God, she believed, must be working among them all the time, playing the organ on Sundays, creeping through the fields, listening at windows and keyholes. She picked a sunflower and explained to her parents that this, too, must be God. Nonsense, they replied, no one could pick God and if they could, they would not.29 So who was God? Did he reside in her favorite song “Green Grow the Rushes-oh”? She brooded for years on the line “One is one and all alone, and ever more shall be so.” Who was One, was it God or herself?30 She liked the idea so much she kept it in her mind for all her life, writing the line into her book Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, published in the 1980s.
Lyndon’s first experience of compassion came one hot Sunday afternoon. The blinds were half down, shading the bedroom where Margaret read aloud the story of the crucifixion from Peep of Day, a collection of Bible stories. Lyndon began weeping uncontrollably for Jesus. She was drowning in sorrow. Her mother, not amused, not pitying, was merely annoyed. “I take the trouble to read to you and all you do is cry and feel sorry…dry your eyes, it was a long time ago.”31
Lyndon liked to count the silver and notes falling into the collection plate at church. She wondered what God did with it all. Once, she tried to hold on to the sixpence that she was given to drop into the plate but her father, all-seeing, sang the warning “time like an ever rolling stream…put in that sixpence now!”32
To make the sermon go faster, Lyndon scanned the congregation for the ugliest faces and decided to kill the worst. Boom! “Mr. Ebb is dead.” Bang! “Mrs. Haig is dead.” Her mother, eyebrows raised at the fierce expression on Lyndon’s face, whispered “What?” “Murdering,” replied Lyndon. “Not in church,” said her mother.33
The restless children were often sent from the pews before the sermon had ended. The Goff girls played among the gravestones, moving glass bowls of metal roses onto graves that had none. They imagined plucking long-dead babies from their graves, and passing them from lap to lap, comforting little Lucinda or Lizzie or Jack. They scurried past freshly dug graves, with their burden of fading lilies; there were people down there, they knew. The bodies were not beautiful, as their parents had promised, but ugly and frightening. Lyndon knew she would live forever. Maybe.34
In this world where nobody ever explained, Lyndon turned to imagination and poetry. In retrospect, she could never remember a time when she was not writing. She saw writing as a reporter might, as “listening and putting down what she heard. No one was pleased or proud.” That, though, was good, because “I was never made to feel that I was anything special.”35 Her poems were hardly discussed—certainly no one thought they had a genius in the family. She recalled taking the verses to her mother, who was more concerned with burning the sausages than reading the poetry. “Another time, dear…” And when her mother did show them to Travers Goff, he sighed, “Hardly Yeats!”36
Her mother, softer, more imaginative, might make a real picnic breakfast for her daughter, or prepare a pretend picnic on the floor at home. But she, too, could be fearsome and full of anger, never more so than one evening when she tidied the children’s rooms, placing their toys in cupboards. Unlike Mary Poppins, who wiggled her nose to make the toys tidy themselves, Margaret grew irritated with the chore, and finally became fiercely cross. She seized Lyndon’s favorite doll with a serene china face, tossed it across the room and yelled at her to put it away herself. The doll’s face struck the iron bedstead and broke. “Mother, you’ve killed her!” cried Lyndon, feeling the crack in her own body. Margaret gathered the pieces and slumped onto the bed, weeping “Forgive me.”
