News from Nowhere

The last-but-one chapter of Mary Poppins is Christmas Shopping. Previous chapters refer to the weather, but I was surprised to realise that this is the first time we are told clearly what time of year it is; and the chapter which follows begins: "It was the first day of Spring." Reading Mary Poppins in the Park I was surprised to be given an actual date for Mary Poppins's birthday; it seemed like the sort of information she would keep to herself. That revelation came very much later in the series, but it is entirely consistent with this sequence of chapters at the end of the first book: a November birthday, Christmas shopping in December (and probably quite late in December, too, in those long-ago times) and then the beginning of Spring. Or is there a more thematic connection, that, once you have thought of birthdays and birthday presents, you move on to think about Christmas and shopping for Christmas presents.

Once again, the central position accorded to Mary Poppins by the narrative means that Christmas shopping is a special activity which Jane and Michael Banks share, not with their mother but with their nanny. Being London children, they take the Bus to The Largest Shop in the World, which I strongly suspect refers to Harrods, whether because their publicity actually made such a claim or just because it is such a famous department store. The chapter opens with a lovely little piece of dialogue:

"I smell snow," said Jane, as they got out of the Bus.
"I smell Christmas trees," said Michael.
"I smell fried fish," said Mary Poppins.

The children are excited in their anticipation of Christmas, the scent of snow in the air, the fragrance of the fir trees, but Mary Poppins deflates their excitement by identifying another assertive and lingering aroma, but a less poetic one. Would nicely brought up children like Jane and Michael ever have eaten fried fish, particularly from a fish and chip shop? Surely not.

By this stage in the book, the reader must know that something extraordinary is going to happen, but Travers has fun spinning out the preliminaries: first there are the shop windows to be looked at, with their displays of all the good things on sale inside (or, for Mary Poppins, their large reflective surfaces); then there are mundane purchases to be made in the Haberdashery department. The children are impatient to visit the Toy Department, and their selection of presents is entertaining in its own right, with its combination of self-interest (Michael buys his father a toy train, intending to take care of it for him when he goes to the City; Jane chooses a toy pram for her mother and Robinson Crusoe for the Twins) and randomness: a pair of spectacles for Ellen, a white dickey (a false shirt-front) for Mr Banks. Then Mary Poppins has an argument with Father Christmas. There is something about the phrasing "Mary Poppins then had a great argument with Father Christmas over a cake of soap," which demands to be read in a tone of exasperation: will we never get to the magic? And it seems we won't, because Mary Poppins now announces that it is time to go home, to leave behind all the enchantments of the Toy Department. And then - and this has a paragraph all to itself, for emphasis - the adventure happened.

The adventure is that Maia, the second-eldest of the Pleiades, is also doing her Christmas shopping, and wants their help. In fact, she has no difficulty choosing gifts for most of her sisters, but the Banks children are asked to suggest something for the two youngest. They are better at this than they are at choosing for their own family: Michael suggests a spinning top, and Jane, thinking of the twins' favourites, suggests a rubber duck. Maia delights in how all these very solid, earthly toys will be put to use in the skies: a broom to sweep up star-dust, a hoop for Celaeno to bowl across the sky in day-time and make a cricle round herself at night. But it is Maia herself who brings joy (Jane feels that nobody could help being glad to see someone so bright and happy), who mysteriously touches all the shoppers and invites the deference of the staff, reminds them that the point of Christmas is not to buy things but to give them freely.

It is Jane who realises that Maia herself has no gift, though as soon as she does, Mary Poppins solves the problem by giving Maia her gloves - and it is their absence, rather than the presence of any evidence, which this time persuades the children that their adventure really did happen.

Summarised like this, the magic seems very slight. But although it occupies only a small part of the narrative, the slow build-up amplifies the charm of the figure of Maia. In Mary Poppins Opens the Door, the chapter about Neleus, the statue who comes to life, The Marble Boy, has a similar flavour, but it is more elaborate, and its sweetness is mixed with pathos.

One last thing about Christmas Shopping: Mr Banks is usually treated as a figure of fun, an overgrown child given to fits of temper, unreasonable and indulged. Maia's description of him, going bald on top, pointing out the Pleiades to his children, is a more rounded, more likable figure, and it would be a shame to overlook it.

