Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  In the real world live forlorn and rather lonely figures: Mr. and Mrs. Banks; Miss Lark, bedecked with brooches, bracelets and earrings, cared for by two maids, and mothering silly, silky, fluffy Andrew, who wears leather boots and is awfully spoilt; and the power-crazed Park Keeper, Frederick Smith, whose badge of authority barely disguises that he is a boy at heart. He is the voice of authority—no litter here, obey the rules, this won’t do at all, it’s against the regulations!

  In the unreal world live happier folk, fantastic creatures who float upside down, laugh so much they fly to the ceiling, or construct the universe by painting springtime or gluing stars to the sky. The fantastic people are often relations of Mary Poppins. The bald Mr. Alfred Wigg, who is her uncle, is round and fat. On his birthday (if it falls on a Friday) he floats in the air. Mr. Arthur Turvy, her cousin, mends broken things, even hearts, but every second Monday he is compelled by supernatural forces to do the opposite of everything he wants to do.

  Her first cousin, once removed, is a scary snake, the Hamadryad, also known as “the lord of the jungle.” Mary Poppins is also intimate with the ancient Mrs. Corry who runs the sweet shop and who knows Guy Fawkes, Christopher Columbus and William the Conqueror. Mrs. Corry likes to paste stars on the sky, breaks off her fingers (made of barley sugar), and has a soft and terrible voice. She is the Queen of the crones; Mary Poppins treats her with the utmost respect. The Bird Woman is another Ancient One, as is the old woman in a chapter called “Balloons and Balloons.” All the old people in the Mary Poppins books appear to be happy—crones who have found the meaning of life.

  The animals and birds in the stories are also members of Mary’s fantastic world. Mary Poppins speaks to Andrew the dog and to the starling who knows how to talk to babies. Animals at the zoo behave like humans, locking the humans in the cages and laughing at the baby children.

  Most of the adventures in the first Mary Poppins books, Mary Poppins (published in 1934), and Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935), are concerned with flight, flying, or simply the air. The first book begins with Mary being blown in on the East Wind and ends with her floating away on the West Wind. Men, women, children, and animals all float or soar in space—on laughing gas, over the moon, around the world with the whirl of a compass, over St. Paul’s, up to the heavens. A naughty starling flies in the window to talk to the babies and Maia, a star, flies down from the sky to do her shopping.

  In the second book, Mary arrives on the tail of a kite, a baby tells how she flew through the world, everyone flies on balloons and Mary disappears on an airborne merry-go-round. The Banks children understand simply this: out of the sky she came, and back to the sky she must go.

  The theme of stars constantly recurs in the Mary Poppins books, with the first imprints decorated with printed stars. Mrs. Corry glues stars, the Cow jumps about the stars, Maia is a visiting star, and shooting stars guide the way to the zodiac circus.

  Pamela constantly returned also to the idea of the unity or duality of things. She really did believe, along with the godlike snake, the Hamadryad, in the “Full Moon” chapter of Mary Poppins, that birds and beasts and stones and stars are all one.6

  The books can be read as an ode not just to “oneness” but to the dual nature of every creature, and of the world itself. Not only are there two distinct sides to Mary, goodness and sharpness, reality and unreality, and to George Banks—softness and crankiness—but there are twin babies, day and night, the sun and the moon, the East Wind and West Wind, the seasons and opposing points of the compass.

  Pamela’s fourth Mary Poppins book, Mary Poppins in the Park, published in 1952, was the most mystical, made up of discrete chapters or incidents which could have happened at any time. The first three books, culminating in Mary Poppins Opens the Door, published in 1944, have a different kind of symmetry: in each, eight to twelve adventures are sandwiched between chapters heralding Poppins’s arrival and departure. The adventures range from visits to Mary’s bizarre relations, whom she is often able to save from outlandish trouble, encounters with the neighbors in which Mary puts things to right, misadventures of the Banks children in disagreeable moods, and sometimes, a story within a story. The emotional climax of the books is a fantastic or surreal journey ending with an apotheosis. At the end of the adventures, which involve another dimension, someone leaves a sign or souvenir of the visit with Mary or the children. If the children point this out to Mary, she angrily denies anything has happened.

