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

by Valerie Lawson

  Pamela’s instincts took her to him in London. It was obviously very serious. AE was going to the lavatory every few minutes. At last, in despair, she brought him all the medicines she already had stashed away in the medicine cupboard for enteritis. They didn’t work, but AE was cheered when she told him how long she had suffered enteritis without it getting worse. Pamela thought he looked gray, and she begged him to see a specialist.5

  Her own doctor recommended one. AE promised that if he didn’t get better in a week, he would see the man. In the meantime, Munro decided to call in a specialist himself. AE saw a surgeon in Cavendish Square who X-rayed him seven times and pronounced diarrhea in the lower bowel and constipation in the upper bowel. He amused the doctor by telling him then of the chakras, the seven spiritual centers of the body, to which the doctor replied, “Oh surely not, Mr. Russell.”6

  Pamela asked AE to stay at Pound Cottage, where she could nurse him in peace, among the early greenery and bluebells, but he felt “I must postpone all thoughts of shifting to the country until the doctor gives his decision.”7

  Although Pamela was living mainly in Pound Cottage with Madge, she traveled to London often to visit the office of the New English Weekly, then edited by Philip Mairet and directed by a board that included Jessie Orage, the American widow of its founding editor, A. R. Orage. During 1935 Pamela became close friends with Jessie, a tall, fair woman who was descended from generations of Connecticut clergymen and scholars.8

  That year, Pamela sometimes stayed at Jessie’s apartment when she visited London. For many years, Jessie kept a diary whose pages reveal much of Pamela’s life for the next decade, sometimes in detail, but at other times in mysteriously allusive phrases. The diary shows that by April 26, 1935, Pamela and Jessie “talked all night,” as they did again the next evening. When Pamela stayed at a hotel, the two women had breakfast together and Pamela often invited Jessie and her two young children, Dick and Anne, to stay at Pound Cottage. By the end of May, Jessie was writing in her diary “I like her so much.”

  The two women had been calling on AE in London who was, by then, very ill. On June 14, he signed a new will. A week later he traveled to Bournemouth by train with Dr. Munro and Charles Weekes, a friend from London who had been his publisher and agent. AE had decided to stay at Havenhurst, the convalescent home of a Miss Phoebe Myers. He gave up his flat at Tavistock Place—the specialist thought he would be better out of London. At Havenhurst, overlooking the sea, he lay in a deck chair under the trees.

  On July 4 he wrote Pamela a card, which she found an odd way of writing, for him,9 saying, “I don’t know how long I will be here. This is a lovely place but I wonder if I will ever get better. I am no further in spite of sun, sea air, kindness, that I often feel my holiday in this place is nearly over. Thanks, dear P, for the invitation [to Mayfield] but I can hardly rise out of a chair.”10

  AE began to write farewell letters to friends, asking every day if there was news for him from Yeats. There never was. He asked Munro to write to Pamela to tell her he needed “a serious operation for stoppage.” By then the doctors had discovered secondary growths. Pamela rang Dr. Munro to learn that AE had only a month or so to live. Munro told her that the doctors had never examined AE’s rectum until he got to Bournemouth. A new doctor had been called in, and after the examination said he must have a surgeon. It was the surgeon who broke the news, and he was so moved by the way AE received it that he broke down himself and had to leave the room.11

  The news had come on July 9. The following day, AE underwent a colostomy operation at the Stagden Nursing Home. Pamela could bear it no longer. On Saturday she drove down from London to Bournemouth, where she booked a room at Havenhurst. She was greeted by William Magee, AE’s friend, another writer (who wrote under the name John Eglinton). “I’m glad you’ve come,” Magee told her. “He keeps asking, and I can’t make up to him for you.”12

  In the morning, she visited AE. Pamela sat on the chair by his bed and put her head on his pillow. He lifted his hand and put it on her hair and said, “You’re a kind, sweet girl.” She found him terribly changed. Pamela thought he looked like a prince, the gray of his beard changed to gold, “the face so slender and dear and the eyes so deep and blue. Oh…I could not restrain my tears.” She managed to say she had come to be near him, that she would not leave him. AE asked for news of Mary Poppins Comes Back. She said she had brought it with her and would work at it there. She kissed his hand again, then left, asking if he would like her to look after his letters and he said, “Yes.”

