A. M.G. D.
Postscript by Brian Sibley
“If you are looking for autobiographical facts,” P.L. Travers once wrote, “Mary Poppins is the story of my life.” This seems rather unlikely when you consider that Mary Poppins goes inside a chalk pavement picture, slides up banisters, arranges tea-parties on the ceiling and has a carpet-bag which is both empty and – at the same time – contains many strange but useful objects. And yet memories of people and events from her life did find their way into the Mary Poppins stories – not that most people were aware of that. Even those of us who were her friends knew little about her private life.
One thing we did know was that, as a child growing up in Australia, she had fallen in love with the fairy-tales, myths and legends from which she later borrowed some of the ideas and images found in her own books. Her passion for reading naturally led her to become a storyteller, beginning her writing career as a journalist and poet some years before she wrote her first full-length novel. It was in one of her earliest stories – written before she left Australia for Britain in 1924 – that a character appeared named Mary Poppins. She was neither magical nor particularly memorable, but the author had found a name that she would one day give to somebody else. . .
That “somebody” blew into Pamela Travers’ imagination rather as Mary Poppins herself blew into Cherry Tree Lane. The author was staying in an old thatched manor in Sussex and was ill in bed. As she once described it to me: “The idea of this unusual person came to me and, in that halfway state between being well and ill, I began to write about her.”
So, some parts of Mary Poppins came to Pamela from out of the blue; others were memories of her earlier life when she was growing up on an Australian sugar plantation. Bertha (or maybe she was called Bella – Pamela could never quite remember!), one of the family’s Irish servants, was a marvellous character whose pride and joy was a parrot-headed umbrella. “Whenever Bertha was going out,” Pamela told me, “the umbrella would be carefully taken out of tissue paper and off she would go, looking terribly stylish. But, as soon as she came back, the umbrella would be wrapped up in tissue paper once more.”
Like Mary Poppins, Bertha also had a number of fascinating relatives whom she would visit. Pamela recalled: “She would come back and tell us wonderful stories. . . But no – she wouldn’t quite tell. She’d just hint: ‘If you could know what happened to me cousin’s brother-in-law. . .’ And when you’d opened your ears and your eyes – and your mouth – waiting for more, she would say: ‘Ah, well, then, it’s not for the ears of children. . .’ And I would wonder what were those things that were not for the ears of children.”
Some children’s writers – maybe because they worry about what is suitable for the ears of children – talk down to their readers. Not P.L. Travers. “Nobody writes for children really,” she’d say. “You’re writing to make yourself laugh, or yourself cry; if you write for children, you’ve lost them.” Her readers proved her right, and wrote to the author in their thousands, often asking the same questions: Where did Mary Poppins come from? Why did she go? And where did she go?
From every point of the compass – and Mary Poppins knew all about compasses! – children would send their letters, carefully written in large, round writing, punctuating their demands for answers with words of praise and, occasionally, complaint. When, at the end of Mary Poppins Opens the Door, the heroine flew away for the third time, a boy (who wasn’t the world’s best speller) wrote mournfully: “You should not have done that, Madum, you have made the children cry.” Pamela treasured that letter, and replied: “I am not surprised. I cried myself, when I wrote it down.”
The only rule Pamela had about writing was that there were no set rules. She wrote her stories, she said,” because they were there to be written”. The actual business of catching ideas and getting them on paper was a mysterious and lonely process; and yet, as she would explain, “you can do it anywhere, any time – when you’re out at the shops buying a pound of butter – still it goes on. Even if you forget your idea by the time you get home, you wait a little and then it will come back if it wants to.”
And the ideas did come back – or maybe she had never forgotten them? “Spit-spot into bed” was a favourite phrase of her mother’s, and other bits of Mary Poppins’ character were clearly inspired by Pamela’s spinster aunt, Christina Saraset, whom everybody called “Aunt Sass”. She was a crisp, no-nonsense woman with a sharp tongue and a heart of gold who, like Mary Poppins, was given to making “a curious convulsion in her nose that was something between a snort and a sniff”.
When Pamela once suggested to her aunt that she might write about her, the elderly lady replied: “What! You put me in a book! I trust you will never so far forget yourself as to do anything so vulgarly disgusting!” This indignant response was followed up with a contemptuous, “Sniff, sniff!” Doesn’t this sound just like Mary Poppins speaking? Equally, it might have been P.L. Travers herself, who said something very similar to me when I rashly suggested one day that I might write her life story!
I received a similar reaction – the severe look and the sniff! – when I once wondered aloud whether Mary Poppins was based on a real person. After all, the character is very real to a great many people. Pamela herself had once told me how a harassed mother of three had written to ask for Mary Poppins’s address, adding: “Because if she has really left the Banks family, couldn’t she come to me?” In reply to my question, however, all Pamela would say was, “Well? Have you ever met anyone like Mary Poppins?” Taken aback by her brusque tone, I was silent for a moment, then summoned up my courage and said that I hadn’t but that I rather wished I had.
What I should have said was what I knew in my heart, which was, “Yes, I have met someone very like Mary Poppins – and she is you. . .”
BRIAN SIBLEY
About the Author
P.L. Travers was born in 1899, in Maryborough in Queensland, Australia, one of three sisters. She was a keen reader, particularly of all kinds of myths and legends, but before long she moved on to reading her mother’s library books (which involved sneaking into her room while she was asleep!).
Pamela deliberately kept her life very private. She lived for a while in Ireland and London, and travelled frequently to America, where she was made writer in residence to both Smith and Radcliffe Colleges in Massachusetts. She also received an honorary doctorate from Chatham College, Pittsburgh.
Although she worked as a secretary, a dancer and an actress, writing was P.L. Travers’s real love, and for many years she was a journalist. It was while she was recuperating from a serious illness that she wrote Mary Poppins – “to while away the days, but also to put down something that had been in my mind for a long time”, she said. She received an OBE in 1977, and died in 1996.
Copyright
First published by HarperCollins Children’s Books 1994
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Mary Poppins first published in Great Britain by Peter Davies 1934
First published by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1958
Mary Poppins Comes Back first published in Great Britain by Peter Davies 1935
First published by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1958
Mary Poppins Opens the Door first published in Great Britain by Peter Davies 1944
First published by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1958
Mary Poppins in the Park first published in Great Britain by Peter Davies 1962
Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane first published by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1982
Mary Poppins and the House Next Door first published by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1988
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2010
Text copyright © The Trustees of the P.L. Travers Will Trust 1934, 1935, 1944, 1962, 1982, 1988
Illustrations copyright © Mary Shepard 1934, 1935, 1944, 1962, 1982, 1988
Postscript copyright © Brian Sibley 1998
Why You’ll Love This Book copyright © Cameron Mackintosh 2008
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Source ISBN: 9780007398553
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007552672
Version: 2013-11-15
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