  The first two books mirror one another, even to chapter titles—“Bad Tuesday” and “Bad Wednesday,” “Miss Lark’s Andrew” and “Miss Andrew’s Lark,” “The Day Out” and “The Evening Out.” Mrs. Corry and the Bird Woman of the first book relate to the Balloon Woman of the second, and the Dancing Cow in the first book and Robertson Ay’s story of the second both tell nursery rhyme tales mixed with parable.

  In Mary Poppins, the most eerie and fantastic story concerns Mrs. Corry and her two big daughters Annie and Fannie. In Mary Poppins Comes Back, an equally frightening adventure, “Bad Wednesday,” is a cautionary tale; Jane in one of her rare naughty moods gets trapped in time, inside the lives of boys who live on a Royal Doulton bowl. She might have been there forever if Mary had not dragged her back home. The most charming adventure in Mary Poppins is “John and Barbara’s Story,” the tale of the baby Banks twins who know the language of the universe but only for a year or so, until they become fully human. The most wistful adventure concerns the visit of Maia, the second-eldest of the Pleiades, who has come to earth to do some Christmas shopping for her six sisters.

  Both Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back include chapters in which Mary guides the children to the secrets of the universe. In “The Evening Out” (Mary Poppins Comes Back), Mary is the honored guest at a huge circus in the sky. The Sun is the ringmaster while Pegasus, Orion, Pollux and Castor, Saturn and Venus are among the entertainers whose finale is the Dance of the Wheeling Sky.

  This great cosmic dance, with its literary and mythological connections, touches on Yeats’s theory, explained in his book A Vision, of wheels and gyres, and on the dance of the spheres in Dante’s Paradiso.7 “The Evening Out” reveals how much faith Pamela put in astrology and has its precursor in the Grand Chain dance of the animals in “Full Moon,” in Mary Poppins. One night—the night of Mary Poppins’s birthday—there is a full moon. The Banks children and Mary visit the zoo where the animals strut around outside, laughing and pointing at the antics of the humans inside the cages.

  In both “Full Moon” and “The Evening Out,” the children appear to encounter God in the shape of the Hamadryad and the Sun. In “The Evening Out,” Mary Poppins dances with the Sun who plants a kiss on her cheek. Next day, back at Cherry Tree Lane, the Sun’s lip marks can be clearly seen by the children, burnt into the flesh of her cheek.

  Mary Poppins Comes Back contains one chapter that takes the reader beyond the fantastic, to the realm of myth, religious symbolism and poetry. Called “The New One,” it is inspired by Wordsworth, and by AE’s favorite poet, William Blake, whom Pamela also revered. The “new one” is Annabel, the Banks’s new baby, who has traveled on a long journey through the universe to arrive in the Banks household. She is not just a time traveler, but part of the universe itself, every part, from the sea, to the sky, to the stars, to the sun. Eventually, she forgets her origins, just as her older siblings, John and Barbara, have forgotten their journey and how they could talk to the sun and wind. Pamela wrote “The New One” with no experience of staring in awe at a newborn baby of her own, with that instinctive feeling that a child has come from God.

  But she did have the example of Blake’s view of children, Songs of Innocence, and especially one poem in that series, “A Cradle Song,” which expresses each parent’s wonder at their baby and the feeling that this child must have come with the blessing of “all creation.” In his “Immortality Ode,” Wordsworth puts forward the same idea that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…trailing clouds of gl
ory do we come from God who is our home…” Staffan Bergsten, the Swedish academic who wrote Mary Poppins and Myth in 1978, pointed out that one of the poems of Blake’s Songs of Innocence was one Pamela applied to herself, “The Little Black Boy.”

  An adult looking for deeper meaning in the books will understand that Mary Poppins lives in a land where religion, fairy tale and myth combine. Despite her knowledge, she does not moralize, but simply allows the Banks children to experience mysterious other worlds. She tells parables and allegories. Lessons can be learned. The grass is always greener, but don’t always want what you haven’t got. Things are not what they seem; don’t judge a book by its cover. Have faith.