  The next day she went to him, stood by his bed, and took down in pencil many farewell letters, including this letter to Henry Wallace:

  My dear Henry,

  This is to say good-bye to you. My illness can’t be cured either by medical or surgical means. I do not know how long I have to remain here, possibly less than six months, death does not make much matter, we understand each other.13

  She did not weep. The doctor asked if there was anything he could do. AE said, “Perhaps a little Chinese tea.”

  On Tuesday, back at Stagden, he asked if she had been swimming. They talked of tides. AE was in a much worse condition. He could not sign the letters, asking Pamela to sign on his behalf. They said their farewells. He said he wished he could have lived long enough to see her poems published. She said they would be dedicated to him. Pamela spoke to AE’s doctor; death was imminent. AE asked, again, if there was any message from Yeats. Nothing. Pamela sent the poet a cable: “AE dying and daily looking for a word from you.”

  She was relieved when Con Curran, one of AE’s Irish friends, arrived with news that the Irish Academy intended to recommend AE for the Nobel Prize. Until then, her only other support in Bournemouth had been Magee. She was on the phone each day to Charles Weekes, back in London.

  On Monday and Tuesday nights she hardly slept, waiting for a telephone call from the nursing home. As he lingered, she felt herself thinking, “Oh be gone my darling, do not wait. Be gone!” A nurse from Stagden called on Tuesday night, but it was only a false alarm. Oliver St John Gogarty sent her a telegram on Tuesday: “Kindly say if I shall be in time to see my friend Russell if I leave this evening Dublin.” She wired back, “Come quickly.”

  On Wednesday AE was given morphia and was mostly unconscious. Jessie heard that Pamela might need help and drove down from London in her black BSA sports car. Madge had also arrived. A telegram finally arrived that morning from Yeats: “Give my old friend my love.” AE was asleep when Gogarty came. He woke at four.

  Before he entered the room, Gogarty kissed Pamela’s hands and said, “Be ever blessed with this!” Then he straightened himself, “already weeping,” and went in. Before the door closed she saw Gogarty on his knees beside the bed, with his cheek on AE’s hand.14

  Outside in the sunny garden, his friends sat talking, waiting. Pamela looked up at a porch to see a bird wildly fluttering.15 AE fell into a deep sleep. They all knew he would die that night. The nurses suggested they wait in a downstairs sitting room, and they assembled there: Pamela, Madge, Jessie, Con Curran, Charles Weekes, who had returned to Bournemouth, Gogarty, Magee and Hector Munro. Pamela begged to see him one more time, but they said it was better if she did not go into his room. At about ten o’clock, Munro said AE’s breathing was now “only automatic, he himself has flown.” An hour later, Munro told them AE was “in the death rattle.” Pamela felt sure that could not be right and asked Munro to return upstairs. The doctor came down once more to tell Pamela that AE had passed into a peaceful sleep. He died at twenty-five past eleven.

  As if in church, Con Curran stood and said, “Let us now praise famous men.” Each one stood, the circle of friends. The moon was very full. Pamela thought everything was bright and rich and lovely at its zenith. Jupiter and Venus were high in the heavens and the moon was streaming out to sea.

  His body lay in the bed next morning. Pamela went up to the room. She had never before seen a dead man. He seemed noble, almost ma
jestic. In his hands he held two sprigs of rosemary Pamela had taken to him from Pound Cottage. She asked the nurse if they could be buried with him. Simone Tery arrived from France and wanted his coffin opened to photograph him but Pamela was glad the funeral home would not allow it. Sean O’Sullivan made three sketches of AE’s head, which, pressed into a pillow, resembled an ethereal halo. That night, Pamela followed the hearse to the mortuary. Charles Weekes’s oversized wreath sat propped up in the back seat of her car. She saw that the moon was gold and full over the sea. She noticed the smell of death in the mortuary.

