THE CREATOR of Mary Poppins was as elusive as her nanny, and just as nomadic.
She couldn’t fly to the heavens and dance with the sun, as Mary did on her
evenings out. But she never ceased travelling the world, chasing gurus and
looking for love.
For most of her 96 years, Pamela Lyndon Travers zigzagged from London to
Dublin, to Moscow to Paris, to New Mexico, to Boston to Kyoto. For a
biographer, Travers is a dream subject. Researching her life allowed me to
travel far, with a purpose, and on the way, to learn about the Russian
mystic George Gurdjieff, the Celtic twilight, the pueblos of New Mexico,
life at Smith College, Massachusetts, in the 1960s, the night skies of
Queensland and the hidden meanings in The Sleeping Beauty .
For any writer, travel postpones the inevitable moment when the fingers must
touch the keyboard. But the travels of Travers had another purpose — she
sought guidance from mystics, medics and gurus on how to contain her chronic
anxiety, among them Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Zen Buddhists in Japan, a
psychiatrist in Switzerland, and doctors in Rome. Pamela Travers needed a
nanny, or a lifetime partner as steady as her own creation, Mr Banks, the
father in her Poppins stories. She found neither.
She spent her last years near the Kings Road in Chelsea, in a Georgian house
with a pink door and a sideboard full of pottery hens.
Travers believed that writers should brood, like hens, and as a four-year-old
in her native Australia, began a habit of crouching outside in the grass,
pretending to hatch. Her family explained to visitors: “She can’t come
inside, she’s laying.”
In the parks and paddocks of her youth, Travers’s imagination took flight.
Near her home in the provincial town of Allora, Queensland, she made
miniature parks for poor people, just as Jane Banks makes a tiny park for
poor people in Mary Poppins in the Park. Jane, the well-behaved
eldest child of the Banks family, says “everybody is happy” in her park
where “nobody ever quarrels”.
Eight years ago I began my search for Travers in Allora, population 950, high
in the Darling Downs. She moved there with her family in 1905, to a modest
wooden house with a banking chamber attached. Her father, Travers Goff, had
managed the Australian Joint Stock Bank in the subtropical Queensland town
of Maryborough, but had been demoted to Allora because of his drinking
problem.
Travers Goff was such a vital influence on his daughter’s life that as an
adult she took his first name as her surname. Born Helen Lyndon Goff she
emerged in her twenties as Pamela Lyndon Travers.
In his own mind, Travers Goff was a melancholic poet with yearnings for the
Celtic twilight. At twilight in Allora, he stood outside the family home,
gazing at the heavens with his little girl, the eldest of three daughters.
To her, the southern skies seemed a celestial suburb, inhabited by a circle
of friends like Venus, Orion and the pointers of the Southern Cross.
In Mary Poppins in the Park, Mr Banks rushes home from the bank one day
to bring great news: “The most wonderful thing! A new star has appeared . .
. a marvel, a gem!” Travers Goff died when his eldest girl was 7. For many
years, she imagined him still alive, as a star.
Almost 100 years after his death, there is a chill inside the high-ceilinged
Allora house where the front room still contains a bank vault, and a sign on
the door spells out “Manager” in gold letters. On the veranda lies a
misshapen doll, scarecrow size, made by local schoolchildren to honour Mary
Poppins.
Hazy memories of Maryborough, with its nearby sugar canefields, led Travers to
indulge in a fantasy that she was raised on a cane plantation. Her more
reliable memories come from the New South Wales town of Bowral, to where she
moved with her mother, Margaret, and sisters in 1907. They lived in a
cottage where the rent was paid by her great aunt Helen Morehead, a spinster
of independent means, whose manner — stern and tender, secret and proud —
“stalked with her silent feet”, wrote Travers, through the pages of Poppins.
But Mary Poppins had a second, more fantastic, genesis. Distraught by her life
after the death of her husband, Margaret threatened to drown herself in a
creek near her Bowral home. Her two youngest huddled under a quilt by a
fireplace, while their big sister told them the story of a little white
horse that could gallop over the sea like a shimmering comet, its hooves
flicking the foam. Years later, Travers wrote that the horse ran underground
“and came up eventually as Mary Poppins”.
Hours after she fled the house, Margaret returned from the creek, dripping
like a revived Ophelia, infuriating her eldest daughter, whose anger
followed her relief.