  Mary Poppins was a direct descendant of the heroines Pamela had loved since she was four. Her closest literary relative was Alice in Wonderland. Back in 1928, Pamela wrote in New Triad’s “London Letter” that everyone loved Alice who “delighted our mothers…The world began to change with the advent of Alice. How could Alice help changing a world that was preoccupied with stories of little children dying prettily and with their last breath bidding their parents not to grieve…Before Alice came…literature for the young was sentimental and unreal. It needed the cold philosophical thought of Alice to put things right.”8

  Mary Poppins has much in common with the girl who fell asleep one summer afternoon. Mary travels to Fairyland. Alice goes to Wonderland. Mary meets weird floating creatures and flies through the sky or sinks to the ocean floor. Alice sinks down a hole in the ground. Mary talks to animals who talk right back to her. So does Alice. Mary Poppins might be only a fantasy, just an ordinary nanny whose adventures happen in the dreams of the Banks children. After all, Alice dreamed her entire adventure.

  Mary springs from the same family tree as Peter Pan, another night flyer who comes to a London household as middle class and respectable as the Banks’s. The head of the family, Mr. Darling, loves his children but is always worried about money. The children, Wendy, John and Michael, are minded by a nanny who is in fact a sheepdog called Nana. (John and Michael are also the names of the two boys in Mary Poppins’s care.) Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up, arrives one night and teaches them how to fly to Neverland, his magic island. Mary Poppins, who seems to be twenty-seven but is in fact ageless, is also a children’s escort for night flying adventures.

  Both Alice and Peter Pan were part of Pamela’s childhood, but then again they were part of the childhood of every middle-class child in Australia and Britain. Alice in Wonderland was written by Lewis Carroll in 1866. Peter Pan by James Barrie was published as a play in 1904 and a story in 1911. Both helped create a new fashion for children’s fantasy, acknowledging the child as a reader with his or her own interests, yet, at the same time, appealing to adults.

  The Victorians had romanticized childhood and invented the idea of children’s books, but it took the Edwardians to make a cult of it. They were “fixated on children’s pursuits,” wrote Jackie Wullschlager, who studied Carroll, Barrie, A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame and Edward Lear for her analysis of Edwardian children’s literature, Inventing Wonderland.9 From the 1860s to the 1920s, England was awash with children’s fantasy books, among them the riverbank tales of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908, and the Bastable books, by E. (Edith) Nesbit, begun in 1898. Both Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett, with The Secret Garden in 1911, brought the idea of magic to the lives of children, while A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books in the 1920s were a reminder of a prewar idyll where Piglet, Eeyore, Pooh, Owl, Kanga, Roo and Tigger were as cozy in their Hundred Acre Wood as Mary Poppins, Jane, Michael and the twins were in their park next to Cherry Tree Lane.

  Mary Poppins drew on the traditions of nonsense and anarchy in Victorian children’s books and the romance, whimsicality and middle class settings of the Edwardian books. Like A. A. Milne’s characters, the Banks family and Mary herself would be perfectly happy in Harrods, frolicking about a Sussex garden or cozily tucked into a Chelsea or Kensington nursery. Wullschlager wrote of the Winnie-the-Pooh books “what draws both adults and children to the books is the ironic, biting tone mixed in with the safe setting.” Mary Poppins adopts the same tone, sharp, unsentimental, but with the certainty of the most comforting moments of childhood.

  Part of Mary Poppins’s appeal lies in her streak of rebelliousness, a quality she shares with the naughty Peter Pan, with Peter Rabbit created by Beatrix Potter, with Toad of The Wind in the Willows, and the peculiar fantasy animals of Wonderland. All these creatures influenced Pamela, who acknowledged her debt to the authors. But it annoyed, even “pained” Pamela when Mary Poppins was called a direct descendant of Peter Pan. “Must you say that?” she grumbled to one analyst of her work.10 Pamela’s literary heroine was Beatrix Potter. “To me she was one of the archangels.” She loved “her understatement, her bareness, her surrealism, her non explaining.”11

  Potter had said “I painted most of the little pictures [of Peter Rabbit, the Flopsy bunnies, Mr. McGregor and the rest] mainly to please myself.” Pamela loved that phrase, repeating it ad nauseam and adjusting it to apply to herself: “I write to please myself.” Potter’s sweet little animal tales, published from 1902, were on the Goff family’s bookshelves in Allora. Pamela devoured them all. She adopted some of the characteristics of Potter. Pamela liked to say she was educated by a governess (Potter was), she took up gardening with passion (Potter loved gardening), moved to a country house that looked like Potter’s animal farmhouses, and began her serious analysis of fairy tales. Potter illustrated traditional fairy tales and was so interested in “Cinderella” that she once wrote her own long and detailed version.12