  On Friday, Pamela and Con Curran traveled on the train with the coffin to Euston Station. Pamela remembered thinking, “I shall never travel again with my genius.” In London, they were met by the Irish high commissioner and Helen Waddell, an academic and London friend of AE’s. They went for a drink at Euston Station hotel where she had met him often. Brian Russell, AE’s elder son who remained at loggerheads with his father until the end, joined them later on the ferry to Ireland. AE had said he wanted to be buried there.

  His body was taken to Plunkett House, the old office of the Irish Statesman, where he had worked for so long. The coffin lay in the hall; his friends came with flowers. On July 20, AE was buried at St. Jerome Cemetery. Yeats and de Valera walked in the long funeral procession. Frank O’Connor gave the oration, quoting from an Arabic poet: “He saw the lightning in the east and he longed for the east, he saw the lightning in the west and he longed for the west, but I, seeing only the lightning and its glory, care nothing for the quarters of the earth.” Pamela had asked that words be spoken from Ecclesiasticus, the book of the Apocrypha: “Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us…the people will tell of their wisdom, and the congregation will show forth their praise.” The night he was buried was, she thought, as beautiful as the night he died. “Everything about him was lifted to its fullness and that is a triumph for a man.”16

  • • •

  In the days and years that followed his death, Pamela sifted through her memories of AE, raking them as a Zen garden is raked, making patterns and sense. She wanted to make clear she “wasn’t a fan of AE’s. I did nothing for him. What does a flower do for the sun? Nothing, it just lives and grows by it.”17

  She wrote to her friends that as Orage gave rise to intellect in men, so AE gave rise to the spirit in them. Although she had grown closer to him in recent years, he had not spoken much of his feelings to her. Pamela thought he accepted her constant need of money and her bad health as “part of my karma” but found out from others that both made him anxious. She had taken “everything” to him and from him all her good had come, material and immaterial. He knew she loved him. She had tried to tell him but it was too difficult.

  Pamela leant on Diarmuid Russell who arrived a week too late to see his father alive, and in August went to stay with Lota Law in Donegal for six weeks. She felt AE’s presence everywhere in Breaghy and Dunfanaghy, that sense of a soul hovering above, not yet willing to fly away. Lota Law looked after her like a mother.

  As C. S. Lewis said of grief, the emotion which so shocks the survivors is the sense of nervousness. She hadn’t been well since he died, and feared her sense of loneliness. The worst moments, as every grieving child, husband or wife knows, come when drawers and wardrobes must be cleared, when everyday reminders are spread before you, the hairbrush with hair still entwined, little poems on yellowing paper, safety pins carefully saved in a tin, a scarf that still smells of a neck you once loved to kiss.

  When Pamela sorted out his clothes and personal possessions she found a little reel of black cotton and a needle and realized how often he must have mended his own things. “It was simply heart breaking. He never let people do things for him. He was very contained and aloof…I find myself so often thinking, “I must tell AE” or “I must ask AE” and then—I realize!”18

  She no longer felt afraid of her own death, unless it might be a sudden disastrous one, with no time to compose her heart or mind. After AE died, she had terrible nightmares about him, as she did about her mother after her death. In the nightmares he was always ill and sad. But one night she dreamed he made her a little tucked apron. Then, when he found out she was cold, he produced a warm cloak, green, embroidered with rough lines of blue. This, she thought, was exactly what he did in life. AE wrapped up his friends warmly, but also had the gift of giving cold, stark comfort, the kind which said, “It’s your battle, you must fight it without weapons, you may lose but I can’t help you.”

  She bundled up copies of his collected poems for the nurses at Stagden—women whom she found full of tenderness. Pamela had hoped she could make a selection of his essays for magazines, but AE’s friend, the writer Monk Gibbon, had started something similar while AE was alive. Although AE didn’t like it, his son Diarmuid felt that Gibbon should have the first chance to compile the memoir.

  Yeats had suggested to Pamela that she should prepare a special selection of his Irish writings but she believed that this would step on Gibbon’s rights. Diarmuid asked her to write AE’s biography, but again, she felt unsure if she could do it well enough. How could you tell the “story of a soul,” as she saw his life?

