Tag: literature

Unexpected Correspondence with a Friend of P. L. Travers, Author of Mary Poppins

Dear Reader,

Words can hardly describe my surprise and excitement when I found an email in my inbox from the American historian and author Benson Bobrick, telling me that he had been friends with P. L. Travers and had written about their friendship in his memoir, Returning From Afar: A Memoir.

(Benson Bobrick with his beloved Samson.)

Obviously, the first thing I did even before responding to his email was to order a copy of his book. Then, after composing myself, for this lucky occurrence felt almost miraculous, I responded to Bobrick, and what followed was a wonderful correspondence that offered me unexpected insights into the life and personality of P. L. Travers.

In Returning From Afar, Bobrick reflects on his life and his journey towards building a fulfilling career as a writer, tracing his family history back to his maternal great-grandfather. He shares the few memories he has retained of his mother, whom he lost when he was only eight years old, and reflects on his difficult relationship with his father. He revisits his years at boarding school as a young boy, then his college years, recalling the events and people who helped shape him into the man he became. Beneath the account of Bobrick’s personal and professional life runs a deeper current of longing to understand its meaning, to integrate the events and choices of the past into a coherent whole, offering the reader an authentic account of a life deeply examined.

Bobrick devotes a full chapter in his memoir to his relationship with P. L. Travers and the impact she had on his spiritual development. To my delight, he generously includes excerpts from the correspondence they maintained throughout their friendship, which lasted for many years.

Letters from writers addressed to friends often reveal more of an author’s personality than interviews could ever do. Yet, in the case of P. L. Travers, there is a remarkable thread of consistency running through her writings, interviews, and personal letters, suggesting a genuine authenticity in the way she expressed herself.

Bobrick was in his thirties when he first encountered P. L. Travers, then in her late seventies and already an established figure within the Gurdjieff Society. Their first meeting took place in New York, in her appartement on York Avenue. (P. L. Travers travelled regularly to the United States, where she gave lectures and completed several writers’ residencies at various colleges.)

This is how Bobrick describes his first impression of her in his memoir:

(…) she was seated in an erect and stately fashion, neatly attired in a white linen dress, her wrists and fingers bedecked with silver jewelry. Her hair was not abundant but seemed more so by being curled; and when she turned to greet me, I was struck by the bright blue clarity of her eyes. At the same time, their concentrated core had a kind of metallic luster, like polished orbs of hematite. Her knowing gaze was full of expectation, perhaps assessment: I felt at once I must not disappoint.

They forged a bond through literature, discussing T. S. Eliot (whom she knew personally), Blake (one of her favourite poets), and Sir Thomas Browne, whom I discovered she also admired. They shared spiritual sensibilities, and as Bobrick writes in his memoir, she completely transformed his understanding of what it meant to be alive. Her imprint is evident from this passage at the very beginning of Returning from Afar:

The most interesting part of life is the growth of the soul. The rest, in the main is theater – names, dates, adventures, masquerades, escapes. A memoir can be – as I hope this is –not only a record of events, but of the stages of an evolution, in so far as that can be grasped. The light that sheds on the life means more than any cavalcade of facts. “What use is the right fact,” as a character remarks in a story by P.L. Travers, “when the point of view is wrong?” The process of self-discovery makes living worthwhile.

This echoes P.L. Travers’s view on autobiographies:

Being born, going to school, having measles or not, being married or not, wouldn’t really be an autobiography for me – it would be more of an inner statement, how one grew within, the hopes, the difficulties, the aim.

P.L. Travers in conversation with W.H. Auden, The Island No.2, March 1966

Bobrick writes in his memoir that P.L. Travers embraced the doctrine of Gurdjieff “as divining profound truths, which she found reflected in other great teachings as well as timeless tales”. She saw in the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty the motif of “the slumbering, unclaimed Self, enclosed within “the automatically growing forest of hour habitual nature.” On this subject he added in our correspondence that “her reading of The Sleeping Beauty, for example, was profoundly affected by Gurdjieff’s teaching, yet in a sense exceeds it, by being allusive, rather than presenting a dogmatic idea.”

It was P. L. Travers’s signature, both as a writer and, as I now understand, as a spiritual mentor, to refrain from being prescriptive. She taught through indirection and firmly believed in the power of questioning and pondering, allowing understanding to reveal itself in its own time.