John and Barbara's Story is another of those chapters in which Mary Poppins plays no active part in what happens: except, I suppose, that by her remarks - her explanations - she makes the twins cry. That's a somewhat skewed summary, but an accurate one. The chapter is atypical - but then, the more closely I look at Mary Poppins, the more I'm struck by how different the chapters are, how far the book feels like a collection of short stories not just in its episodic structure but in the variety of those episodes.

John and Barbara's chapter begins with the removal of Jane and Michael from the scene: only when they have been packed off to a party, looking very fine in their best clothes, can the narrative focus on the twins. They inhabit a world in which everything speaks and everything can be understood: the sunshine, the starling, the wind, and of course the Twins themselves. They perform tricks to entertain the adults, and are bewildered at the stupidity, not of their parents, from whom they expect no better, but of Jane and Michael, who no longer understand the language the Wind speaks. Once they did understand, Mary Poppins says, but they have forgotten, as the twins themselves will forget. It is unlike her to be so forthcoming, but how else is the information to be conveyed to the reader? And by the end of the chapter, the twins have passed their first birthday, and can no longer converse with the Starling. Sunt lacrimae rerum.

Why does this depiction of infancy as a golden age of universal comprehension not lapse into sentimentality? There's a lovely balance to it, a variation of tone: the poetic evocation of the sunlight that "poured in at the window, flickering on the white walls, dancing over the cots where the babies were lying," gives way to John's peevishness: "You're right in my eyes," Barbara's happy enjoyment of the sunshine is followed by the Starling's disrespectful "Chatter, chatter, chatter!" (though anyone reading this would by definition be too old to have heard a single spoken word). There is lively cross-talk between the Starling and Mary, who share a brusque turn of speech, and there is clever observation in the children's antics, and in the way they design their tricks to please the adults. Poor Mrs Banks arrives to demonstrate how completely she does not understand her children, and it is left to John, who has good manners and is fond of his Mother, to remind us that her incomprehension is not her fault. The mockery is gentle, but it relieves the sweetness of the story.

Mary Poppins Comes Back returns to the theme of the wisdom of the new-born. The New One, with the birth of baby Annabel. The Starling reappears*, too, and is accompanied by a Fledgling of his own, which allows Travers to give him a wonderful piece of dialogue: "Kindly remember, Mary Poppins ... that all my families are properly brought up. Littering indeed!" I can almost hear him sniff. He speaks to Mary Poppins as an equal.

Annabel's wisdom is deeper and stranger than that of the Twins: they could converse with their everyday surroundings, but Annabel has a mystical knowledge of her existence before birth, and her journey to be born: "I am earth and air and fire and water ... I come from the Dark where all things have their beginning..." To my taste, this chapter is more self-consciously poetic than its predecessor, and correspondingly less successful. Is it purely poetic - words chosen for their effect - or does it reflect any particular belief system (Travers seems to have been influenced by Gurdjieff, for example)? But what Annabel knows is even more evanescent than the understanding of what things say, and although she too has a tantrum when told she will forget, by the time she is a week old, she has forgotten.

After these two passes through this story, Travers does not return to the theme. More than that, she never again allows the younger children a point of view. They are loaded into the pram - sometimes all three of them - or held by the hand, an encumbrance to be looked after and transported like the shopping or Mary's mending, present, riding their peppermint horses while Mary leads them on strings, not forgotten but not active participants.

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*In each of the first two books, the Starling appears in these chapters only. In Mary Poppins Opens the Door he appears in the first chapter, as if anticipating Mary's arrival, and thereafter he is part of the regular cast of characters, to be called on when required.

As I understand it - on the basis of having seen the trailer, plus whatever additional clips were included in the television programme which set me off on this journey - the film Saving Mr Banks argues that P.L. Travers was eventually won over to Walt Disney's version of Mary Poppins by its treatment of Mr Banks, the father of the family. Like her own father, George Banks works in a bank, and the film adds scenes in which he encounters problems there; but unlike her own father, he is ultimately rescued, redeemed. There is no basis for any of this in the chapter in the book in which the children are taken into the City to have tea with their father.

