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

by Valerie Lawson

  She returned to the scrapbooks in the studio. The London letters were hopeless, she knew, so dated and striving for effect. But in among them were the short stories, about the under nurse, the match man and the dancing cow. AE had told her to think of a witch’s adventures. Perhaps the witch could be the nurse?

  Pamela tested the idea on AE. In a few weeks she had several stories to send him. He replied testily, “Why Mary Poppins and no word about yourself? I know Mary Poppins is an incarnation of some attributes of Pamela but I believe in wholeness, not in some partial incarnation, so please tell me how you are.” He thought the adventures were “very good.”50 But AE, forever the editor, suggested an alternative ending. Mary Poppins “should not have gone up in the sky at the end without some transfiguration. Why picture her with that old umbrella and the carpetbag and the disastrous hat?” She might have left town in “less of a period garment” and more like the diaphanous slip worn in an illustration for the book by Maia, one of the seven stars who formed the constellation of Pleiades. AE and Pamela had fantasized about the origins of Mary Poppins, whose name could be a derivation of Maia. Had she come down from the heavens? Was she really a stray star, who had been placed in the constellation according to a tale from ancient mythology?

  AE insisted all along that Mary Poppins had come from mythology. He thought if she lived in the days of old, where she belonged, Mary would have long golden tresses. In one hand she might carry a wreath of flowers, in the other, a spear. Her feet would be shod in winged sandals. But, as this was the Iron Age, she came in the clothes most suited to it.

  • • •

  AE had now known Pamela for a decade. The whole of that time, she needed a mentor and he wanted to fill that role. He could not stop now. In August 1934, AE wrote, “I hope you will think about my suggestion to write a [new] book with the inanimate things talking. Imagine a stone telling its story to the boy going back millions of years when it was flung out of a volcano, or a shell telling its history in…whatever age shells came into rocks. Or a chair gossiping about the people who sat on it, or a clock telling about the girl who came and looked at it every two or three minutes and who then sat down and cried. I only mention these possibilities, not that you need necessarily use them, but because they might start you thinking of things whose stories you could tell.”51

  Woven into many Poppins adventures to come, Pamela did write of inanimate objects coming to life to tell their tales—figures in a Royal Doulton bowl, a china lion, a marble statue who told the Banks children and Mary Poppins how he had come from Greece.

  In October 1934, Pamela offered AE a small share of the money from her first Poppins book. He readily accepted “part of your treasure. Again, congratulations dear Mary Popkins.” From now on, AE called both Pamela and Mary Poppins “Popkins.” Pamela never knew if it was a deliberate mistake or not. “I hope the new Mary Popkins is adventuring in your mind or better still that poems are bubbling up,” he wrote.52

  The next month, Orage died suddenly of a heart attack. With the loss of yet another soulmate and listener, AE became even more melancholy. He was about to sail away for the last time, to the United States, returning home to London fatally ill.

  Pamela would soon be thirty-five. Too old to be a nymph, still not a mother. She decided to dedicate Mary Poppins to her own dead mother, and began the search for the next Mr. Banks.

  II

  The Mother

  1934–1965

  ‘Out of the sky she had come, back to the sky she had gone.’1

  ALLORA, MAY 1906

  Tucked into her bed, Lyndon could hear Aunt Ellie complaining to her mother.

  “The children are behaving abominably. Lyndon is the eldest and she must at least try to tidy up. The least she could do is put her toys away at night. My dear, I know money is hard to come by, but you really should think about advertising for a nanny.’

  Lyndon wished Mummy wasn’t so busy all the time, fussing over Moya. The baby was ten months old now, trying to walk but always falling over. Mummy never seemed to have a moment to just sit down and talk. Imagine if there was another mother in the house, someone as nice and sweet smelling as her, but funny too. Who might even make shopping fun, and take her for walks in the park. Instead, she had to act grown up and be a mother to Biddy and Moya when she was not even seven herself.

  Lyndon knew she looked really grumpy and ugly. Mummy would say, “Better be careful or the wind will change and you will look crabby forever.”

  She pulled the blankets up toward her chin. Lyndon could hear the wind whipping up around the corner, rustling the grass out the back by the stable. She loved her mother, truly, but if only she could have a fairy godmother as well.