There is still no formal acknowledgment of Travers’s life in Bowral, though
Poppins herself is a kind of homage. With its willows, cherry blossoms, its
tidy park with a bandstand, and street names like Holly and Ivy, Bowral is a
Poppinsish place.
After a brief career as a dancer and actor, and longer stints as a journalist
and poet, Travers left Australia for ever. In 1924, aged 24, she sailed
alone to Southampton, armed with £10 and a determination to go “home” to
Ireland.
Once in London, she wrote to George William Russell, the editor of the New
Statesman in Dublin, offering poems for publication. He replied: “I like
very much some of the verses you sent me and hope to make use of one or two
of them at an early date.”
Russell’s letters to Travers are preserved in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.
Affectionate, tender, sometimes flirtatious, they tell of an intimate
relationship that lasted until his death in 1935, after which she felt
“fatherless”. With Russell, she travelled to Co Donegal, where they stayed
in a stone farmhouse and walked on the strand. He drew her perched in a tree
and she laughed at his habit of absentmindedly pushing a lit pipe into his
shabby coat pocket.
Russell introduced her to Yeats, with whom he attended seances and studied the
esoteric. Later she travelled to Lough Gill, made famous by Yeats’s poem The
Lake Isle of Innisfree. There, she picked rowan berries, which she
delivered in person to Yeats in Dublin.
Travers adopted the Hindu theosophical beliefs of Russell and Yeats. One can
see their influence in the symbolism of her Poppins stories, with their
emphasis on circles and spheres, and her fascination with duality, with
being, and with shadows.
Not long before he died, Russell was thrilled to hear Travers’s idea for a
story about a witch whose broomstick would fly “just as well by white magic
as by black magic”.
The “witch” took shape in Sussex where in 1931, worried about her health,
Travers rented a cottage in Mayfield. There she wrote her first book of
Poppins adventures. Tea and whisky were supplied by Doris, a local girl, who
came to the cottage as a daily maid. One day, Doris was astonished by
Travers’s request to adopt her. Her family declined.
In 1939, Travers heard that the Hone family of Dublin was offering for
adoption all seven of their children. This extraordinary offer linked
Travers for ever to the mythical Ireland of her father’s imagination. All
seven children were the grandchildren of Joseph Hone, the first biographer
of Yeats. Travers chose Camillus, a twin of Anthony, and took him home to
Mayfield. Camillus did not know he was a twin until he met Anthony by chance
in London, when they were 17.
In Mary Poppins in the Park, the Banks children attend a picnic in the
park, thronged with the shadows of nursery tale characters, among them, Mary
Poppins’s friend the Bird Woman, who remarks that “our shadows are the other
part of us, the outside of our inside”.
Early in the Second World War, Travers moved to the United States, first to
New York, then on to New Mexico in 1944, where she had been invited by one
of Russell’s old cronies, the US Minister for Indian Affairs, John Collier.
She lived for a while with the Navajo people in Window Rock.
Her love of the Navajo myths had its origins in her study of mythology, which
she began with Russell and continued with the major spiritual force in her
life, George Gurdjieff, whom she met in France in the 1930s.
Gurdjieff, often silent, forbidding, yet inquisitive, might have been
reincarnated in Mary Poppins Opens the Door as a friend of the nanny,
the Terrapin, who says: “Silent and dark and wise am I, quiet and very
patient.”
Published in 1944, the book holds many ideas from her New Mexico days and her
spiritual searching in France. Twenty years later, with the release of
Disney’s film of Mary Poppins, Travers became a minor
celebrity, invited as writer in residence at American women’s colleges,
among them Radcliffe, and Smith College. Swathed in a kimono and lying on a
sofa in one college room, she replied to some young inquisitors: “You’re
trying to find out my secrets. A secret is something that must not be told.”
Nothing personal would pass her pursed lips. Like her nanny, she “never told
anybody anything”.
When Cameron Macintosh optioned the Poppins stage rights in 1995, The
Observer sent Nicci Gerrard to interview Travers at home in Chelsea. She
was a difficult subject. Asked “how long have you lived here, how old are
you and I hear you have many grandchildren?” Travers replied: “I have no
gift for numbers.”
Later, she called Gerrard, with an afterthought: “I have not said this before,
but I have suffered a lot in my life. I will only share my suffering with my
pillow.”
- Out of the Sky She Came: The Life of P. L. Travers by Valerie Lawson
(Hodder Headline, Australia). Her search for P. L. Travers is the
subject of The South Bank Show on ITV, Boxing Day, at 10.45pm
