Having been disciplined a little
they will receive great good
because God tested them and
found them worthy of himself
like gold in the furnace he tried them
and like a sacrificial burnt offering
he accepted them
in the time of their visitation they
will shine forth
and will run like sparks through the stubble
The congregation all sang the Twenty-third Psalm. Then Patricia Feltham read the lines from Cymbeline:
Fear no more the heat of the sun
nor the furious winter’s rages
thou thy worldly task has done
home art gone and ta’en thy wages
golden lads and girls all must,
as chimney sweepers come to dust.
Pamela had asked Ben Haggarty to give the eulogy. Haggarty was a storyteller and former actor who had read her first piece in Parabola, “The World of the Hero,” and felt his life transformed. This was what she wanted most, one of those young men who had always asked the best questions to say the last words for her.
The choir sang “God Be in My Head,” unaccompanied. The congregation rose to sing “He Who Would Valiant Be” and, as the coffin left the church, Pamela’s Gurdjieff group sang, spontaneously, “Lord of the Dance.” She, the dancer, had loved that song. Her body was cremated and her ashes placed in the churchyard garden of St. Mary the Virgin Church, overlooking the Thames at Twickenham. Pamela had said she wanted to be near her only family, the grave at Bovington long forgotten. All that marked the final resting place of Pamela, actress, writer, poet, was a plaque that read “Pamela Travers.” No dates, no details. Within the church and its grounds lay the remains of the poet Alexander Pope.
In September, probate was granted on her estate of £2,044,078. Camillus, now divorced, came to live at Shawfield Street. Cameron Mackintosh ran into trouble with Disney, as expected. He wanted his stage version of Mary Poppins to be completely different to the books and movie but thought it essential to have the best known songs from the Sherman brothers’ score. The Disney people would not allow the songs to be used. It was stalemate once again.
• • •
Pamela once said that if ever her friends held a memorial service for her, she wanted some lines read from Blake’s poem “Night,” one of his series of poems called Songs of Innocence. It began:
The sun descending in the west
The evening star does shine.
The birds are silent in their nest,
And I must seek for mine,
The moon like a flower,
In heaven’s high bower,
With silent delight
Sits and smiles on the night.
The words had carried her back to the night sky of Allora, to the moment when everything stood still at sunset, to the memory of the prickly grass digging into her bare shoulders, the lights shining from the house, her mother calling her in, “Lyndon, Lyndon…”
When she thought about who she really was, not Dr. P. L. Travers, but Helen Lyndon Goff, an Australian woman who had taken a circuitous journey of a hundred years, she knew the truth of the lines she often quoted from the American poet, Theodore Roethke: “You learn by going where you have to go.” As she said, “You can’t learn before you set out, can you? You go along the road, and you learn as you go.”13 Ouspensky had told her the spiritual quest was its own justification. He quoted T. S. Eliot: “To make an end is to make a beginning.” So it proved to be for Pamela Travers.
She spent her life searching for Mr. Banks. She never found him. All the Mr. Bankses on the way, from Lawrence Campbell to Allan Wilkie to Frank Morton, to Yeats, Orage, AE, Ouspensky, Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti, helped Helen Lyndon Goff grow into Pamela Travers. But in the end, she found her own identity, masked though it might be, through her own long search, conducted alone. She was, as she always knew she would be, the hero of a story—her own.
P. L. Travers’s mother, Margaret Goff
P. L. Travers’s father, Travers Goff
P. L. Travers aged twenty months
The Goff family residence, Allora, Queensland
Left to right: Lyndon, Moya and Biddy Goff at the stream opposite their home in Bowral, 1915
A youthful Travers in a checked shirt
Travers photographed in 1923
A publicity shot taken for Travers in the 1920s
Travers in a play produced by Allan Wilkie
Travers in costume for a production of Julius Caesar
Travers and George William Russell (AE) at Pound Cottage, Mayfield, 1934
Pound Cottage, Mayfield
Madge Burnand at Pound Cottage, 1930s
Mary Poppins arrives at the Banks home in Cherry Tree Lane
Jane and Michael Banks with Mary Poppins
Michael and Jane watch Mary go
The balloons illustration from Mary Poppins Comes Back
Detail of the balloons illustration: Travers and Mary Shepard holding their named balloons
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
Travers in 1941
Travers with Camillus in 1941
Travers with Camillus in Gstaad, 1947
Camillus aged 19
Julie Andrews with Tony Walton
“She shelters the posies on her hat in a Mary Poppins rain scene”
Julie Andrews and Walt Disney
“Andrews gets her face dirty in a chimney-sweep scene”
Police pass for Mary Poppins premiere, August 27, 1964
Julie Andrews, Walt Disney and Travers at the premiere of Mary Poppins, 1964
Travers in her residency at Smith College, 1966
“The books wrote themselves,” P. L Travers said of Mary Poppins
The character of Mary Poppins: from literary heroine to film star to advertising icon
Travers’s collection of mementos presented to the New York Public Library, including the original Dutch doll that was the model for the Poppins illustrations
Travers in 1966
Travers at home in Shawfield Street, Chelsea, 1995
Acknowledgments
Many people helped and supported me in the research and writing of this book but my greatest thanks go to P. L. Travers’s son, Camillus Travers, for allowing me access to the studio of his late mother, for his generosity with his time, and for his willingness to share his memories about his mother and his own life.
