mother. “That seemed to be my role and I wondered if there was anything else for me in life.”22
At her bleakest moments, she said to herself that if stars were happiness, which would she rather have, the Milky Way or the two stars that point to the Southern Cross? Lyndon decided it must be the pointers. “It was so black, so dark, so terrible in between them—but I thought those two gold moments would be better than whole years of the Milky Way.”23
4
The Creation of Pamela
By the time she was seventeen, Lyndon knew by heart all of Juliet’s speeches and most of Lady Teazle’s lines from School for Scandal. She was a typist in name but an actress by instinct. Under Minnie Everett’s instruction, she continued her fancy dancing lessons, hummed little tunes which might accompany her own verses1 and boasted that she saw every play that was staged in Sydney. Her obsession was more a matter of grief than pride for her mother and Aunt Ellie.2
Lyndon’s grand ambition was to become a dramatic actress in the style of Kathlene MacDonell, whom she had seen in 1917 at the Criterion Theatre. She liked her in Peter Pan but loved her in Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon and learned the play by heart. Two years later, Lyndon spent all her spare money at the New Olympia Theatre in Darlinghurst to see over and over again the visiting English actor, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, in the play Passing of the Third Floor Back.
She watched with envy as the older pupils at Minnie’s dance school were cast in the pantomimes staged at the city theatres owned by the flamboyant brothers Ben and John Fuller (motto: “Hilarity Without Vulgarity”), the Grand Opera House (formerly the New Adelphi) and Her Majesty’s. The “pantos” were a regular fixture of the theatrical year, not just a Christmas attraction, and they all featured “beautiful ballets.” They were based on European fairy tales, and there were few exceptions to the sweetly familiar stories of Cinderella, Aladdin, Dick Whittington, Robinson Crusoe, Red Riding Hood and Babes in the Wood. Now and again, the Grand Opera House audience might see a rare piece of Australiana, as it did in December 1916 with The Bunyip, a pantomime featuring the Wattle Blossom Fairy Princess.
After months of tantrums, when Margaret Goff and Aunt Ellie were alternately outraged by or contemptuous of the suggestion she should become an actress, they allowed Lyndon to perform in a pantomime.3 Her debut took place in 1920 in J. C. Williamson’s spectacular Sleeping Beauty, which opened in April for a six-week season at the Criterion. Of course she knew the fairy tale from childhood, and she had always identified with both the resolute princess and the thirteenth fairy, who took her revenge on being excluded from the christening party. Lyndon’s involvement in the pantomime version helped reinforce its importance in her mind as a key to a woman’s life.
Lyndon took part as a member of Minnie Everett’s ballet troupe, some of whom spoke a few lines—to the scorn of the critic from The Triad magazine, who found their interpretation “intensely pathetic.” But Sleeping Beauty had a successful season with the help of actors from England and New York playing the principal boy and girl.
During the run Lyndon made friends with Peggy Doran, billed in the cast list as “the noted Irish Character Comedienne.” Lyndon asked Peggy if she would hear her practice the lines from L’Aiglon. She had rehearsed them already in the storeroom under the stage, amid the baskets of props and costumes. Peggy spread the word that there was a real actress among the dancing girls. Minnie was astonished, and she asked Lyndon where she had learned to act. Lyndon hung her head. “I never have.” “Never mind, you’ll now have a small part in the play,” said Minnie. In true showbiz style, Lyndon stepped into the speaking role of a woman leaving the show.4 Already stagestruck, she was now completely seduced. The stage fulfilled cravings in Lyndon for applause. Somebody, even if it was an audience of complete strangers, was now paying attention to little Lyndon. She longed to do this all the time.
The way ahead was through the Shakespearean actor Lyndon had idealized as a schoolgirl, Allan Wilkie. If Lawrence Campbell was her first Mr. Banks, Wilkie became the second. Liverpool born, Wilkie was a trouper and actor-manager in the Henry Irving manner who had learned his craft playing in melodrama and Shakespeare in companies run by Ben Greet, Frank Benson and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. He toured the English provinces, then traveled with an itinerant company of actors throughout the world. Caught in South Africa at the beginning of World War I, Wilkie and his actress wife, Frediswyde Hunter-Watts, sailed for Australia, where she had relatives.5
A traditionalist who shunned modern-dress versions of Shakespeare, Wilkie resembled Oscar Wil
de and boasted that he could play Shylock any night with no preparation but needed twenty-four hours’ notice to play Othello. For a generation of schoolchildren, he transformed Shakespeare from an incomprehensible jumble of words that the teacher made them speak aloud to poetry that came suddenly alive. It meant nothing that the Wilkie players’ set might consist of a black backcloth, a wooden throne, a table, or a divan. What mattered was the passion, the loving, the embracing, the bloody sword fights and betrayals enunciated in the fruity tones of Frediswyde and friends.
In 1915 Wilkie found his first Australian financial backer—another showman from northern England, George Marlow, who had been the lessee of the New Adelphi Theatre and the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. Marlow suggested that Wilkie form a new company, and in January 1916 Marlow’s Grand Shakespearean Company premiered in Melbourne with The Merchant of Venice. Marlow was the promoter and financier and Wilkie the star and artistic director. Lawrence Campbell had taken Lyndon’s class at Normanhurst to see the Sydney season of this company.
In July 1918 Wilkie thrilled Sydney again in a long season at the Grand Opera House,6 then finally formed his own permanent company in 1920. Defying theatrical tradition, he chose Macbeth to open the first season in Melbourne in September that year. In February 1921 his company came to Sydney for a six-week season at the Grand Opera House. It presented, in repertory, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and As You Like It.
Lyndon met Wilkie just before this late summer season began. She told different versions of how she came into his orbit, but it is likely that she was introduced to him by Lawrence Campbell. As she walked through the city streets to meet Wilkie, whom she called the Great Man, or simply GM, Lyndon fantasized that his body would be as beautiful as Tarzan’s and his face like a treasured picture of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson which she kept at home. He would lead her, like a bride, down broad carpeted stairs to the stage where he would instruct her: “We shall rehearse Anthony and Cleopatra, and you will be Cleopatra.”
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers Page 6