  7

  Poppins and Pamela in Wonderland

  Who is Mary Poppins? In our mind’s eye we see Julie Andrews in a pastel Edwardian dress, smiling as cheerily as the star of a toothpaste commercial, as saccharine as the spoonful of sugar that helped the medicine go down, as jolly as a jolly holiday with Bert, as cheery as “Chim Chim, Cheree.” Such is the power of Walt Disney. The original Mary Poppins was not cheery at all. She was tart and sharp, rude, plain and vain. That was her charm; that—and her mystery.

  Mary Poppins is snap frozen in the 1930s, a nanny of her day and age, not one of today’s country girls dispatched by an agency to mind the offspring of working parents—always half wondering if they have a baby killer in the house. Mary Poppins is a nanny from Wonderland or Neverland, who strolls along the riverbank of The Wind in the Willows or through the Hundred Acre Wood of Winnie-the-Pooh. She and her colleagues could still be seen, mid-twentieth century, in Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens, in a buttoned up, belted topcoat and no-nonsense hat, pushing a high-wheeled Victorian pram.

  That was the workaday Mary Poppins who blew in to the Banks residence in 17 Cherry Tree Lane. But where did she come from, and where did she go when she left at the end of each book, lifted to the heavens by her parrot-headed umbrella or a runaway merry-go-round? Why did she have to go? Children, academics, reporters, and readers from Sweden to Trinidad, from the 1930s to the 1980s, all wanted to know. Pamela Travers brushed them off, always. From the day the first Mary Poppins book was published in 1934, she preferred silence or allusion.

  The many adventures of the magical nanny have their genesis in Pamela’s childhood—her loneliness as a little girl, daydreaming in Allora, her domineering great aunts, her precepts and rules for living—and in her love for AE and the mysteries of creation she heard from him and read in the poems of Yeats and Blake.

  Each of the female characters in Mary Poppins contains a little slice of Pamela. She appears in the guise of Jane, the eldest child of the Banks family; as her mother, Mrs. Banks; as Miss Lark, Miss Andrew, Mrs. Corry; a grab bag of weird and magical hangers-on; and as Mary Poppins herself.

  Mary Poppins represented one of Pamela’s most treasured beliefs: that a woman passes through three phases of life—first maiden, then mother, then crone. By crone, she did not mean a doddering old woman hobbling along with a stick. Her crone was a woman who had “gathered up all the threads of life, and all they’ve found and known, and had it there as wisdom.”1

  Mary Poppins has the superficial manner of a nymph or virgin waiting for the right admirer. But her next layer is one of a nurturing mother, not an absentminded one, like Mrs. Banks, but a mother sensitive to the needs of children, emotional and physical. That is why all children love her so much, why her disappearance is like a death, not like the death of a mother of young children but the death of a mother whose adult children have grown wise from her loving care. But peel back another layer and Poppins is revealed as a crone or grandmother, imparting the wisdom of the ages, a witch or wise woman. All these feminine qualities Pamela found, and loved, in fairy tales, the “marvellous heroines, the villainesses—all the women. I think the fairy tales have a very great deal to tell us about the life of a woman. I think they are all really one person rolled into one and tell
us what we should be.”2

  She said every woman could find her prototype or a model for her role in life in the fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm. They might be apparently passive heroines, such as Cinderella or the Goose Girl, a simple maiden like the Miller’s Daughter, a heroine like the sister in “The Seven Ravens,” who had to go to the end of the world—“to the sun and moon and stars and back”—to save her brothers, or the twelve dancing princesses who explored the mysteries of the world below our world. Or the grandmothers and witches in “Rapunzel” and “Hansel and Gretel,” or the numerous queens, wise women, and priestesses.

  Mary Poppins has been called the “mother Goddess,” a witch, the good fairy, a wise woman, the “ecstatic Mother” as exemplified in Artemis and Sophia,3 Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary. She is said to contain Zen secrets or to epitomize Zen. Professors have written books analyzing Mary Poppins. Earnest students and ordinary readers wrote to Pamela suggesting who Poppins might actually be. “You tell me,” she liked to tell them, and shrugged in mock amazement: “The readers tell me things I never dreamed.”