Three women have been vital in the decade it took for the book to develop from an idea to reality. Michele Field, who interviewed Travers in the mid-1980s, suggested a biography to me in 1990. Five years later, Alison Pressley enthused me once again and, through the long process to publication, has been a wonderful ally and friend. And through all the ups and downs, Lyn Tranter kept me laughing and kept me going.
To the librarians of the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales, my deepest thanks, particularly to Louise Anemaat, who catalogued Travers’s papers, to the manuscript librarian Paul Brunton, and to Rosemary Block, curator of oral history.
In Wellington, New Zealand, Rachel Lawson and Nicholas Lawson researched the Christchurch Sun. Their findings added immeasurably to research work already done by Dr. F. W. Nielsen Wright on Travers’s journalism in New Zealand.
In the United Kingdom and the United States, my thanks to Mary Shepard’s agent, Kathy Jakeman, for her generosity and kindness; to Ann Orage for her detailed work on Jessie Orage’s diaries; to George William Russell’s granddaughter, Pamela Jessup; to Camillus Travers’s brother, Joseph Hone, his sister, Sheila Martin, and his aunt, Sally Cooke Smith, for many very helpful memories about the Hone family.
To Doris Vockins (now Doris Bruce), Lucy Firrell and Andew Firrell in Mayfield, Sussex, thank you for the afternoons in the sun at Pound Cottage and your unstinting help.
My thanks also to Ellen Dooling Draper, Penelope Fitzgerald, Jules Fisher, Robert Gray, Dushka Howarth, Minette Hunt, Joy McEnte
e, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, Maureen J. Russell, Michael Theis, Frances White, the Maryborough Historical Society, the Allora Historical Society, Jane Knowles, archivist at Radcliffe College, the archivists at Smith College, Scripps College and Chatham College, the librarians at the National Library of Dublin, the British Library, the U.S. National Archives, the U.S. National Library, the City of New York Parks and Recreation department, the public affairs office of the U.S. Library of Congress, and the staff of Parabola magazine, New York.
Thanks also to Faber and Faber and to the Trustees of the Eliot Estate for permission to reproduce the quotation from “Little Gidding” by T. S. Eliot.
Thank you Victor, Lucy and Annie Carroll for accompanying me on “the Pamela hunt” through the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom and for adding to the pleasure of traveling with a purpose.
Valerie Lawson is a journalist and author who lives in Sydney.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
DISCOVER MORE GREAT BOOKS AT
authors.simonandschuster.com/Valerie-Lawson
Other books by Valerie Lawson
Connie Sweetheart: The Story of Connie Robertson
The Allens Affair
We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
Notes
PREFACE
1. Letter from Ted Hughes, undated, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
2. P. L. Travers, About the Sleeping Beauty (London: Collins, 1975).
3. Feenie Ziner, “Mary Poppins as a Zen Monk,” The New York Times, May 7, 1972.
4. “A Remarkable Conversation About Sorrow,” interview on June 23, 1965 by Janet Graham, Ladies’ Home Journal.
5. Letter to Staffan Bergsten, February 19, 1977.
6. Michael Holroyd, interview by Nigel Farndale, Daily Telegraph, July 4, 1998.
7. The late wind that cools Sydney after a hot summer day.
8. Boston radio station interview, 1965.
9. “A Remarkable Conversation About Sorrow.”
10. Ibid.
11. Ms. note written by P. L. Travers during World War II, Mitchell Library.
12. Salman Rushdie, interview by Nigel Williamson, The Times, April 3, 1999.
13. Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (New York: Random House, 1983).
PROLOGUE TO PART 1
1. Lecture notes prepared by P. L. Travers, 1947/8, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
1. THE REAL MR. BANKS
1. P. L. Travers, Johnny Delaney (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944).
2. Interview by Robert Anton Wilson, New Age Journal, August 1984.
3. Shusha Guppy, Looking Back: A Panoramic View of a Literary Age by the Grandes Dames of European Letters. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); letter to Staffan Bergsten, February 19, 1977.
4. Westpac archives.
5. The AJS bank continued under that name until 1906 when it was re-formed as the Australian Bank of Commerce. Eventually it became part of the Bank of New South Wales, then Westpac.
