Mary Poppins, She Wrote

by Valerie Lawson

  Biddy had taken the twin boys straight from the Dublin hospital to the home of Joseph and Vera Hone. By now, and not surprisingly, Joseph was beginning to get rather fed up with all these children.14 But, they muttered, “Biddy, poor Biddy” could not cope, emotionally or financially. And Nat had told everyone, straight out, that he could no longer afford to keep all the children.15 Little Geraldine was sent to Biddy’s parents. But who would take twins? Joseph Hone knew someone who might take them off his hands—Pamela Travers, AE’s close friend and Macnamara’s castoff.

  Nat’s sister Sally Hone, then twenty-five, remembers the scene when Pamela called. The baby boys, Camillus and Anthony, lay in two separate adult-sized beds in a guest room. Camillus was much better looking. Pamela gazed down on each one. Joseph said to Pamela: “Take two, they are only small.” Biddy also tried to orchestrate the choice. “You want to have Anthony, he is a gorgeous boy.” Camillus was crying. Anthony was not.16

  On October 28, Jessie wrote in her diary “P. rang up from Dublin at 12. She is coming back Tuesday without the baby. She didn’t like him enough.” A fortnight later, Pamela confided in Jessie. She liked Camillus much more than his twin, the baby she was supposed to take. Just to be sure, Pamela had both babies” horoscopes prepared by an astrologer, an Edward Johndro of Fresno, California. The astrological chart for Camillus concluded: “All in all, it would be a rare thing to find better cross rays between a child and its OWN mother. So I would say, by all means, ADOPT HIM.”

  Little Anthony was now dispatched to Biddy’s mother and Camillus made the crossing to England, with Pamela, in mid-December 1939. From then on, Pamela wore a wedding ring, a simple gold band signifying respectability. Five days before Christmas, “P. had bad night as Camillus screamed all the time.” The doctor came, but “she now talks of sending him to a babies’ home in Tunbridge Wells.” Jessie told Pamela it would be a mistake to send Camillus away as he’d settle down soon. On Boxing Day, though, he yelled constantly. Jessie recorded in her diary: “Poor Pam. P. asked my advice about sending him to TW to get his feeding right and have the rash on his face looked after. P packing for Camillus.”

  • • •

  A few months before Camillus moved to Pound Cottage, young evacuees from London had begun to arrive in Mayfield, complete with their little food kits of corned-beef tins and condensed milk. Pamela heard them complain of the “ ’orrible quiet down there. The condensed milk stood unopened on larder shelves, for, at the end of the year, it seemed the war was not going to arrive. On Christmas Day, Mayfield tucked into the usual Norfolk chickens and Stiltons.

  The weeks of the phony war passed. While the locals blew the froth off their pints in the public bar, declaring there would be no real war, the main street was blacked out at night. That was fine. The locals always went home in the dark anyway. New rabbit guns could be seen in the saddler’s window. The petrol boy from the garage was in uniform and everyone tried on his steel helmet. They all had gas masks, too.

  By early 1940 Mayfield’s comfy retired major, a gentle soul who had canvassed the village in search of the conservative vote, was appointed chief warden. Sporting new trousers, he ordered the villagers to black out those damned windows, immediately. Each day, the young men disappeared from the streets and shops and houses. Pamela saw that the ironmonger’s boy and the lad who drove the milk lorry had gone, “as leaves drop from a tree.”

  Khaki filled the public bar and the saloon and leant with “a rattle of brass against the counter, elbowing out the regulars.” Pamela’s old gardener had returned from France after a series of adventures and limped the three miles to Pound Cottage to see her. They toured the garden, Pamela apologizing for the daisies and clover on the lawn. “Dainty, that’s what they are,” he said, “let them bide.” And, still, Mayfield stood serenely under “the great marquee of heaven.”17 The romantic image was washed away, eventually, by the sheer number of evacuees and the troop buildup in the area. Without a special pass, it was hard to get anywhere closer to the coastline of England than Mayfield.18

  All through winter and early spring, Camillus remained fretful, in and out of hospital at Tunbridge Wells. On April 18, when he was eight months old, he was returned to Pound Cottage, still tiny for his age, still not able to sit up or turn over. Two days later he was back in the hospital again.