  Pamela saw that each of Potter’s tales was built on a simple everyday happening, without sentimentality, but suggesting magic. Each had an element of irony, toughness, danger, suspense and even terror. She was impressed with the sudden, wild inconsequence which from time to time took Potter into a “mad and beautiful, almost surrealist dream where everything is a non sequitur.” And she loved the sweet femininity of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit and Mrs. Tittlemouse, four creatures who seemed to sum up women’s ability to nurture and put things to right.13

  But the essence of Beatrix Potter that appealed most to Pamela was the “non explaining.” Mary Poppins never explained and neither did Pamela. The reader had to discover where Mary went between sojourns with the Banks family. In one interview Pamela added, in an arch and infuriating way, that if she knew where Poppins went, she would have said. “She never explains, that is her chief characteristic, and I think it must be mine.” Then, Pamela threw in an extra piece of Alice in Wonderland–like nonsense: “I don’t not explain because I’m too proud to explain, but because if I did explain, where would we be?14

  “Mary Poppins is never explicit. Perhaps she has Oriental blood. Did you know there is a Chinese symbol called pai? It has two meanings: one is explain, the other in vain. If the book were to be publicly translated [into Chinese—it had been privately], I think it would have to be called Pai.”15 The kind of writing she liked was done between the lines. “I like understatement, hints.”16 The Poppins stories all revolved around questions.

  Pamela maintained there was never anyone remotely like Mary Poppins in her life. “Perhaps as a child I may have wished there were. I did not even visualize her. She just appeared fully armed with umbrella and carpetbag rather in the way that Pallas Athene sprang from the brow of Zeus.”17 But while Mary Poppins did not really refer to her, “there must be some element in me to which she hooked herself I suppose.”18

  One element was Pamela’s apparent strictness. In Mary Poppins, the strictness was, she said, only skin deep, the wise woman’s strictness. She denied that Poppins’s authoritarianism was a masculine characteristic, and pointed out “how the men all turn to her,” just as the Irish literary set all turned to Pamela. Mr. Banks, the Lord Mayor, the Butcher, the Baker, Bert and even the Park Keeper all had a special feeling for her.19
“Men do fall in love with her.”20

  • • •

  Mary Poppins’s impact on men and appreciation by Mr. Banks is an expression of Pamela’s own desires. The vanishing act of Poppins into the sky at the end of the first two books recalls the death of Travers Goff, a disappearance that Lyndon knew mysteriously as “Daddy going to God.” Years later she felt the true impact when she gazed up at the night sky. Pamela visualized her father transforming into a star, just as Mr. Banks believed Mary Poppins’s ascent into the sky on a merry-go-round was a new star. As an adult she could make another connection—in many Greek myths heroes turned into stars and constellations.

  From the very first Mary Poppins book, it is clear that Mr. Banks has adopted many of the traits of Travers Goff. He harbors the same mixture of melancholy and gaiety. Like Goff, his abruptness is softened at odd times as he searches the sky for his favorite stars. Pamela knew Mr. Banks had “a strong inner urge to be an astronomer.”

  Pamela said Mr. Banks was the complement of Mary Poppins because he “almost knows.”21 Without understanding anything consciously, he was involved in the adventures. Somewhere in his masculine nature, he understood Poppins’s feminine being.22 It was Mr. Banks, not Bert, who was Mary Poppins’s opposite number, who sometimes subconsciously understood who she was.

  Other characters from Pamela’s childhood appear in the books, Nellie Rubina and Uncle Dodger from Bowral feature in Mary Poppins Comes Back as the couple who live in an ark and prepare the world for spring. The Goffs’ maid, Kate, appears as Banks’s former nanny. Miss Quigley, the sad woman with a music box in Bowral, was written into Mary Poppins Comes Back as a piano-playing governess who arrives and departs quickly after Mary Poppins’s first disappearance.