6. P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins (London: Gerard Howe, 1934).
7. Letter to Staffan Bergsten, February 19, 1977.
8. Helen Morehead’s memoirs, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
9. David S. Macmillan, “R.A.A. Morehead” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 2 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press; London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967).
10. P. L. Travers, Aunt Sass (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941).
11. Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland (Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1982).
12. Letter to Staffan Bergsten, February 19, 1977.
13. Article by P. L. Travers in The New York Times, October 20, 1962.
14. “Only Connect,” speech to the Library of Congress, October 31, 1966.
15. Letter to Staffan Bergsten, February 19, 1977.
16. Letter from Travers Goff to Margaret Goff, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
17. Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (New York: Random House, 1983).
18. “A Radical Innocence,” The New York Times, May 9, 1965.
19. “A Remarkable Conversation About Sorrow,” interview on June 23, 1965 by Janet Graham, Ladies’ Home Journal.
20. “A Radical Innocence.”
21. “A Radical Innocence”; “Only Connect”; interview by Michele Field, Good Weekend, January 25, 1986; Roy Newquist, Conversations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967); “A Remarkable Conversation About Sorrow.”
22. Interview by Melinda Green, 1976; “The Primary World,” Parabola, 1979; Conversations; “Only Connect”; “Joyful and Triumphant, Some Friends of Mary Poppins,” McCall’s, May 1966; “The Black Sheep,” The New York Times, November 7, 1965; “A Remarkable Conversation About Sorrow”; “Looking Back,” The New Yorker, October 20, 1962; interview by Robert Anton Wilson, New Age Journal.
23. “A Remarkable Conversation About Sorrow”; Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn; “A Radical Innocence.”
24. “The Primary World.”
25. “Silver Lake, Golden Window,” Good Housekeeping, April 1948.
26. Westpac archives.
27. Cicely Goff’s birth certificate.
28. Travers, Aunt Sass. In this account of Helen Christina Morehead, she was called “Aunt Sass” or “Christina Saraset.”
2. ELLIE AND ALLORA
1. P. L. Travers, Aunt Sass (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941).
2. “A Radical Innocence,” The New York Times, May 9, 1965.
3. Letter from Travers Goff, August 5, 1905, Mitchell Library.
4. “Silver Lake, Golden Window,” Good Housekeeping, April 1948.
5. “The Black Sheep,” The New York Times, November 7, 1965.
6. Ms. note by P. L. Travers, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
7. “Meet the Creator of Mary Poppins,” interview by Ian Woodward, Women’s Weekly, 1975.
8. Ms. note by P. L. Travers at Shawfield Street, Chelsea.
9. Good Housekeeping, April 1948.
10. “Where will all the stories go?” Parabola, 1982.
11. Lecture notes prepared by P. L. Travers, 1947/8, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
12. “The Primary World,” Parabola, 1979.
13. Letter to Staffan Bergsten, March, 20, 1977.
14. “Now Hail and Farewell,” Parabola, 1985.
15. Boston radio station interview, 1965.
16. “A Remarkable Conversation About Sorrow,” interview on June 23, 1965 by Janet Graham, Ladies’ Home Journal.
17. “That Friend,” Good Housekeeping, November 1950.
18. “A Radical Innocence.”
19. Lecture notes prepared by P. L. Travers, 1947/8, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
20. Ms. note in Mitchell Library, Sydney.
21. Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (New York: Random House, 1983).
22. Interview with Camillus Travers, 1997.
23. Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn.
24. “Letter to a Learned Astrologer,” Parabola, 1973.
25. “Fear No More the Heat of the Sun,” Parabola, 1977.
26. “The Black Sheep.”
27. “I Never Wrote for Children.” The New York Times, July 2,1978.
28. Shusha Guppy, Looking Back: A Panoramic View of a Literary Age by the Grandes Dames of European Letters. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
29. “Now Hail and Farewell.”
30. Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn.
31. “A Remarkable Conversation About Sorrow.”
32. “Threepen
ny Bit,” article by P. L. Travers in ms. form, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
33. Interview by Melinda Green, 1976, typescript, Mitchell Library.
34. “Fear No More the Heat of the Sun.”
35. Roy Newquist, Conversations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967).
36. Boston radio station interview, 1965.
37. “A Radical Innocence.”
38. “Only Connect,” speech to the Library of Congress, October 31, 1966.
39. “Letter to a Learned Astrologer.”
40. Ms. note in Mitchell Library, Sydney.
41. P. L. Travers, Johnny Delaney (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944).
42. Letter to Dushka Howarth, November 1981.
43. Letter to Professor Staffan Bergsten, February 19, 1977.
44. “Threepenny Bit.”
45. Letter to Staffan Bergsten, February 19, 1977.
46. Travers, Aunt Sass.
3. OLD ENGLAND IN AUSTRALIA
1. The Triad, September 10, 1923.
2. Ms. note in Mitchell Library, Sydney.
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers Page 35