For those unfamiliar with Gurdjieff’s teachings, Bobrick summarizes succinctly the main concept around which Gurdjieff organized his system. He held that the state of the average person is “marked psychologically, by mechanical and associative thoughts; that our thoughts, sensations and emotions belong to as many shifting selves; and among them there is no coherent, reliable “I”. Man according to Gurdjieff is asleep and must work towards the harmonisation of his conflicting impulses.

The way out of this inner disharmony, according to Gurdjieff, is through the disciplined process of “self-remembering”. Or in other words, the practice of being consciously aware of oneself while, at the same time, remaining aware of what one is experiencing. By this, Gurdjieff meant not merely intellectual self-awareness or introspection, but a particular state of divided attention in which one is simultaneously aware of oneself and of what one is experiencing in the present moment. This bi-directional attention interrupts the habitual mechanical state in a person by creating moments of genuine consciousness. It creates a state where a person is being aware of what they are doing, feeling, or perceiving while simultaneously maintaining the sense “I am here.”

Bobrick’s encounter with P. L. Travers had the backdrop of Gurdjieff’s teachings, but at the end, he never became an official member of the Gurdjieff Society. He did, however, come to appreciate certain aspects of Gurdjieff’s thought, particularly self-remembering and the idea of repairing the past, both of which continue to resonate with him today and which he found embodied in the person of P. L. Travers: “In her own extraordinary alert, forthright presence she seemed to exemplify what self-study might achieve.”

Gurdjieff’s idea of repairing the past has affinities with the Christian concept of repentance, but places the emphasis not on seeking forgiveness, but on becoming conscious of one’s past mechanical behaviour. He encouraged his pupils to awaken from their habitual patterns of reaction, emotion, and identification and to recognize the moments in which they had acted unconsciously. Once they could see what they had been unable to see at the time, they were asked to confront the consequences and contradictions of their actions and experience what Gurdjieff called remorse of conscience. This conscious suffering could then become material for inner transformation. In this sense, the past could be revisited and repaired in the present.

On this subject, Bobrick shares in his memoir that P.L. Travers once wrote to him that “she believed in a dialogue with the dead – in the need, as she advised in a letter, “to work with and repair the past – (both for ourselves and the past).

While the rest of Gurdjieff cosmology did not find inner resonance with Bobrick, his friendship with P.L. Travers remained intact as she allowed his development to follow its own course, evidence to her non dogmatic approach to spirituality.

In our correspondence, Bobrick shared his belief that P. L. Travers “surpassed Gurdjieff in understanding, with a knowledge drawn from the whole Canon of Western and Eastern literature and culture, which gave her a wider lens.” He also acknowledges that P.L. Travers would have disagreed with this statement, but I share his reverence for her wisdom and her gifts of observation.

P. L. Travers has often been described as difficult and demanding, and I’ve always felt that such descriptions read more like labels, particularly when they are offered without specific examples of what made her so. Knowing, too, how readily strong women can be labelled as difficult, I have always been resistant to this characterization of her personality. That is, until I read Bobrick’s illuminating explanation in our correspondence:

Though she was ever demanding, she was also loving and kind and above all yearned to serve. She expected you at any and every moment to be present: alert, conscious, and self-possessed. At the very least she wanted you to aspire to that state. For only in such a state can one make deliberate choices that reflect a consciousness.

It is no wonder, then, that people felt challenged in their interactions with her.

Service was an important part of P. L. Travers’s spiritual outlook, particularly in the later years of her life. In a 1982 interview with The Paris Review, she spoke of the human search for something that we cannot possess but serve, something higher than ourselves adding that this search had been her own throughout her life.

But what did service mean to her in practice? When I asked Bobrick how P.L.Travers understood service, and how this yearning to serve expressed itself in her life, he wrote back: “Her idea of service was to help others gain conscious possession of their lives.”

That is not an easy task, either on the giving end or on the receiving end. It also makes me wonder whether some of what others perceived as difficult in P. L. Travers was, at least in part, an expression of what she understood as service.

