Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  Instead, Allan Wilkie resembled a weedy Lorenzo proclaiming his love to a stout and elderly Jessica. A felt hat was jammed down on his head, a cigarette butt clung to his lower lip, trembling as he spoke but retaining its perilous position. “Is this the girl?” Wilkie asked.

  “This is she.”

  “Oh well, we’ll try her anyway.”

  Wilkie looked down his chiseled Roman nose at Lyndon. He instructed her to run around a cluster of chairs masquerading as a fountain in a village marketplace. “You’re a girl of the town being chased by a young man—go ahead!”

  Lyndon obediently ran. One of the young actors caught her and kissed her full on the lips—violently, she later said. Young and innocent, she had never been kissed that way. Lyndon slapped him very hard, leaving a flaming hand mark on his face. He put his hand to his cheek. According to Lyndon he sulked to Wilkie, “Don’t take her, she’s dynamite,” but Wilkie merely replied, “On the contrary, that’s why I shall take her. We need a bit of dynamite around here. Good, now we’ll do the scene again.”

  It is hard to know who felt the biggest thrill from the chase, the kiss, the smack, then the stinging cheek—Wilkie, Lyndon, or the actor. Wilkie asked her what else she could do. Lyndon boasted Juliet, Rosalind, Miranda, Portia, Beatrice, Mistress Ford, and even Lady Macbeth. Wilkie smiled at the last. Was she afraid of hard work? Hardly. Did she want to try? “Oh yes!”

  She was engaged at two pounds a week.7

  • • •

  This time, Lyndon had less trouble with her mother and Aunt Ellie. After all—Shakespeare! She began her season with Wilkie as an understudy, sitting in the wings each night, in anguish for Ophelia, weeping out loud for Juliet. The leading lady, Frediswyde, was never ill. In the end, taking pity, Wilkie gave Lyndon a part as Anne Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

  The debut was in March 1921. Trembling with fright, she could barely speak her first line, “The dinner is on the table; my father desires your worships’ company.” At the end of the engagement, Wilkie was satisfied with his Sydney reception despite the acerbic reviews in The Triad, which closely followed his company’s fortunes. The critic, who hid behind anonymity, had found Wilkie’s Mark Antony “eminently suburban…woefully deficient in light and fire” while the extras were “some of the queerest on this planet.”8

  Wilkie’s plans included a new tour of Australia then New Zealand. Lyndon was desperate to travel, too. No, said Aunt Ellie, she was far too young to leave home with those theatricals. “Wait another year,” said her mother. Lyndon sobbed as she waved the train good-bye.

  In those few months on stage, Helen Lyndon Goff began her transformation from gauche little Lyndon to sophisticated Pamela. Her stage name, she decided, had to change. There was no romance in the name Lyndon and Goff was well, gruff, hardly mellifluous. There was, though, resonance in her father’s Christian name, Travers. That sounded actressy. Lyndon knew of a Pamela from the Goff family tree. She thought it a pretty name whose rhythm flowed with Travers. In time, she grew to resemble her new name. Its translation from the Greek was “all sweet” or “all loving,” and the name Pamela became increasingly fashionable in the 1920s and ’30s. The new Pamela cultivated her hair into a frizzy halo and in publicity photographs learned to tilt her head beguilingly, so that she could gaze down at the camera through heavy lidded eyes. Pamela had full lips above a neat pointed chin, but her face was too long for true beauty.

  In the spring of 1921 she was asked to tour New South Wales with a repertory company presenting a handful of plays, among them Charlie’s Aunt and the melodrama East Lynne. They would also stage scenes from Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice, in which she was to play a boy’s part, Lorenzo. “The family sat in council with me and the upshot, one very starry evening, I set out from Sydney with other actor people to get six months outback experience.”9 Pamela did not reveal the name of the touring company, but it was likely to be a group put together by the Fullers. East Lynne and potboilers such as Her Road to Ruin were favorites of Ben and John Fuller’s Dramatic Players and had already been staged often in Sydney at the Grand Opera House.

  The troupe included a leading lady, a leading man, a juvenile male lead whose sad face resembled a very thin horse, an old man who played character parts and, onstage, hid his lines in a dilapidated Shakespearean hat, and Pamela, the female “juve.” They traveled in a lorry piled high with costumes, curtains and scenery. The six men rode Roman-chariot–style on top while the two women sat in the cab with the driver.