  Although she shares qualities with Peter Pan and with Alice in Wonderland’s surrealistic friends, the Queen, the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter, Mary Poppins is unique: lovable because of her mixture of magic and sternness, her fantastic abilities hidden behind the facade of an extremely ordinary woman.

  Walt Disney saw the fascination of Mary Poppins and, although his movie contained none of the mystique and symbolism of the original Mary Poppins books, it held enough magic to become a much-loved classic. Julie Andrews did not resemble the Mary Poppins created by Pamela and her illustrator, Mary Shepard. Andrews was sweet faced and exuded charm. The original Mary Poppins was never charming. Her appearance was based on a Dutch doll or peg doll that Pamela said she owned as a child. The doll had shiny, painted coal-black hair and a turned up nose, attributes she gave Mary Poppins, who also saw the world clearly through her rather small bright blue eyes. Mary had rosy cheeks, big hands and feet, and a bony frame. She wore shapeless coats and suits, cut to an unflattering low calf length, mufflers, gloves, sensible Mary Jane shoes and carried a businesslike handbag.

  The Poppins adventures were written over a fifty-four-year period, but in the stories nobody ever gets any older and the adventures have the freshness of tonight’s bedtime tale. The reader is led gently to the possibility that Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane might still exist. If Pamela was explaining it one more time she might tantalize the reader, “You will find it hard to find Cherry Tree Lane, exactly.” She once wrote that it was one of those byways not important enough to show up on a map.4

  Cherry Tree Lane appears to be in Kensington or Chelsea, but is definitely not in the most fashionable precinct of either suburb. A chemist’s shop stands on one corner, a tobacconist at the other. On one side of the street is the entrance to a park as big as the imagination of a child. Inside the grounds are a merry-go-round, a lake and classical statues. A row of cherry trees goes dancing down the middle of the street. On the other side is a handful of houses. The most eccentric, at one end, is the home of that cheery soul Admiral Boom. The house, built like a ship, is crowned with a gilt weathercock resembling a telescope. The garden is dominated by a flagstaff.

  An elderly spinster, Miss Lucinda Emily Lark, and her pampered hound, Andrew, live next to the Bankses. Miss Lark has the grandest home in the street, with two entrances, one for friends and relations, the other for tradesmen (not tradespeople—this is the 1930s). Number 17 is rather dilapidated and the smallest house in Cherry Tree Lane but somehow big enough to accommodate five children—Jane and Michael Banks, the twins John and Barbara, the new baby Annabel—Mr. George Banks and Mrs. Banks (whose first name is a mystery), a nanny who never stays long, a cook, Mrs. Clara Brill, a maid, Ellen, and an odd, odd job man, Robertson Ay.

  Mr. Banks can afford either a smarter house, or all those children, but not both. As a banker, he is keenly aware of budgets and often complains, as Pamela’s father complained in Allora, that there is no extra money to bring home today as “the bank is broken.” George Banks, balding, is neither handsome nor plain. He wears proper banker’s attire, bowler, suit, overcoat. George is short tempered and expects the worst. Once he threatened to leave home for good. He is finicky, even obsessive. Everything has a place and everything must stay in that place. Yet there is also something rather wistful and boyish about George. One day of the year—only one—he sings in his bath. He likes to smell the tulips in the garden and has a secret longing to be an astronomer. Just last summer, he told his children about the constellation called Pleiades, the seven sisters. He is forever hopeful that a new star might light up in the sky.

  Mrs. Banks seems vain and proud but is really terribly insecure and succumbs easily when Mary Poppins tells her she has no references, because producing references these days is frightfully unfashionable. Nor do smart people give their servants every third Thursday off each month. To be really chic, Mary tells Mrs. Banks, they should allow her every second Thursday off. Mrs. Banks is a bit silly, anxious and soft.

  Jane Banks is a proper little girl, quiet and thoughtful, occasionally naughty, and wishes so much that she was not the oldest. She broods sometimes and pretends she is a hen about to lay seven nice white eggs. Pamela told a university student in 1964 that the tale of Jane in the chapter “Bad Wednesday” laying imaginary eggs was “a definite element” in her own childhood.5 Michael, Jane’s younger brother, is like all younger brothers in children’s stories: naughty, quick to speak his mind and then to regret it.