If you think about it, service is also at the heart of Mary Poppins’s character, both in her role within the Banks family and in the lives of her readers. I believe this is also how P. L. Travers eventually came to understand her fictional creation, although I suspect that the idea of Mary Poppins as a servant was not consciously articulated from the beginning. In my view, making Mary Poppins the children’s caregiver was an inspired choice. It allowed her to be close to the children without being their parent, giving her the freedom to introduce them to the mysteries of life in ways their parents could not. In her 1962 interview with Geoffrey T. Hellman in The New Yorker she said: “Parents don’t bring magic to children, but servants do, and sometimes an aunt or an uncle.”

In her later interviews, P.L. Travers herself spoke of Mary Poppins as a servant, a role that seems to me to extend far beyond her domestic duties. Mary Poppins comes not only to reveal the mysteries of life to the Banks children, but also to disrupt the habitual ways of thinking and behaving of the adults around her. But that is the subject for another post.

I could tell you more about Bobrick’s friendship with P. L. Travers, but instead I invite you to read his memoir, Returning From Afar, a fascinating book in its own right and what I see as Bobrick’s own exercise in repairing the past. In the chapter devoted to P. L. Travers, you will also find a wonderful poem he composed for her, inspired by the image of the seeker she had evoked in one of her talks.

I am forever grateful to Bobrick for offering me this glimpse of P. L. Travers at a time in her life when her accumulated experience and lifelong study of myth, fairy tales, and world religions had been distilled into wisdom that she was willing to share with those who were receptive to it.

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed this post, and if you would like to join me as I continue exploring the many paths of the Mary Poppins rabbit hole I fell into ten years ago, you are very welcome to subscribe.

Until next time, be well.

Lina

Making Mary Poppins, Unmaking P. L. Travers

Dear Reader,

Did you know that a new book about Mary Poppins was released last October, titled Making Mary Poppins: The Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney, and the Creation of the Classic Film by Todd James Pierce? The book explores the making of the 1964 film starring Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins. While documentaries and other accounts of the making of the film already exist, this book shifts the focus to the personal and professional lives of the Sherman brothers. Rather than centring solely on the movie, the first part of the book traces their family background, beginning with their father and early childhoods, and follows their long struggle to succeed in the musical industry, culminating in their breakthrough as the songwriters behind Mary Poppins.

I am a fan of the Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers, as they are where I first encountered Mary Poppins as a child. I only discovered the existence of the film in 2015, after reading Mary Poppins She Wrote by Valerie Lawson, the first written biography of P. L. Travers. This may sound strange, but the fact is that I spent my early childhood in Bulgaria during the Cold War. Disney films were viewed as products of American capitalist culture and, as such, did not make it behind the Iron Curtain.

The political regime of that period viewed Disney as promoting bourgeois values and glorifying individualism and consumerism. Because the state conceived of itself as the guardian of children’s impressionable minds, it sought not only to shield them from harmful bourgeois influence but also to guide them toward socialist values, shaping them into future workers and citizens bound by a moral duty to serve society.

How, then, you may ask, was it possible for the Mary Poppins books to be translated into Bulgarian and made available to children? One plausible explanation is that reading was regarded primarily as an educational practice rather than a form of mass entertainment. Furthermore, the books may also have appeared less overtly Western or glamorous in tone.

In the literary version, Mary Poppins is markedly stricter, colder, and more ambiguous than the character portrayed by Julie Andrews. The original Mary Poppins is authoritarian, ironic, and emotionally distant. In addition, the stories can readily be interpreted as conveying lessons in discipline, hierarchy, and moral correction, all qualities that stand in sharp contrast to the film’s lavish spectacle.

Luckily for my childhood self, and for other young readers of that time, Western children’s literature appears to have been tolerated so long as the stories lacked explicit political content and were not oriented toward consumption. Other children’s classics, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, and Winnie-the-Pooh, similarly slipped past communist censorship and quietly beguiled our imaginations. At the time, I was, of course, entirely oblivious to the broader social and political context in which I encountered these books.

I liked the Mary Poppins film. I admit that it is difficult not to like it. It is a visual and auditory delight, a feast for the senses. Still, it is not the Mary Poppins of my childhood, nor the one I rediscovered as an adult. It is an entirely different artistic creation. The screen version, entertaining as it may be, lacks the depth and mystery of the Mary Poppins found in the books. I am always struck by the comments of adult readers who, as children, first encountered the character through the film. They often express the opposite reaction, largely because they are surprised by the stark difference in the personality of the literary Mary Poppins.