Mr Banks's request that Jane and Michael* call for him at the Office, and take him out to Tea and Shortbread Fingers, as a Treat. I am charmed the mixed registers of this invitation. On the one hand, the plaintive tone: "and it's not often I have a Treat." is typical of the depictions of Mr Banks as in some ways the youngest and most indulged of the Banks children; on the other, Shortbread Fingers are quite an adult treat - no raspberry jam cakes for Mr Banks. Perhaps it is simply kindness, to suggest that the outing is a treat for him, when he intends it as a treat for his children.

It is a treat for them, but this has nothing to do with tea and shortbread biscuits with their father; that is no more than a pretext to bring them into the City** where they can meet the real star of the chapter, the Bird Woman. The chapter opens with Michael's anxious words "Perhaps she won't be there," and Jane's reassurance that she will, "she's always there for ever and ever," and she is saying, as she always is, the magic words: she satisfies the children's desire for permanence and predictability which Mary Poppins will never indulge.

But then, this chapter isn't about Mary Poppins, either. She is present, of course, wearing her new hat and looking very distinguished, referring to the birds as 'sparrers' (a rare dialect pronunciation for her) because all birds are alike to her***. But she doesn't make the magic happen - if there is, indeed, any magic except in the telling; she doesn't lead the children into unfaniliar and enchanted territiory, for they know the Bird Woman already; and she doesn't get the last word. It is Jane who Michael asks for the story, and they tell it to each other; at the end, Michael asks if it is true, and Mary Poppins says no, because she always says no, but Jane says yes, and Jane always knew everything... The story, with its soothing description of the birds' bed-time ritual, ought to lead to the children asleep in the nursery, but they have not yet reached their father's Office, and their arrival there is never described.

In Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mary leads the children to a Park entrance they have never seen before, where they find the Balloon Woman, who urges them to choose carefully, because there are "Balloons and balloons" in Mary Poppins Opens the Door, Miss Caliuco sits by the Park railings with her peppermint horses. The Bird Woman foreshadows these street vendors, but their stories develop in a very different direction.

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* This is one of those chapters in which Mary Poppins is accompanied only by the two elder children; who, if anyone, is looking after the Twins?

**The location is quite precise: they walk up Ludgate Hill to Saint Paul's "which was built a long time ago by a man with a bird's name", which is why it is home to so many birds, and to the Bird Woman. Travers may have disliked Disney's whimsy, but this is whimsical by any standards.

It also places Cherry Tree Lane, with its High Street shops and its small-town or suburban neighbourliness, very close to the City - not just the centre of London, but the business and financial centre (the map in the endpapers of Mary Poppins in the Park shows Cherry Tree Lane skirting one side of the Park, and St Paul's tucked into the far corner, at one end of the High Street.

***They are not sparrows, but doves and pigeons, in a variety of colours. An internet search on 'London' and 'pigeons' brings up mostly sites about pest control. And it is illegal to feed pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

Writing about Miss Lark's Andrew, sartorias says "I loved the 'Andrew' chapter because any story in which a rejected dog gets a home was good for me". I start from the opposite standpoint; by and large I am not interested in stories about animals. Yet I have no problems with the next two chapters of Mary Poppins, both of which centre on animals.

Andrew is the pampered little dog of Miss Lark, who lives next door to the Banks family. In the magical world of Cherry Tree Lane, the smallest and shabbiest house in the Lane is next door to the grandest - grander even than Admiral Boom's house, which has ship's funnels instead of chimneys, and a flagstaff in the garden - because it has two gates, one for visitors and one for tradesmen. From this opening, it is clear that Miss Lark's Andrew is not so much an animal story as a comedy of manners. We start with Miss Lark's problems with the baker (who once accidentally used the wrong gate, but cannot be entirely snubbed because he is the only source of "those little flat rolls with the curly twists of crust on the top" - P.L. Travers has a keen eye for baked goods) and move on to the insubordination of Andrew.

Andrew is generally disliked locally, and Mary Poppins takes his side, but without explanation: "He is not a nincompoop ... and that is that." It is the omniscient narrator who fills in the background from Andrew's point of view: he is mildly fond of Miss Lark, but bored to distraction by his luxurious lifestyle. He longs to be "a common dog" and have common dogs for his friends. nineweaving says that Andrew and his friend Willoughby are a gay couple: "the not-so delicate resentful mother's boy, standing up to her at last; his insouciant but no less devoted rough-trade partner..." Given the ambiguities of Travers's own life, this is not just a pretty idea, it could also be true at some level.