  On her first visit back to Dublin after his death, she took lavender from the garden at Pound Cottage and planned to sprinkle it on his grave, but couldn’t tell which it was. There was still no headstone.19 Eventually a stone was erected, engraved with the lines: “I moved among men and places and in living I learned the truth. At last I know I am a spirit and that I went forth in old time from the self ancestral to labours yet unaccomplished.”

  • • •

  By late October 1935, after long days and nights spent at the typewriter, Pamela finished Mary Poppins Comes Back in an exhilarating burst of three weeks. It was published in both the United States and England in November, in time for the Christmas trade. Madge thought it was a better book than the first.

  Eugene Reynal, the American publisher, had been in England in October and was “kind and generous and touchingly gentle to me.” He asked her how much she needed to live on and assured her he would try to boost Mary Poppins’s sales in America. “And it wasn’t just bluff and hard headed business but something real and quick and human and generous.”

  Now, at thirty-six, Pamela felt fatherless, for there was “nobody to whom one may go for the deeps of life and being.” She wrote to friends that “AE would expect us to do now for ourselves what he did for us. And I will try to do that.”20

  9

  The Crossing of Camillus

  Only a woman as tough and brave as Ellie Morehead would embark on a sea voyage from Australia to England at the age of ninety. Aunt Ellie was determined, though, to attend the wedding in London of a great niece. She looked like a little old crone, shrunk to the height of Pamela’s shoulder, when the two women greeted one another in London in 1936.

  Pamela showed her great aunt the first of her Mary Poppins books, typed on the typewriter that Ellie herself had given her. The old lady stroked the cover, opened the crisp pages, then read the dedication to “My Mother.” She turned away so Pamela could not see her face. Ellie’s eyes reddened and her voice was unusually low when she looked again at Pamela. Meg would have been pleased, the old woman said. Ellie liked the cover. Then in her old grumpy way she asked, was the inside as good?

  Ellie Morehead returned to Australia the next day. From her home in Darling Point, Sydney, she wrote one last letter to her sister Jane, then living in England. The date was September 24, 1937. The letter ended: “I love you all. I have had a long and happy life. God bless you. Goodnight.” The last wavering strokes of her pen seemed to drift away like a plume of smoke. Ellie had died as her hand left the paper.1

  In her will, the old lady had been generous to Pamela. As well as her equity in the Colonial Sugar Refining Company and the Commercial Banking Company, Ellie left Pamela a share in all her real estate and personal estate. Now Pamela had three secure sources of in
come: the money from Aunt Ellie, royalties from her Mary Poppins books, and regular payments from the articles she wrote as a freelance journalist for the New English Weekly.

  She had been an occasional contributor to the journal since 1934, but in 1936 Pamela increased her output to three or four articles a month. Under the bylines “P. T.” and “Milo Reeve,” she reviewed many plays and films, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Peter Pan, from Snow White to King Lear. It was the age of the great stars of the London stage. She saw Ralph Richardson as Othello, Leslie Howard as Romeo and Alec Guinness as Hamlet. Dismissive of Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill, Noël Coward, the films of Walt Disney and many children’s writers, including A. A. Milne, Pamela praised most of Ibsen’s plays except Peer Gynt, which she dismissed as “a jumble.” Her sharp rebukes reveal an immature critic’s voice—the need to sound certain and authoritative at the expense of genuinely helpful or insightful comments. The only writers she consistently praised were G. B. Shaw and T. S. Eliot. By then, Eliot was a consultant and contributor to the New English Weekly.2 Glimpses of a more personal, everyday world peeped into her infrequent essays. She wrote of motor shows and dog shows (did she display her hound, Cu?), a picnic in winter, or her clapped out BSA sports car with its hole in the carpet and bent nail in the door.

  With her new streams of income, Pamela had enough to buy the freehold of Pound Cottage from the Glynne Estates. Not only did she now own her own house, but she decided, like Mrs. Banks, to hire help. Pamela knew that little Doris Vockins, who lived with her big family a ten-minute walk away, was about to leave school. She went to see her mother. Doris, who was fourteen in 1935, left school on a Friday and started work with Pamela as a daily maid the next Monday morning.