  These were glorious days, seen in retrospect as if in a musical set in the 1920s, Salad Days or The Boyfriend, perhaps, or a chapter from The Good Companions. The tour was the making of Pamela, or, as she once put it primly, “this little company was excellent training for me, not only as an actress but as a person.”10 Waiting in the wings some nights, she saw the leading man look toward her with only slightly disguised lust. Pamela felt a surge of power. She knew she was at her peak of sexual magnetism.

  “Wattle peered at us with little golden eyes” and the lorry sped through arches of eucalyptus. “The merriest group of barnstormers in the world” rehearsed new parts, sang, told stories and shopped at farmhouses for milk and oranges. Sometimes they journeyed by the light of the moon, so bright it turned the creeks silver. On the Dorrigo Mountains, inland from Coffs Harbour on the New South Wales north coast, the driver was so nervous he told Pamela and the leading lady to get out and take the next car to town. Of course they refused. Silly! With that, the wheels slid over the edge of a precipice. They all clambered out to push the lorry back to safety. Once they lost the juvenile boy over the back of the lorry, which rattled so loudly no one heard his shouts for help. He arrived at the theatre hours later, his feet and legs brown with dust, after a thirteen-mile trek.

  The troupe often arrived at the village town hall just in time for the evening performance. The show might start at quarter to nine, the locals patiently waiting on benches with their lemonade, oranges and peanuts as the men pinned up curtains and hammered scenery into place. Pamela played Joyce, a servant to Lady Isabel in East Lynne, and Salarino in The Merchant of Venice. But “I longed to be in anything…I greeted each day with ardor,” she wrote later.

  Wilkie wrote to ask her to rejoin his company. Pamela traveled to Melbourne to find the company rehearsing Julius Caesar. “I loved the welcome the company—theatrical diehards—gave me, a novice. It gave me a kind of cachet of importance among the new ones but my smugness vanished under the sarcastic utterances of the GM at rehearsal.”

  Wilkie sometimes nodded approval, but the acknowledgment was rare and never came at just the right time, when she felt that she really was rather sweet as Titania. In this season, Pamela played a handmaiden to Olivia, a lady to Portia, a forest boy in As You Like It, a scarlet-garbed attendant to Lady Macbeth, then moved on to play Jessica, Olivia, Viola, Juliet and Lady Macduff. Now she was earning £4 a week and beginning to attract her first press notices, which she carefully clipped and posted to her family. “I told you so!” was the unwritten message.

  She performed the opening dance in Julius Caesar, in “a very abbreviated green garment with flowers in my hair, cymbals in my hands. I stood trembling with a crowd of revelers and waited for the first note of my dance…” 2, 3, 4, there it was! “Clash of cymbals, clamor of the stage crowd, flowers tossed in the air and curtain up! How I kept in time with the music I don’t know as my ears were dulled with the roaring of vigorous supers all determined to earn their night’s wage of 6 shillings and eightpence,” she wrote later. Pamela wanted her mentor’s approval; Wilkie managed an approving nod one night.11

  Back in Sydney’s Grand Opera House in April 1922, Pamela was cast as Titania in Wilkie’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Triad critic wrote “Miss Pamela Travers was human, all too human, as Titania. Whenever Titania is not all pure fire in ecstasy, the less Titania she. On the whole, this production was a workmanlike essay holding much mirth but little thrill.�
��12

  • • •

  Pamela’s acting career ended soon after a tour to New Zealand where, in sleepy Christchurch, she met a man who led her to a new life as a writer. It happened purely by chance when the troupe reached the southern city. Drunk with the freedom from any responsibility and tipsy with wine, the actors danced barefoot through the city square, playing leapfrog and giggling at the thought of the provincials tucked up in their beds.13 The locals ogled the traveling players. One journalist from the afternoon paper, the Christchurch Sun, was so entranced by Pamela he started to follow her from town to town on his motorcycle.

  From the evidence of her later writing, she fell for him with a sudden passion. In “Surrender,” a poem written in 1923, Pamela remembered how her heart had once been free from “all emotion’s clamor”…until “the tree quivers before the storm…of searing love. Oh joyous overthrow…I feel your kisses warm upon my mouth.”