As in the previous chapter, Mary Poppins doesn't initiate the events of the story, she just walks into them, and by doing so enables the children to share them. It is she who interprets Andrew's demands to Miss Lark, for she understands his yapping - though when Mary Poppins talks to the animals, she does nothing so undignified as grunt and squeak and squawk to the animals: he barks his questions and she replies in her standard, if brusque, English. The successful outcome of this bargaining is then incorporated into the worldbuilding: thereafter, Miss Lark appears in the company of her two dogs.

Just as the previous chapter was the first of a pattern repeated in subsequent books, so Miss Lark's Andrew has its counterpart in the next book, Mary Poppins Comes Back, whose second chapter is Miss Andrew's Lark. Again, Mary Poppins demonstrates the ability to converse with an animal, this time a caged lark belonging to the terrifying Miss Andrew. It's a conventional enough tale with a moral, and I suspect that the wordplay came first and the story was produced to support it.

Like Miss Lark's Andrew, The Dancing Cow is firmly set in Cherry Tree Lane. Jane is in bed with toothache, and Michael offers to entertain her by telling her what he can see through the window: Admiral Boom, Miss Lark's second housemaid, Robertson Ay and then - great excitement, for the Lane is very much in town - a cow. Naturally, the Cow is well known to Mary Poppins and this leads into the first of another type of episode, those in which Mary Poppins acts as storyteller. When she does this, she becomes quite unlike herself, speaking "in a brooding story-telling voice", gazing into an unseen distance, entering a kind of trance state in which her sharp, hard-edged everyday persona can give way to the magical figure we know her to be.

Read what sartorias says about the content of the story, because I think she completely nails it: the narrative line makes a swerve from deadpan irony at the expense of the Very Respectable Red Cow and the music of the spheres. Indeed, as I commented there, there are layers of irony in that the description of the cow as "very respectable, she always behaved like a perfect lady and she knew What was What" could easily apply to Mary Poppins herself. No wonder the Cow was so great a friend of Mary's Mother. There's a nursery rhyme flavour, too: the animal who goes to see the king, the cow encouraged to jump over the moon. Yet alongside this, that wonderful description of the experience of jumping over the moon, hurtling through the heavens "with the stars spinning around her like great golden plates..."

The Cow's dilemma is that she cannot live with the fallen star caught on her horn; it compels her to dance, so that she cannot rest or eat. But having dislodged it, she cannot live with the loss of that joyful dancing. She cannot connect the passion and the prose. But Mary Poppins can.

Chapter One of Mary Poppins ends with the household's reactions to the arrival of Mary Poppins: each for their own reason is glad of it. The last words of the chapter express a recurring theme: "But nobody ever knew what Mary Poppins felt about it, for Mary Poppins never told anybody anything..."

So I was surprised at the extent to which Chapter Two is told from Mary's point of view; inevitably, since the children are completely absent from this chapter, but that too was a surprise. I was surprised, too, that it is permissible to speak simply of 'Mary', this being how she is addressed by her friends. Clearly I had forgotten much about Mary Poppins's Day Out (every second Thursday, one till six, as given by the best people). My clearest memories of it, before this re-read, came from the film, and while those memories too may be inaccurate (is it as large a part of the film as I think?) they are vivid. I wonder whether they have blotted out the written version?

Like the most clichéd depiction of a domestic servant, Mary Poppins spends her afternoon off with her gentleman friend, the Match Man. His name is Bert (Herbert Alfred for Sundays: I was about to say that these are now irredeemably comic names, but fashions change - perhaps they are due for a come back?) but the narrative always refers to him as 'the Match Man'. He is also a pavement artist, and in fact only sells matches when it is too wet for his pictures. Am I right in seeing both of these occupations as barely a step above begging, the equivalent of selling The Big Issue? It wouldn't be hard to construct a narrative in which Bert is a shell-shocked veteran of the war, one of those who never quite managed the return to civilian life, and who is treated more gently on account of it; but Travers doesn't do it. Mary is socially inferior to the Banks family, and Bert in turn is Mary's social inferior; referring to him by his profession ensures we don't forget it.