Travers was just as likely to fly into a rage, but just as quick to forgive. One rainy night, a couple of rag dolls he had christened Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton were abandoned in the garden. Lyndon was so fearful of his anger that she lied. It wasn’t her, she would never leave the dollies outside. He bellowed, “You told me a lie!” but then, seeing her pinched face, softened the assault—“and let them catch their death of a cold.”37
For one year, 1906, Lyndon and her sister Biddy attended the Allora Public School, where Biddy once found a brooch lost by a teacher. She handed it back. Her two-shilling reward seemed wealth beyond measure. Travers Goff, all bluster, all bank manager, insisted it must be returned at once. The girls could not bring themselves to do so. Lyndon and Biddy spent it on marzipan lollies in a packet, Simpsons Sugar Smokes.38
Lyndon was never sure whether her father would respond to her mishaps with a joke or an explosion. But she knew he might do something worse: dismiss her with ridicule. She admired a maid’s parrot-headed umbrella so much that she decided to save to buy one. With the umbrella swinging by her side, the maid was far more elegant, Lyndon thought, than her mother. Lyndon was deeply hurt to hear her mother say she “wouldn’t be seen dead” with one. But more embarrassing was her father’s reaction to the maid’s umbrella, which she often wrapped lovingly in tissue paper on her return from a day out: “We could put it in a cage and teach it to say ‘Pretty Polly.’ ”39
Lyndon often daydreamed about the maid’s journeys. When she came home, the girl would never quite say what she had done. She hinted. Full of stories about her widespread family, she would say—No, she could not really tell, the adventures were beyond the ears of children.40
Subdued by her cool yet conventional parents, though loving them deeply, and with a soaring imagination nurtured with books, Lyndon grew up thriving on what was difficult. She had to become, she thought, “my own planet.” She always longed to be good, to be better, but felt she was touched by the bad. Always, she wanted to be something larger than herself. She suspected she was not her mother’s favorite—that was the beautiful Biddy. Lyndon’s role was to be the lover, not the loved. The loved, she knew, could “sit in the lap of time” while the lover had to watch and pray, and grind his own grain.41
Yet she felt, hoped, she was her father’s most loved. As the oldest and most perceptive child, Lyndon felt sharply the effects of his drinking, although, as she later wrote, “I did not know what it was I suffered from.”42 The drinking was not just a family secret but known to his employers. Late in January 1907, Goff believed he was about to be demoted once more at the bank. He became ill after he returned home from a day spent riding in a downpour.43 For three days, Goff had a dangerously high temperature. One night, Lyndon tried to cheer him with a threepenny piece from her apron pocket. She was baffled by his face, as white as his pillows. Here was the man she knew as a Zeus, now diminished. Lyndon felt as all children do when they see their parents weakened and quiet. Panic surged up in her chest and gut.44
The local newspaper reported that Goff died that Thursday night. Margaret cannot have been with him, for she did not call a doctor during the night but later, after she found him dead in the morning. Dr. Francis Pain pronounced him dead on Friday, February 8. The cause of death was epileptic seizure delirium. When Margaret told Lyndon that morning that Daddy had gone to God, Lyndon felt a sense of shame quickly followed by disbelief. That couldn’t be right. God didn’t need him. He had all those angels.
Lyndon was seven and a half years old. For the next few months she wore mourning, a white dress with a black sash. It was six years before she accepted that her father had died.
As she grew into a young woman, Lyndon talked to her dead father, finally coming to the resolution that she should comfort him: “It’s all right, it’s all right, you don’t have to be so unhappy.” No one comforted her. As an adult, Lyndon believed that her father died because he could not face what was in store for him at the bank—that he allowed pneumonia to kill him instead. But while a seizure might have been the immediate cause of death, she always believed the underlying cause was sustained heavy drinking.45
After the doctor left that Friday morning, Margaret appeared to have a surge of energy. The funeral was arranged immediately. She sent a telegram to Aunt Ellie, and placed an advertisement in the local paper for the sale by auction of the household furniture and effects. There
was to be no future here. She had no parents, her Great Uncle Boyd had died two years before, the bank owned the house.
Travers’s funeral was held at the Allora Cemetery that Friday afternoon, the vicar from St. David’s officiating. Ellie telegrammed back from Sydney that she would travel to Allora by train, without delay. A messenger was sent to meet her at the station. She greeted her niece in the cool hallway. It smelt of lilies. “Meg!” There was nothing more to say. Margaret merely leant her head against Aunt Ellie’s bony shoulder. “You and the children will come to stay with me!” Ellie declared. Margaret began to pack. After the furniture, horse and sulky were sold on February 16, Ellie, Margaret and the three little girls said good-bye to the maid at the station.
The hours seemed to turn more and more slowly as they approached Sydney. “Is this New South Wales, is this the city?” Only Moya, just eighteen months old, remained passive as she was handed back and forth between the arms of Ellie and Margaret.