In the books, Mary Poppins is harsh, cold, and not given to explanation. This never troubled me as a child. From the very first chapter, I was convinced that her severity was a kind of pretence, that she only appeared strict. The contrast between her outward demeanour and the inner self I sensed made her all the more compelling and rendered the magical adventures she led the Banks children on even more wondrous. I suspect that other children reading the books felt much the same.

Her contrariness does not trouble me now either. Instead, it makes her more human, precisely because of her ambiguity. She may possess magic, she may be the Great Oddity or the Great Exception, she may even have reached a higher level of consciousness, for all we know, yet she remains unmistakably human. Are we not all a little more ambiguous than we care to admit?

Despite my allegiance to the original Mary Poppins, I felt compelled to read Making Mary Poppins, if only to see whether the incident involving P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the Sherman Brothers might be portrayed with greater nuance. The title of the chapter devoted to this encounter, “The Trouble with Travers,” quickly dispelled that hope. A look at the Notes section at the end of the book suggests that Pierce relies heavily on Valerie Lawson’s biography of P. L. Travers and on the Sherman brothers’ own testimonies, while demonstrating limited engagement with P. L. Travers as a writer and spiritual thinker.

I would have welcomed a discussion of the cultural differences between P. L. Travers and Disney, or an exploration of the inner conflict she most likely experienced in the process of relinquishing control over her creative vision of Mary Poppins. Instead, the reader is once again invited to pick sides in a simplified clash of two creative visions. Worse still, the narrative encourages us to commiserate with the hardworking Sherman brothers, finally given their chance, while casting P. L. Travers as the obstructive and unreasonable figure standing in the way of their great success.

But why pick sides in this artistic conflict? Why not simply observe it in all its complexity? Yes, P. L. Travers did not follow the same logic as the Sherman brothers or Disney, but there was still logic behind her actions and her words. She was not as irrational or contrary as the cultural establishment has long been inclined to portray her.

Let us turn the tables here. The prevailing story has long favoured Disney’s version as generous, creative, and life affirming, while casting P. L. Travers as obstructive, eccentric, or emotionally difficult. When someone’s behaviour is labelled this way, it becomes easy to dismiss. It suggests that there is nothing to engage with intellectually, only a difficult personality to endure. More disheartening still is that women are often, even today, dismissed as overly emotional and difficult in situations where they are simply affirming their opinions and values.

How about we question those assumptions? We must recognise how power, gender, and cultural authority shape which voices are celebrated and which are marginalised. The loudest voice is not always the truest. We need to restore intellectual and moral complexity to a figure whose resistance was grounded not in whim, but in a coherent artistic vision and a deep sense of responsibility toward her work.

P. L. Travers was shaped by a cultural background that valued myth, folklore, and symbolic meaning. Her imagination was steeped in fairy tales, Celtic myth, and archetypal storytelling, where ambiguity is not a flaw but a feature. She wrote, “Fairy tale is at once the pattern of man and the chart for his journey.”

Through her engagement with esoteric traditions and thinkers such as George W. Russell, W. B. Yeats, and Gurdjieff, she believed stories could transmit moral and spiritual truths indirectly. For her, meaning was not something that needed to be explained but something to be experienced, because real wisdom is achieved through lived experience.

The Sherman Brothers, on the other hand, emerged from an American popular entertainment background. Their songs express feelings directly. Joy is declared, not hinted at. There is little mystery, because the goal is inclusion rather than initiation. Their background aligned naturally with Disney’s vision of family friendly, emotionally transparent storytelling.

The artistic conflict, then, was not merely about temperamental differences. It was a clash of cultural assumptions. P. L. Travers believed stories should challenge and unsettle. The Sherman brothers and Disney believed stories should reassure and delight.

Because of these differing assumptions, interpretations of the character of Mary Poppins diverged. P. L. Travers openly articulated her belief that the true magic in her books lay in the ability to engage successfully with ordinary life. To grasp her position, one must approach the stories as allegories. The Sherman Brothers, by contrast, understood Mary Poppins as a figure who brings magic into ordinary life, which implicitly assumes that ordinary life itself lacks magic. For P. L. Travers, the opposite was true. Ordinary life already contained magic. It was the springboard from which magic emerged.