  None of the servants is quite up to his or her duties. Oh, they cope, just, but when the unsuccessful nannies leave, the other servants fall apart. Not that Robertson Ay even needs to cope. A sleepyhead, not much more than a boy, Ay is supposed to shine the shoes and keep the lawns in order. Instead he snoozes all day in the broom cupboard or garden. Robertson Ay, we learn later, is not like the other servants but really one of Mary Poppins’s mystery gang, one of the Ancient Ones, the supernatural creatures from myth and fairy tale. He is the Fool or the Dirty Rascal to the Wise Woman of Mary Poppins.

  Not that we know, in the beginning, that Mary is anything but a servant with an unconventional way of arriving at the door. The Banks household is in a state of disorder if not chaos, as the previous nanny, Katie Nanna, has just disappeared. As Mrs. Banks writes advertisements to send to the newspapers for a new nanny, the East Wind suddenly flings Mary Poppins against the front door, complete with carpetbag, umbrella, shallow-brimmed straw hat, long scarf and a bad attitude.

  She gives the strong impression that she is doing the Bankses a favor by accepting their offer to become the new nanny. The children are astonished to see that she slides up the banisters and that from her ordinary-looking carpetbag she takes out a starched white apron, a large cake of Sunlight Soap, a toothbrush, a packet of hairpins, a bottle of scent, a small folding armchair, a package of throat lozenges, and a large bottle of dark red medicine that is as magic as Alice in Wonderland’s “Drink Me” bottle. Mary’s luggage and its contents seem rather like Aunt Ellie and Aunt Jane Morehead’s travel requirements, especially when it comes to the next layer of contents: seven flannel nightgowns, four cotton nightgowns, one pair of boots, a set of dominoes, two bathing caps, one postcard album, one folding camp bedstead, blankets and an eiderdown.

  Mary settles into the nursery for the night. When Michael asks her if she will stay forever, Mary displays her disagreeable habit of responding with a studied insult or threat. If he persists in this line of questioning, she will call a “Policeman” with a capital P.

  Mary Poppins seems the epitome of the punishing governess, the bullying woman who has an apt saying for every occasion, and who subdues children as they were subdued in the Victorian age, when they were seen and not heard. “Spit spot into bed” is her most famous order, but Poppins is an absolute compendium of instructions, cliches, declamations and proverbs, among them: Strike me pink; Early to
bed, early to rise; Curiosity killed the cat; Trouble trouble and it will trouble you; Don’t care was made to care. She carefully hides her compassion. Almost sadistic at times, Mary is never really nasty but often very sharp. She is a controlling force, making order from disorder, making magic, then never admitting magic took place.

  Mary has one great weakness: her vanity. She is endlessly fixing her hat and checking her clothes, always pleased with her reflection, and clearly believes in retail therapy. She is especially chirpy about her new clothes. Mary loves her blue coat with silver buttons, white blouse with pink spots, the hat with the pink roses, the hat with the daisies, the brown kid shoes with two buttons, white gloves, fur-trimmed gloves, and of course the parrot-headed umbrella, which is also her means of transport to the stars.

  Mary Poppins threatens to leave at a point of time which only she controls. She tells her charges she will be with them until the wind changes or until her necklace breaks. She never tells where she has comes from, where she intends to go or who she really is. But she leaves many clues. Like Francis of Assisi, she is close to animals and birds, with whom she can talk. Like Jesus, she helps the poor and weak. She understands the universe and seems to take part in its creation and renewal. She is known as the Great Exception, the Oddity, the Misfit.

  The shopkeepers and neighbors treat her with respect and bluster and bumble when she is around. Mary takes the Banks children on many adventures to visit her most peculiar friends and relations. It is the contrast between these adventures in Fairyland, or Wonderland, or Neverland, and the reality of life in Cherry Tree Lane and its environs that gives the Mary Poppins stories their special charm. The real world is one of teatime, and sensible shoes, and being tucked into bed, of the ice cream man, the butcher, fishmonger, the grocer and above all the nursery food, the gingerbread, raspberry jam, buttered toast, thin bread-and-butter slices, crumpets, plum cakes with pink icing, warm milk, baked custard, apples on sticks, lamb cutlets, wholemeal scones, arrowroot biscuits, porridge, coconut and walnut cakes, rice pudding with honey in it, macaroons, tapioca, conversation lollies, chocolate drops, sherbet and licorice.