Back home, Ellie resumed her martinet pose. The dispirited little family was ushered into her hall at Albert Street. “Watch out for that!” The object nestling in the shadows was a bust of Sir Walter Scott, given to her “by your great, great grandfather!” Margaret and the girls sat down to lunch with Ellie. First the soup, then the meat, the pudding, the fruit plate. It was February, a sweltering month in Sydney. Ellie monopolized the conversation, of course, remarking on the children’s manners and prospects for the future. Biddy broke down first, then Margaret left the room, with Moya in her arms. Ellie scooped up a bunch of black-red cherries. Only Lyndon remained with her at the table. Her eyes were misty. Would she cry too? “No, I won’t, you old beast. I am not crying, it’s only my eyes.” No one spoke. “Here,” Ellie said at last, “take the cherries to your mother and say I’m a bitter old woman. I didn’t mean a word.” Lyndon picked up the cherries, folded her little hands over their roundness and looked into the eyes of her great aunt. Ellie, sixty-one, and Lyndon, seven, recognized in one another the soul of a woman who does not step back.46
3
Old England in Australia
Ivy, Myrtle, Holly, Elm, Daphne, Shepherd. The street names of Bowral contained the essence of the English countryside. The toy town set high on the southern tablelands of New South Wales was swathed in the transplanted trees and flowers of England: poplars, willows and peach blossom. From a distance, Bowral was a patchwork of every shade of green, from jade to apple. Unlike the coastal towns, sweating through endless summers, the town enjoyed real seasons, with snow and copper-colored leaves, tulips and daffodils.
The town, two hundred kilometers south of Sydney, resembled a hill station in colonial India, a place where homesick Englishmen and -women could retreat from the heat of the coast. Bowral was sleepy in winter then rambunctious in summer with city folk down for the views and the country air.1
The living was cheap in this little town. Margaret and her three girls moved there in 1907; Aunt Ellie had enrolled Lyndon and Biddy in the new Bowral branch of Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School, founded a year earlier. The Goffs rented a wooden cottage, one of about four in Holly Street, then a dirt road. Aunt Ellie paid the rent. A willow drooped near a brown stream that ran through a paddock, fronting the garden. Here Lyndon grew from child to young woman, to the time of secrecy, when a girl knows her parents know nothing. She studied her mother, as all girls do, with a kind of gradual insight. Why, when she had known birth, love and grief, did her mother seem to understand so little?
Lyndon was eight when she moved to Bowral, the age when girls retreat into private games played with their “very best friend forever,” when a passerby might hear confidences whispered between them, or between a little girl and her invisible companion. She daydreamed by the willow tree, which took on astounding forms: a princess running from an ogre, the arms of a prince, or a horse that carried her to victory. Another day it became a ship, red and black funneled, on which she sailed to a land of fairies. Later, by the age of eleven, Lyndon knew that men looked at her another way, with a speculative glance at her tiny breasts, like the man in the fruit shop who leant over the counter and asked her to be “my little girl.”2
Many of these Bowral neighbors and shopkeepers were reborn years later in Lyndon’s books and articles, among them “Uncle” Dodger Woods and his daughter Nellie Rubina, Miss Quigley, and Mrs. Corry, who lurked within the general store in the main street, bullying her gigantic daughters Annie and Fannie. Miss Quigley’s heart had been broken, the Goff girls knew that much from crumbs of chatter overheard at tea parties, just outside the door, when the grown-ups asked the children to go and play. The girls were more interested in conquering Miss Quigley’s garden, with its store of tempting apple trees. Like Eve, they might have come to grief over the apples they stole in the orchard, stashed under their sailor blouses and in the elastic legs of their bloomers. But Miss Quigley outsmarted them instead.
