Mary Poppins flies again in a musical that opens in Melbourne this month. Valerie Lawson, biographer of Poppins creator PL Travers, reacquaints herself with the magical governess.
She can fly like Peter Pan and play in the underworld like Alice in Wonderland. But Mary Poppins is more mysterious – more three-dimensional – than her fellow fantasy creatures. Created 76 years ago by Australian writer PL (Pamela) Travers, the flying nanny is younger than the Victorian-era Alice and the Edwardian-era Peter Pan. She sprang from the post-Depression age, yet has managed to lodge herself in the imagination of parents and children ever since the first Poppins book was published in London in 1934.
Julie Andrews playing Poppins has a lot to do with her popularity, but the Disney film of 1964 does not account for her longevity. Mary Poppins’ allure springs as much, or more, from her contradictory character. She is controlling and comforting, blunt yet kind, stern yet playful. And there’s something quite naughty about her flirtations with the butcher, the baker, the chimney sweep and even her employer, the banker, Mr Banks. As Travers said of Poppins, “men do fall in love with her”.
Held in the air by her parrot-headed umbrella, she drifts down from the sky to bring order to a disorderly family. When her job is done, she flies back to the sky until next she is needed. Wherever she goes, Mary Poppins makes magic then denies anything magical has taken place. She is shrouded in uncertainty, always threatening to leave her employers whenever the wind changes, or at a time that she can never disclose.
By 1959, when Walt Disney bought the rights to her stories, Travers had written four Poppins books, but was hardly known outside literary circles. Just before she died in 1996, she sold Cameron Mackintosh the stage rights for a musical eventually produced in association with Disney Theatrical. It premiered in London in 2004 and has since gone global, opening in cities throughout the US and Europe. This month it arrives in Australia, opening in Melbourne, moving to Sydney next year. A new generation will see Mary Poppins in the role she played for most of last century: an all-purpose, idealised helper sought by every harassed parent. Bad day at the office? Call for Mary. Children playing up again? Sit down, relax; Mary will bring them into line.
Children, in turn, have loved Mary for the comfort she brings and the escape she offers. As a comforter, she represents a strong, alternative “attachment” figure, one defined by the psychiatrist John Bowlby as the person most needed in a child’s life. The attachment figure must be nearby, accessible and attentive if the child is to feel loved, secure and confident enough to explore and to play with others.
Through her long list of instructions, Poppins sets the boundaries that children need. It’s “spit spot into bed”, “early to bed, early to rise”, “curiosity killed the cat”, “trouble trouble and it will trouble you” and “don’t care was made to care”. She tells her charges, the Banks children, that “the grass is always greener” and “we must not judge a book by its cover”. They might be clichés, but they still hold a kernel of truth.
She wraps them in the blanket of routine. After tea time they’re tucked into bed, and from breakfast to supper they sit down to an endless supply of nursery food: porridge and warm milk, buttered toast, raspberry jam, thin bread and butter slices, gingerbread, crumpets, wholemeal scones and arrowroot biscuits.
Then comes the uncertainty. All of a sudden, in the middle of the night or during a stroll in the park, she whisks them off on weird adventures with her relatives and friends, such as Mrs Corry, a crone who bites off her fingers made of barley sugar and pastes stars onto the night sky. Poppins drifts to the bottom of the ocean to play with the sea creatures and then soars to the heavens, where she is kissed by the sun and plays with the constellations. Poppins is scary, but not scary enough to trigger a nightmare.
Ever since she first appeared, the nanny has changed her form and shape and, in one case, her name, when in The Simpsons she became “Sherry Bobbins”.
In the original books, illustrated by Mary Shepard (daughter of Ernest Shepard, illustrator of Winnie The Pooh), Poppins has rosy cheeks, an upturned nose, button eyes and big feet. She wears Mary Jane shoes and severely cut, shapeless suits with the hemlines falling below the calf. Her hair is scraped back and a cherry-trimmed hat is plonked on her head. This wouldn’t do for Disney, whose designers dressed Julie Andrews in Edwardian clothes. In the new musical she shares some of the rosy-cheeked charm of the original, but her costumes are much more flattering. Cut in the manner of Dior’s New Look collection of the 1940s, her coats in scarlet and violet are tight-waisted and curved over the hips.
For most of her life, Travers was asked how and why she created Poppins. In her more elusive moments she waved her hand, raised her eyebrows and claimed that the nanny just drifted into her life. In franker moments she said that every Mary Poppins story contained something from her own life. Some recorded the “dreary childhood penance of going for a walk” followed by “the blissful forgiving moment at bedtime when I suddenly felt so very good”.
These moments came early in her childhood, in the small town of Allora in Queensland’s Darling Downs, where she studied the night sky with her father. When he died, the seven-year-old Pamela imagined him as a star. In the same way, when Mary Poppins disappears in one of the stories, Mr Banks explains she has flown to the heavens to become a new star.
Richard Eyre, who directed the Poppins musical, believes Travers simply wrote a wishful autobiography about a family being healed. This was the way she imagined her childhood if she could have rearranged it.
Travers lived most of her life in London, never married, adopted a baby and sought spiritual help from a series of gurus. Her path was never easy. She never spoke of her personal life. She once told some inquisitive students, “You’re trying to find out my secrets. A secret is something that must not be told.” Like her nanny, her motto was never tell anybody anything.
Mary Poppins She Wrote by Valerie Lawson (Hachette Australia).
Mary Poppins The Musical, Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, from 16 July.
www.disney.com.au/marypoppinsSource Qantas The Australian Way July 2010