Even before she met Disney, she disagreed with the way he altered beloved fairy tales, which helps explain why she refused to sell the rights to Mary Poppins for nearly twenty years. Interestingly, her views on Disney’s work were also shared by two other British writers. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis likewise believed that fairy tales and fantastical stories carry meaning and convey truths about life. Both disliked Disney’s animated film Snow White, and so did P. L. Travers. It becomes easier, then, to understand why it was extremely difficult for her to see her own creation as merely a vessel for entertainment, no matter how enticing and successful that vessel might be.

Beyond cultural differences and divergent views on the purpose of storytelling, another important distinction separated the Disney team from P. L. Travers. The Disney team operated comfortably within the world of entertainment and the logic of commercial success. Creating for money was not only acceptable; it was the point. The more successful the production, the better.

P. L. Travers approached money differently. She was not indifferent to it, but she did not see it as the primary measure of value. For her, money always carried a spiritual dimension. When she was young, her literary mentor George William Russell, known as AE, introduced her to the idea of the poet’s vow of poverty. This did not mean literal destitution. As she later explained to Brian Sibley, “It didn’t mean that if you were offered $100,000 you would refuse it. But it meant that you would not be attached to it. You didn’t even need to give it away but you wouldn’t live by it.” The principle was inner detachment. Money must not become the master of the work.

Years later, her spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff articulated a related but more demanding position. The material question was not whether one should have money, but whether one could earn, manage, and use it without guilt, vanity, or self deception, and without allowing it to define one’s inner work. Money, in this view, was a force that revealed character.

By the early 1960s, P. L. Travers was facing practical pressures. Sales of the Mary Poppins books had slowed. She was ageing. Her adoptive son, Camillus, had discovered that she was not his biological mother, a revelation that strained their relationship. It is not unreasonable to assume that financial security, and what she might eventually leave behind, weighed on her mind.

At the same time, she felt the adaptation threatened her artistic vision. In a conversation with Janet Graham shortly after the film’s release, she explained: “You must remember that an author’s idea is very precious to him, it’s like a child to a mother. So that if somebody comes along and turns it into a fair haired child when it is dark, or gives it four legs instead of two, he can’t be utterly pleased, even though the effect is something very gorgeous and splendid.”

This statement clarifies much of her resistance. From the outside, her behaviour appeared obstinate, even irrational. According to accounts reported by Pierce in Making Mary Poppins, many people working at the studio found it strange that she would stand in the way of a lavish film adaptation. Yet from her perspective, taking the money while her creation was altered beyond recognition carried a far greater cost, the quiet betrayal of her own artistic vision.

In the end, practical considerations prevailed. But her ambivalence never disappeared. When asked about Logan Pearsall Smith’s assertion that “There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail,” she replied with her usual wit, “I should think that that was true, at any rate externally; at least you could go to the movies and forget it for a time.” Her remark acknowledges money’s utility while quietly denying its power to resolve deeper conflicts.

The encounter between the Disney team and P. L. Travers is compelling precisely because neither position is illegitimate. They were operating from fundamentally different premises. One measured success in entertainment, originality, and revenue. The other measured it in loyalty to an inner vision.

We are often tempted to reduce complex conflicts to a clash between heroes and villains because it simplifies uncertainty and soothes our anxiety. Yet adult life, and especially artistic life, rarely conforms to such black and white thinking. Two positions can be internally coherent and still irreconcilable, as in the making of Mary Poppins.

Thank you for reading. If this story resonated with you, I invite you to subscribe to The Mary Poppins Effect, where I share reflections on Mary Poppins, her connections to other literary worlds, and my musings on books and the quiet magic of childhood.

Until next time, be well.

Lina

When Fiction Feels Real: Sherlock Holmes, Mary Poppins, and the Strange Afterlife of Literary Creations

Dear Reader,

This weekend I visited an immersive exhibition in Montreal devoted to the world of Sherlock Holmes, the legendary detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was both fun and educational, but as any bookworm would probably agree, there is something almost transcendental about seeing in real life the desk at which Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories. I only wish I could have touched it. There was also his richly ornate inkwell set, along with many other interesting objects.