What's more, on this particular Day Out, he has only earned two pennies, which is not enough to take his girlfriend out to tea (with raspberry-jam-cakes, which sound good, whatever they are). But it is Bert, not Mary, who comes up with a solution, that they should spend their afternoon in his picture, and he, not Mary, who makes it work, who takes her hands and draws her into the picture (yes, the verb used is 'drew' - is the pun deliberate?). I was going to argue that the man in the relationship must be allowed to take the lead, but on reflection, there may be a larger pattern: magical things happen wherever Mary goes, but she doesn't initiate them, and often seems quite put out by them ("Oh, Uncle Albert - not again? It's not your birthday, is it?" But I anticipate).

Reading the descriptions of Bert's pictures, I feel some sympathy for Walt Disney. With the exception of the "picture of two Bananas, an Apple and a head of Queen Elizabeth" (the first Queen Elizabeth, of course, though I have to pummel my mental image every time) on which Bert is working when Mary arrives, they are highly coloured landscapes which must have seemed overdue for the Disney treatment: "a mountain covered with snow and its slopes simply littered with grasshopers sitting on gigantic roses" is just waiting for the grasshoppers to go into their cheerful song and dance routine. How was Walt to know that this wasn't actually what Miss Travers wanted?

She may satirise the social pretensions of Mrs Banks, boasting of her children's nurse who is so fashionable that she doesn't believe in giving references, and of those like her who go to the Royal Academy, look at the pictures for a very long time and then say: "The idea - my dear!" But she is no gentler with the lower class pretensions of their employees: Mary Poppins is not just vain and smug, she is vain, smug and common. She would probably have loved the Walt Disney version. Her magical afternoon out is a visit to countryside, but "something that looked like Margate" is not far away. The Match Man's clothing has been transformed into bright colours (a green-and-red striped coat, a new straw hat) and even Mary, whose appearance is always practically perfect, has been improved by "a cloak of lovely articial silk", a hat with a long curly feather and big diamond buckles on her shoes. As well as the raspberry-jam-cakes, they eat whelks, with a pin, handed to them by a Waiter - whom Mary invites to sit down, because she is not accustomed to being waited on (the Waiter declines, but seems pleased to be asked). And so on.

For someone of my age and background, this profound class-consciousness is difficult to write about: I am aware of it but keep stumbling over taboos when I try to express it. I don't think I noticed it as a child - I would, I think, have read this chapter as wish-fulfilment, though the wishes being fulfilled were so much not mine (perhaps this, too, is why it washed over me leaving so little trace). I wonder how it played in 1934, when the book was first published? Would middle-class children then have been more aware of what P.L. Travers was up to? She apparently said that the books were for adults as much as for children: maybe this chapter (which is, remember, only the second chapter in the whole story of Mary Poppins) is evidence of that - or perhaps she is still feeling her way into the balance between the two.

Thanks to a tip-off from poliphilo, I watched the BBC's 'Culture Show' special on P. L. Travers and Mary Poppins. It pulled off rather neatly the trick of having its bread buttered on both sides: riding the wave of publicity about Saving Mr Banks, and the impending 50th anniversary of Disney's Mary Poppins, praising both films and offering attractive trailers, while occupying the cultural high ground, defending Travers' dislike of the Disneyfication of her book, and pointing out the dishonesty of Disney's attempt to bring her posthumously on side. Victoria Coren Mitchell did a very good job as presenter, despite all the cgi flummery: having her descend once from the heavens clutching an umbrella with a parrot's head handle was quite entertaining; having her flying by umbrella or jumping into a piece of pavement art at every scene change became tedious. She had shed the highly polished and slightly off-key witticisms with which she presents Only Connect, and spoke naturally of her childhood love of the books and ambivalence about the film; her final summary felt less like a concluding speech to camera, more like a friend settling down to discuss what we had just seen. This naturalism may be just as articial, I wouldn't know, but it was a comfortable fit for the programme.

This is what Victoria Coren Mitchell told the Observer about the documentary.