  Jessie and her children spent most of their time at Pound Cottage, but in March Jessie told Pamela it was impossible to continue the arrangement. They fought more often than not. Jessie longed for her homeland.

  By May, troops were billeted around Mayfield, patrolling the streets. German planes flew overhead; then bombs were dropped on nearby Ticehurst. A few days after the Germans marched into Paris in June, Jessie told Pamela she planned to leave England. She and her children would sail soon for New York. Pamela was “very sad,” Jessie wrote in her diary. A couple of days later she hoped to take Pamela too, but when the S.S. Washington sailed on July 7 with Jessie, her children Ann and Dick, and 150 other mothers and children, Pamela was not on board. Jessie wrote once more in her diary: “Darling Pam, so broken up and sad.” Pamela thought she should stay, although she yearned to follow Jessie.

  At the dock in New York Jessie was greeted by a Gurdjieffian group, including Rosemary Nott and Jessmin Howarth. By the end of July, she opened her first letter from Pamela—“very distressing, if only I could get her over.” On August 3, another letter followed. This time, Pamela was on her way, via Canada. By now Mayfield was part of the front line, with planes streaming in from Europe and battles raging overhead. Some aircraft came down in and around Mayfield. Pamela asked the local real estate agent to rent out Pound Cottage, indefinitely.

  10

  Through the Door to Mabeltown

  The ship carrying Pamela and Camillus to Canada sailed with three hundred children on board, almost all evacuees from London’s East End. They were to cross the Atlantic in convoy with seven other passenger ships, three destroyers and a battleship. At the Liverpool wharf, before they boarded the big ship, Pamela stroked the ground. “I must feel it once more,” she said, “just once more.”1 For two days, they stood at anchor at Liverpool; U-boats had been spotted nearby. Several women, distraught at the sight of land, begged to be taken ashore. The children had wept as they squeezed their parents good-bye. But on the second day, the novelty of their new surroundings dried their tears. The boys and girls swarmed all over the railings, scampered across the deck. Some even tried to climb the rigging. They had no idea how dangerous the journey might be.

  By August 1940, thirty-five hundred British children had been evacuated to Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Escape from southeast England seemed the sensible thing to do, but many might have been safer at home. In early July 1940 one of the first evacuee ships, the Arandora Star, was attacked by U-boats in the Atlantic. There were no casualties among the children on board, but from then on, the British Admiralty decided all ships carrying evacuees should sail in slow convoy. In late July, a ship taking children to Canada was attacked by submarines. At the end of August, after Pamela’s ship had sailed, another evacuee ship, the Volendam, left Clyde. It was torpedoed 215 miles out to sea. Over three hundred children were on board that vessel, but none died. On September 17, the ship City of Benares sailed from Liverpool to Canada. It was torpedoed in the Atlantic with the loss of 260 lives, among them one hundred children.2

  In a series of articles called “Letters from Another World,” Pamela wrote of her journey for the New English Weekly. In the first, she compared the convoys with their fragile cargo to the voyages of many Mayflowers, each traveling from the known world to a new life of which they knew nothing except “a promise of hope.”

  She felt overwhelmed by her responsibility to Camillus and to the other children from Mayfield and Tunbridge Wells she was escorting to Canada. The adult passengers, she thought, had little to say, little to offer. Among them, though, she found someone she could talk to, a woman with a gentle voice. Often she wa
s bent over a sketch pad. Gertrude Hermes was an artist, quite a good one. “Call me Gert,” she told Pamela. The women sometimes teamed up with two of the ship’s officers.3 The first officer liked the poetry of T. S. Eliot, whose “Burnt Norton” seemed to speak of wartime. One day, when he mentioned “the still point of the turning world,” Gert picked up her pencil and began to draw. She told an inquisitive child she was only sketching “the still center.” What did she mean, the still center? Gert just smiled.4