  “Surrender” appeared in an issue of The Triad on the same page as her poem “On a Circle of Trees in the Christchurch Gardens.” Here in the gardens, she believed that

  young Psyche, tremulous with love’s pain,

  first knew the wine of Eros’s drooping mouth.

  In the gardens, Diana might have paused,

  mocking the lovers whom her deep eyes

  led to woo her heart from chasteness to delight.14

  Pamela had also written a prose version of the “Circle of Trees” poem, which she described as “a poetic imaginative piece,” or “a fantasy about gardens.” She showed it to the journalist, who in turn showed it to his editor, who published it. “The editor asked me to write for him regularly, articles and poems. I was so pleased at seeing my writing in print that I began to bombard the paper with material and the editor accepted it all.”15

  When the troupe returned to Sydney, she continued to write each week for the “Women’s World” section of the Christchurch Sun. Her column was called “Pamela Passes: the Sun’s Sydney Letter.” The acceptance of her work without effort, and the thrill of the byline, meant that “I knew I had found the love of my life, writing.”16

  Her output in Australia grew from an occasional comic essay or romantic verse to a more serious stream of freelance contributions. Among her outlets were the Shakespearean Quarterly, associated with Allan Wilkie, Vision and The Green Room. Pamela considered a career as a journalist, although an editor once warned her against that addiction. “You’re no journalist. Get away before you lose your soul.” He had been caught in the trap of news making, but she must not be, he told her.17

  Her father’s voice continued to haunt her with his tales of Yeats and Russell. A real writer was not a journalist, she knew, but a poet. The prime place for an aspiring or established poet was page seven of The Bulletin, captioned “Various Verse” and featuring the work of David McKee Wright, Zora Cross, Roderic Quinn, Jack Lindsay and Mary Gilmore. On March 20, 1923, Pamela joined their ranks with an Irish fantasy called “Keening,” in which she wrote of Iosagan, the Irish name for Jesus.

  The poem began:

  When I was young in green Athlone

  The young Iosa played with me

  Through the winter of 1923, The Bulletin published many of her poems, most referring to romance, stars, children sleeping, mouths and kissing. In one, she wrote of her own “wild, wild hair” and “tremulous breasts”; in another of her “pagan-scarlet mouth.” The most erotic, called “The Lost Loves,” began:

  Now that he’s gone and I am rapture-free

  I shall return to my old loves again,

  And seek from them some solace for this pain

  That hangs me high upon a sorrowing tree.

  The rope of kisses wound about my throat

  Is tied with dreams upon a bough of grief,

  Curving with my sad weight, and every leaf

  A tear that I have wept for Love’s lost note.

  It spoke of her lover’s “questing hands” and his “dream dark” head at her breast. Another poem, “Glimpse,” described a man’s “proud kiss-courting mouth” and his “dark head silk-pillowed on my arm.”

  In June 1923 Pamela wrote of the “Raggedy-taggedy Gipsy Man,” which looked both backward to the gypsies of her youth and forward to two characters in her Mary Poppins stories, Bert, the itinerant matchman, and Robertson Ay, the servant-fool. But the most remarkable reference to the Mary Poppins of the future came in The Bulletin on July 5, 1923, in “The Nurse’s Lullaby”:

  Hush, little love, for the feet of Dusk

  Stir softly through the air.

  And Mary the Mother comes to set

  A star within your hair

  Sleep, O heart, for the candle-light

  Out of darkness gleams,

  And Mary’s mouth on your mouth shall fill

  The drowsy night with dreams

  Another poet published by The Bulletin was Frank Morton, who, Pamela knew, ran The Triad, which she thought “a rather good literary paper.”

  Although the focus of The Triad, edited by Charles Baeyertz, was literary, the magazine also boasted of its “outstanding coverage of Life, People, Places.” Contributors included the poets Kenneth Slessor, Hugh McCrae and Mary Gilmore, and the writers Dulcie Deamer and Hector Bolitho.