Beyond the objects themselves, the exhibition led me to reflect on an unexpected connection between Sherlock Holmes and Mary Poppins. One section included a video recording of Conan Doyle speaking about his creation and about the correspondence he received from readers. He explained that he was surprised by the number of people who were convinced that Sherlock Holmes was a real, living human being. He received letters addressed directly to Holmes, letters requesting his autograph, letters written to his friend Dr. Watson, and even letters from women offering to become his housekeepers.

This immediately reminded me of an interview with P. L. Travers in which she said that people wrote to her asking whether Mary Poppins could be sent to their home to help with the raising of their young children. When I first read this, I assumed that people were simply being whimsical and indulging in wishful thinking, but were still aware that Mary Poppins is a fictional character. Surely they could not truly believe that Mary Poppins was a living, breathing being in our world, even though I was convinced of it myself as a child.

Now, hearing that readers reacted in the same way to another fictional character, I have come to a different conclusion. This longing to meet such characters in person may be the strongest proof of a truly successful literary creation, one that feels original and extraordinary. It makes me wonder whether P. L. Travers was aware of this striking similarity between her experience as an author and that of Conan Doyle.

There are other curious parallels as well. Both writers were interested in the occult, though in different forms, and both shared a belief in an invisible dimension beyond ordinary perception. Both authors refused to treat imagination as mere fantasy. They seemed to believe that imagined figures could carry truth, presence, and meaning that felt real to readers. That kind of openness allows characters to feel alive rather than invented, which may explain why readers wrote letters as if Sherlock Holmes and Mary Poppins actually existed.

And lastly, Sherlock Holmes’s creator wanted recognition for his historical novels and did not want to write as many Sherlock stories as he did. Similarly, P. L. Travers wrote other books and essays on myth and fairy tales and complained that people only wanted Mary Poppins stories from her. Both fictional characters became larger than their creators, and the relationship between creator and creation was riddled with ambiguous feelings. Isn’t it funny how what brings outer success does not always equate to inner fulfilment?

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and will consider subscribing to The Mary Poppins Effect for more stories exploring the world of Mary Poppins and its connections to other literary worlds.

Until next time, be well.

Lina

Revisiting Happy Ever After

Dear Reader,

I wish I were as talented a storyteller as P. L. Travers, able to gift you a magical story this holiday season, but my brain is analytical and reflective. So instead of enchantment, what I am offering is a comparative analysis of the first version of “Happy Ever After,” a Mary Poppins story by P. L. Travers first published privately for friends in 1940 and later included in Mary Poppins Opens the Door, the third book in the series, published in 1943.

The first edition of “Happy Ever After” was limited to one thousand copies privately published by the author for her friends and her publishers as a New Year’s greeting. What a lovely idea, and how lucky were those who received it!

When I first sat down to read the original version, I did not know what to expect, though I suspected there would be some differences from the story I had read in Mary Poppins Opens the Door. Naturally, I was curious to see what had changed and perhaps even to investigate the differences and what they might reveal.

It turned out that the original story is very similar, with most of the differences being largely stylistic. That will likely come as no surprise to any writer. Editing, polishing, and improving a text can be a never-ending process, especially when one struggles with perfectionism or insecurity, which may simply be two sides of the same coin. However, I noticed two significant discrepancies between the two versions of the story and these are the ones that I want to tell you about.

Nowhere in the Mary Poppins books is the exact age of the Banks children stated. The reader understands that Jane and Michael are preschoolers, since they spend most of their time with Mary Poppins in the nursery or in the park. John and Barbara grow from babies to toddlers, and the youngest Banks child, Annabel, appears in the second book, Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935).

But in the 1940 edition of “Happy Ever After,” P. L. Travers reveals how she imagines the ages of the children, and interestingly she seems to forget about Annabel. Or perhaps she intended the story to take place between Mary Poppins’s first visit to the Banks family in Mary Poppins (1934) and her second visit in Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935).

“It was the latest day of the Old Year. Upstairs in the nursery of Number Seventeen Cherry Tree Lane, Jane Banks who was seven, Michael Banks who was five and John and Barabra Banks who were twins and two-and-a-half, were being undressed.”