It looked - inevitably - for the origins of the books in Travers's own life, and found an unsettled childhood, in Australia (which was unexpected) with a failed bank employee father and an overwrought mother. You could see how that child would have yearned for someone calm and competent to turn up from anywhere, or nowhere, and take charge. There was also a great-aunt who was stable, repressive and owned an umbrella with a parrot's head handle. Then we jumped to Travers's adult life, and her decision to adopt a boy for whom she provided a childhood which must have been, in its way, as unsatisfactory as her own. The Wikipedia article fills in some of the details of the biography, providing some curious connections as well as explaining how Helen Lyndon Goff became Pamela Lyndon Travers. Wikipedia links to an interesting article by Justine Picardie written in 2008 (when Cameron Mackintosh put on a stage musical of 'Mary Poppins'), which among other things quotes Travers as writing: "If you are looking for autobiographical facts, Mary Poppins is the story of my life."

Indeed, but which part does she play in that story? Is she the little girl longing for security and order, or is she the adult who is an outsider* but who knows best, who allows no sentiment to show, who permits no argument? The more the script stressed Travers' secretiveness, her emotional restraint, while the camera lingered on the wooden Dutch doll to which Mary is repeatedly compared, the more I thought that a connection was being made but not articulated: Mary Poppins, c'est moi.. Of course: all the characters come from the author, and each of them has a spark of her life.

The documentary, anxious to demonstrate what the Walt Disney version was lacking, emphasised the darkness of the books. Victoria Coren Mitchell picked out an episode in which Jane has a tantrum and is left alone in the nursery: somehow she enters the scene depicted in the Royal Doulton Bowl (the children's world is full of capital letters, as if every object were unique, every noun a personal name) in which old fashioned children are playing - and then she is told that she can never go home, she is trapped in the past. Mary Poppins rescues her, of course, but it is a frightening story, though one I had completely forgotten. The one that stays with me was the one in which Michael, similarly left alone, uses some sort of compass to revisit people (racial stereotypes, I fear) whom the children had visited earlier with Mary and been welcomed by, but who are now angry and threatening.

I am writing from memory, and not recent memory either - it shows, doesn't it? And I would have told you I'd read all the books, until I looked at the list and discovered there were eight of them. I have only three, and not the first one**. But from memory, of the books I read and re-read, each one followed a similar pattern - they were episodic, but the same episodes repeated: Mary Poppins arrives, one of the children is naughty and has a frightening experience, there is a visit to one of Mary's relations, Mary has an evening off, Mary leaves***. And what I remember as clearly as the dark and frightening episodes are others which are simply glorious. I'm not thinking about the afternoons in the park, which do find a place in the film****, though without the touch of the numinous the book gives them; but of Mary Poppins' evenings off, her Second Thursdays, when the children are privileged to attend parties at which she is fêted by the creatures of the kingdom under the sea, or at the zoo, or by the constellations. Mary Poppins' dark side is not just the bitter taste of the medicine which is good for you (and which can be helped down by a spoonful of sugar), it is the shadow which casts into relief her brilliance.

ETA: Kathryn Hughes in yesterday's Guardian offers the opposite view: as a child she adored the film and thought the books were All Wrong. She singles out for particular disapproval***** those scenes that I (and, I see from the comments, nineweaving) particularly loved. But she backs me up on the class aspect, and goes further.

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* Mary Poppins is literally an outsider, of course. She arrives out of the blue, from what might as well be Australia. But she is also a social outsider, a domestic servant (along with Mrs Brill the Cook, Ellen the parlourmaid and Robertson Ay - is this establishment likely for a bank employee in the 1930s? It feels archaic. But I digress...), and it is tempting to see her rigid adherence to propriety as class-specific: not for her the easy emotionalism of the confidently middle-class Banks. She is always referred to by her full name, for she demands respect.

But P.L. Travers biography places her in artistic social circles: perhaps this is a red herring?

** I have only Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mary Poppins Opens the Door and Mary Poppins in the Park. This last one doesn't follow the familiar pattern, and is prefaced by a note from the author explaining the the events in it should be seen as occurring in Mary Poppin's three previous stays with the Banks family.

*** Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book follows a very similar pattern, not just in its episodic structure but in the nature of some of those episodes. When he acknowledges a debt to P.L. Travers, this, I suspect, is where it lies.

****I should probably admit that I saw the film when it was new - accompanied by my brother and sister and grandmother - and haven't seen it in its entirety since. This, too, is from memory.

***** OK, she may have a point about the zoo. I remember feeling that the zoo was not my favourite Evening Out. Though when I try to be more specific, I wander into the zoo sequence of Wind on the Moon...