  But, as it was run on a shoestring, the editor and his business partner, Frank Morton, filed the bulk of the copy. Morton, who wrote under numerous pseudonyms, was to become the third Mr. Banks in Pamela’s life. He sensed the energy and daring in Pamela, offering her regular work on the magazine. Aunt Ellie was again mortified. “Writing! Why can’t you leave that to journalists!” Ellie thought Pamela had probably inherited the writing gene from her great uncle Edward, who wrote a book of religious sonnets, privately printed. Pamela sniffed that her talent had come from her own father.18

  Unlike Lawrence Campbell and Allan Wilkie, both performers, Morton was an observer. While Campbell and Wilkie set out to impress Pamela, Morton was more interested in her mind. Or so he said. In fact, he was a total sensualist. Even his memorial notice in The Triad pulled no punches, admitting his detractors charged him with “lewd hedonism.”19

  Morton had been married for over thirty years but described himself in print as “the Great Lover, a disillusioned yet still dangerous roué.”20 As a journalist he worked in Singapore and in Calcutta, wrote as a special correspondent on the Indian tour of the theosophist Annie Besant, and contributed to The Bulletin’s literary pages, then edited by the grumpy A.G. Stephens, with whom he enjoyed a long-running feud over who was the better editor. Morton worked for the daily press in New Zealand and founded The Triad there. He joined the Australian edition of The Triad in 1915 and published volumes of poetry, including an erotic poem, “The Secret Spring.” Morton was an odd and heady combination: a poet, a Don Juan, a gourmet, and a journalist so experienced he could write about summer fruit or French literature with equal speed and ease.

  Pamela’s first published work in The Triad, in March 1922, was a poem called “Mother Song.” She wrote under the byline Pamela Young Travers. This was the first and only time she used the name “Young,” which she undoubtedly felt. “Mother Song” was an unabashed piece of sentimentality, notable only for its mention of stars, the theme of so much of her later work, the phrase “time for bed,” one of Mary Poppins’s favorite orders, and the idea of a flying angel, in the form of the Dustman.

  Little son,

  You must soon be sleeping;

  Baby stars are peeping,

  One by one.

  ‘Time for bed!’ . . .

  Hear the Dustman crying,

  As he comes with flying

  Wings outspread . . .

  Morton and Baeyertz promised to publish her poetry, but what they really wanted was a sharp writer for the women’s column. The Triad’s bylines included a few women’s names, some of which may have been pseudonyms for Morton himself, especially the morose sounding Susan Gloomish. For three years, a Laline Seton Grey wrote every month under the
umbrella headline “From a Woman’s Standpoint.”

  In May 1923, when Pamela began to work at The Triad’s Castlereagh Street offices, the Sydney press had been busy hiring women editors and launching new women’s sections. The new Daily Guardian ran a regular women’s page of society gossip, fashion and shoppers’ prizes, the Daily Mail gave women’s news more and more space, while Smith’s Weekly recruited the flamboyant actress Ethel Kelly as its society writer.

  Morton and Baeyertz, who had seen the great success of the catty yet witty “Women’s Letter” at The Bulletin, gave Pamela a luxurious free rein to fill four or more pages an issue under the new headline, “A Woman Hits Back.” She could range from verse, to satire, to journalism, to fantasy. Pamela was both overjoyed and overawed. This seemed to be a dream job. She leapt in with unfocused, scattergun energy. (Morton and Baeyertz were the kind of editors who edited at long distance. Pamela once wrote that “the editors were not often to be found in the office, being too busy chasing Romance outside.”)

  She revealed more of herself than she knew in her pithy paragraphs, snippets, short stories, reportage, reviews, verses, snatches of overheard conversation, attempts to write in the style of the famous, observations of Sydney and its people, and thoughts on Australia. She wrote of love gone wrong and what men wanted, of desire, fantasy, feminism and memories of childhood.

  The style varied wildly. Her strong suits were direct descriptive journalism and an ear for dialogue. Her weaknesses were occasional flights into purple prose or attempts at short stories set in places she could only imagine, such as Galway. Much of her work was tremulous poesy (a word she loved), in the style of Tennyson with references to Yeats.

  But, perhaps to please Morton, erotic verse and coquetry ran powerfully through her pieces. Alongside them, The Triad published advertisements for Morton’s soft porn books such as Pan and the Young Spinster and Other Uncensored Stories. Among her phrases of sexual longing, Pamela wrote of swooning “deep in an ecstasy of love,” and in another poem yearned