“Children, how lovely, have you come to pay me a visit?” Miss Quigley, drifting through her garden, called them down from the trees and into her front room, where she opened a gorgeous music box inlaid with silver and mother of pearl. Its long gilt cylinder tinkled “Brahms’ Lullaby,” “Barbara Allen” and “The Blue Danube.” Miss Quigley waltzed around the jardiniere, holding her arms curved before her, and the children picked up the waltz. “Oh children!” She whispered to them of the Danube, the river “blue as an eye, blue as heaven, blue blue…”—who would they marry, tinker, tailor, poet?—and as they waltzed, the apples fell from their bloomers, of no use, of no meaning now.3
They had learned the art of advanced tree climbing from Uncle Dodger, who rescued them when they were too high in the branches to descend without panic. Dodger had a way with children and birds. Kookaburras, sparrows and parrots flocked to his call and sat on his head. His niece Nellie Rubina, then about eight years old, was a stolid, rosy, wooden child who lived across the field from the Goffs. She fished sticky conversation lollies from her pockets and offered them with a deep, expressive glance. The sugary pink-and-green tablets were inscribed with enigmatic messages: “Wait Till Tomorrow,” “Help Yourself.” Nellie Rubina wandered the dirt lanes, a string bag containing just one bun looped over an arm. She called out to Lyndon, “What’s your name, Back Lane?” and refused to share the bread.
Nellie Rubina and Uncle Dodger appear in the second Mary Poppins book, Mary Poppins Comes Back, in a story called simply “Nellie Rubina.” The title character sweeps away the snow by bringing spring to the world. An adult, not a child, who resembles a wooden doll, Nellie lives with her uncle in a wooden ark with a hinged top. She may be the daughter of God. Nellie and her uncle share conversation lollies with Mary Poppins and the Banks children and manufacture wooden objects signifying spring: cuckoos, lambs, branches laden with buds and snowdrops.
Lyndon was intrigued by these conversation lollies but more by the shopkeepers who sold them. Aunt Ellie’s travel anecdotes included the tale of an English sweetshop kept by a decrepit old woman who had two lines of merchandise, one called Kiss Me Quick and the other Cuddle Me Close.4 This old lady, combined with the Bowral sweetshop proprietor, were the basis for one of Mary Poppins’s oddest friends, Mrs. Corry. She appears in several of the Mary Poppins books as a tiny, skinny old lady in a dingy store whose windows are decorated with old bits of colored paper. Mrs. Corry stocks gingerbread, sherbet, licorice sticks, apples on a stick (stale), and barley sugar. Her own fingers are made of self-renewing barley sugar and she tyrannizes her gargantuan daughters.
Mrs. Corry clearly comes from the world of legend and myth. She is a wise woman, a crone, a storyteller, a sibyl. Mrs. Corry knows William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great and Guy Fawkes, and, with her daughters and Mary Poppins, fixes stars on the roof of the sky with the help of a pot of glue and a very tall ladder.
The real Mrs. Corry in Bowral was just as fearsome. Lyndon was terrified of entering the dark recesses of the shop. With a quavering voice, she would ask for two fizzos�
��glutinous sherbet lollies. Mrs. Corry cried “Fizzos!” in a booming echo, loud enough to wake the daughters, who came from upstairs to stare down at the girl.5
For all the rich lode of characters she found in Bowral, the focus of Lyndon’s life remained her mother, Margaret, a woman who had never been mothered herself, except by Aunt Ellie, and who was now a widow in her thirties. At ten, Lyndon still did not believe her father was really dead. If things went badly wrong, she reassured her mother, “Don’t worry, it will all be all right when father gets back from God.” At this, Margaret’s gray eyes turned black.6
Lyndon feared her mother would remarry, yet she might have suffered less if Margaret had found a man. She resented the burden of being the oldest child, the confidante. “I was the eldest and that is a very difficult place. So much is expected of you, an example to set.”7 Her mother even needed Lyndon’s hand on her brow if she had a headache. Gradually the child came to feel inadequate to the task, resentful, as growing children do of a parent’s needs. Her hair began falling out in little round patches; the family doctor, Dr. Throsby, said it was all too much strain on the girl.8
A continuing metaphor for her absent father was Halley’s Comet, which she mistakenly knew as Harry’s Comet. Waiting for Harry “is one of the things I’ve been doing all my life, imagining him out there on his appointed course, trailing his tail among the galaxies.” When the comet came into view in 1910, the red-dressing-gowned Goff children were plucked from their beds to see the miracle and told, “You won’t see him again…he won’t come again for seventy-six years.”9
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers Page 5