  Each night the little band of travelers tried to decipher the crackly shortwave BBC radio broadcasts reporting the bombing raids over England. By day, they listened for warning blasts that meant lifeboat drill—six blasts for mustering and seven if U-boats were sighted. Pamela felt dreadfully guilty that she was not facing up to the war in England. By saving the children, she felt she was missing her own life. She told Gert she felt as if her body was made of the woods and rivers of England. The worse the news of the war, the worse her body felt.5

  The ship docked at Halifax, which smelled of pine—a sweet relief after all the salty air. Pamela and Camillus took the train to Montreal, spent a week at the Windsor Hotel, then on August 30 flew to LaGuardia Airport, New York, Pamela arguing all the way with a finance journalist about the concept of social credit, which at least distracted her from the awful storm that meant the journey lasted five hours instead of the usual two.6

  LaGuardia had been a rubbish dump when she last saw it in 1936. Now, all around the airport were the wild shapes of the World’s Fair and there before her, across the Triborough Bridge, as familiar as a returning dream, lay the “delicate airy towers and those tongues of flame turned stone that are Manhattan.” Pamela wrote in the New English Weekly that she loved the roar and hum of Manhattan, loved to feel part of a band of poets and artists in New York “on a mission, who have it in their power effectively to join the hands across the sea.”7

  That was the propaganda, but in truth, Pamela was miserable, despite her new but increasingly intimate friendship with Gert. The big reunion with Jessie Orage went badly. Both women were agitated, unsettled and missing England. Pamela rented an old fashioned apartment at 142 East 52nd Street and hired a Finnish maid, Pauline.

  Pamela, Gert and Jessie met, talked, then recognized that the ground rules had changed utterly. The three women made an uncomfortable triangle. In October 1940, Jessie felt she had told her diary too much. Later, she ripped out the pages she had written over ten days, but left intact the words “I’m free somehow, thank God.” Gert, she confided, was the cause of her freedom. A few weeks later, the three women met for a drink—“a very funny situation,” wrote Jessie.

  Jessie never planned to stay on the East Coast, but to drive with her children to New Mexico to join a community of Orage and Gurdjieff followers, among them Jessmin Howarth. She was also in search of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a Gurdjieff disciple who had invited Rosemary Nott and her husband to his house, first in Wisconsin then in Phoenix, Arizona. At both homes, he welcomed those who worked in the Gurdjieff way. Pamela told Jessie she would visit her one day in New Mexico.

  • • •

  All through her first year in the United States, Pamela felt like a lost child, forlorn and lonely, a prisoner of the war raging across the Atlantic.8 At times, life was “so bad I thought I couldn’t endure it.”9 Pamela even consulted a Jungian analyst who told her, “You don’t really need my help. What you should do is read your own books.”10 In her little apartment, Pauline helped her feed and change Camillus. She brushed his soft, light brown hair and washed his baby smocks and later his matching shirt-and-short sets. There was only one true solace, as there had always been. Writing.

  In 1940, she wrote a short story, “Happy Ever After,” in which Mary Poppins reads the Banks children Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes. Eugene Reynal told her he would publish a special edition, just for fun, and a thousand came off the presses of Reynal and Hitchcock, their covers dotted with silver stars. She mailed a few as Christmas presents to her friends.

  Reynal suggested she write an account of her journey to New York. The result, I Go By Sea, I Go By Land, was published in 1941 by W. W. Norton. Written in diary form by a fictional eleven-year-old, Sabrina Lind, it tells the story of “Pel” of “Thornfield,” Sussex, who escorted the children of friends to America and made friends with “Mrs. Mercury” (Gertrude Hermes). Among Pel’s eight charges were Sabrina, her eight-year-old brother James Lind, and Pel’s baby, Romulus. “Pel” is Pamela and Romulus is, of course, Camillus, who by now had recovered his health to become a more placid and almost chubby baby boy.

  The Lind family’s decision to evacuate their children to the United States followed the shocking arrival over Thornfield of a German plane. At 1 A.M., it dropped five bombs. One exploded in Farmer Gadd’s cornfield, killing two horses—who could be seen, bloody and lifeless, at the bottom of a crater. The cowman, who had been up all night nursing a pregnant cow, was taken to Tunbridge Wells hospital with bomb splinters in his leg.

  Just as Mayfield is called Thornfield, many local characters make a barely disguised appearance in the book, including “Mr. Oliphant, the Vicar of Thornfield” (the real vicar was the Reverend Theodore Oliver). Mrs. Lind is “Meg,” named for Pamela’s mother, and the Lind children are greeted in London on the way to the boat by their rude Great Aunt Christina (yet another incarnation of Aunt Ellie).

  Pamela dismissed I Go By Sea, I Go By Land as “a mere bibelot…written at the request of my publisher…all of us took assignments which weren’t properly in our line.”11 The book was all founded on fact, and, as she once said, “the feelings much resembled my own.” She described herself in the book as a solicitous but playful minder of the evacuee children, especially caring of the little girl Sabrina Lind. The writer and guardian of the children, Pel, tells Sabrina, “you have a full cup, and the thing to do is to learn to carry it without spilling over. Nobody can help you, you have to do it by yourself. And it takes time, I am only learning it now.” As Pamela later said, “Sabrina Lind is an aspect of me…my cup was always full.”12

  Pamela wrote another, much shorter, book in 1941. Her mind had drifted back to Aunt Ellie in Woollahra, to the death of her father in Allora, the great aunt coming to rescue Meg and her little girls, to the fairy stories that had sustained her. The book was Aunt Sass, the story of Aunt Ellie. Pamela called Ellie “Christina Saraset” or Sass for short. Aunt Sass became her second personal gift book. It was dedicated to Reynal, who printed five hundred copies. Their yellow covers were decorated by a locket, surrounded by stars. (Aunt Sass was followed two years later by another gift Christmas book, Ah Wong, about her family’s general dogsbody, a Chinese man who was largely a figment of Pamela’s imagination. She dedicated this book to Camillus and the children of her friends, including the children of Jessie Orage, Diarmuid Russell and Eugene Reynal. Pamela sent a copy of Ah Wong back to Madge, inscribing it “To Madge Burnand, with faithful love, Pamela.”)

  Words clattered out of her typewriter, as they always had, worthy but dull pieces written for the New English Weekly. In these, she claimed with phony authority to understand the mood of America. Some were laced with the journalist’s old standby, the views of barmen and cab drivers. One such piece was written from Washington, D.C., which she was visiting when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. With the entry of the United States into World War II, the Roosevelt administration launched a national and international propaganda campaign, coordinated by the Office of War Information (OWI). Pamela became drawn into the effort.

  She knew two ministers in the Roosevelt government, Henry Wallace and John Collier. Both were old friends of AE, and she maintained the contacts. The OWI and Britain’s Ministry of Information developed strong networks of staff and contributors among the literary and journalism communities. The poet Archibald MacLeish and the playwright Robert Sherwood played major roles in the formation of OWI. MacLeish, a dedicated antifascist, worked mainly on the domestic side of the operat
ion, claiming that the principal battleground of the war was American opinion. He became the OWI’s first director.

  Sherwood, who had been writing Roosevelt’s speeches before the war, headed the overseas branch. He gathered around him hundreds of journalists, writers and broadcasters who shared his views. Before the war he had spent summers in Surrey and knew many English writers as well, although there is no evidence he knew Pamela then. A major part of Sherwood’s overseas branch was the radio news and features division, which asked Pamela “to do some broadcasts to all the occupied countries.” Pamela thought, “Good gracious, why ask me? You can all tell the news of the day or something interesting.” But they said “No, we want you to do something.” But what kind of thing? “We don’t know, but we think you will come up with something.”13

  She couldn’t sing or act or play an instrument. But she did have one idea. “How could I speak to anyone except speaking to their child? And so to every country I did broadcasts on their fairy tales, their legends, their folklore. If I didn’t know it, I learned it and discovered it and it was very useful to me afterwards.” Then there were the nursery rhymes. “I would tell them…have them sung, say where they came from, and reminded [the listeners] that there would be a time they could be told again.” In broadcasts to France, she played recordings of “Frere Jacques” and “Sur le Pont d’Avignon,” told the history of the songs, and reassured her listeners. “All they had made of France was still there, and one day would be free again. And then we came to Greece. I could only talk to them of their great heroes.”14