This is certainly the kind of detail only a Mary Poppins enthusiast like me would notice, but I take enormous pleasure in diving deeply into these stories and sharing my findings with you. I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I enjoy discovering them.

Another interesting difference between the two versions is that in the 1940 edition, P. L. Travers describes at length how the children perceive Mary Poppins. In the later version, which I find more successful, she conveys the same idea more succinctly and in a way that feels more revealing. Here are the two passages in order.

“She moved about the nursery, folding up the scattered clothes and tidying away the toys. To look at her – with her coal-black hair, her china-blue eyes, her bright pink cheeks and her turned-up nose that was like the nose for a Dutch Doll – you would never imagine that she was anything but a perfectly ordinary person. But Jane and Michael and John and Barbara knew better. For had she not, when she first arrived at Number Seventeen, mounted the stairs by sliding up the banisters? And was it not certain that on her second visit she had appeared from Nowhere on the end of a string, looking more like a kite than a human being? How could a perfectly normal ordinary person be capable of such extraordinary behaviour? Impossible. Jane and Michael and John and Barbara knew very well how extraordinary she was but they did not speak of it for there were things about Mary Poppins that could never be explained. And it was no use talking to her about it for Mary Poppins, as everybody knows, never told anybody anything.”

The passage comes across as clunky and overly explained, and P. L. Travers may have added extra detail for friends unfamiliar with Mary Poppins, but she later trimmed it from 182 words to 94 in the second version of the story.

“She moved about the Nursery, folding up the scattered clothes and tidying the toys. The children lay cosily in their beds, watching the crackling wing of her apron as it whisked about the room. Her eyes were blue and her cheeks were pink and her nose turned up with a perky air like the nose of a Dutch Doll. To look at her, they thought to themselves, you would never imagine she was anything but a person. But, as you know and I know, they had every reason to believe that Appearances are Deceptive.”

What a valuable lesson for children and one that resonates deeply, yet is often forgotten as we grow older. The importance of looking beyond outward appearances and not relying solely on what meets the eye is especially relevant in today’s world, where social media shapes so much of our perception. We are constantly exposed to carefully curated images and stories that can distort what is real and influence how we view ourselves and others.

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of comparing and judging based on these surface impressions. Many of us have likely experienced firsthand how the tendency to compare ourselves with others can disrupt our relationships and undermine genuine connections. Although it is natural to observe and compare, I find that the rise of social media has intensified these impulses, often resulting in feelings of envy, dissatisfaction, and a sense of inadequacy. Ultimately, the gentle reminder from Mary Poppins to look deeper and not be deceived by appearances is a lesson we would all do well to remember, especially in our modern, image-driven world.

I often wonder what would P.L. Travers think of the world we now live in.

Now I would like to share some examples of the stylistic changes made in the story, even though I cannot fully explain the reasons behind these edits:

In the 1940 version, the nursery characters that come to life on New Year’s Eve are drawn from Nursery Rhymes Old and New, a Victorian era edition of classic English nursery rhymes. In the 1943 version, however, the characters come from Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, which refers not to a single book but a long-standing tradition of collections featuring familiar English rhymes and characters.

In the 1940 version Admiral Boom blows a trumpet in the frosty air while in the 1943 story he clangs a ship bell.

In the 1940 version, Barbara’s monkey toy is called Sissie, while in the later version the toy is renamed Pinnie.

In the first version, when the children follow their toys to the park where characters from fairy tales and nursery rhymes have gathered to celebrate a magical moment of happy ever after, the brief crack between the first and last stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, they are greeted by the Frog Who Would a-Wooing Go. In the second version, however, they are welcomed instead by the Three Blind Mice and the Farmer’s Wife.

There are several similar small changes in the second version of the story, although the reasons for them are not entirely clear. Even so, the heart of the narrative remains unchanged, reminding us that we each must work to reconcile the opposing forces within our inner and outer lives.

Wishing you all a happy ending of the old year and an even happier start of the new year.

Warmly,

Lina

Discover Mary Poppins’ London: A Literary Travel Guide for Fans of P.L. Travers – Part II 

Dear Reader, 

This post continues the story about my first Mary Poppins–themed trip to London with my daughter in the summer of 2023. In last month’s post, I shared our visit to P. L. Travers’s former homes at 50 Smith Street and 29 Shawfield Street in Chelsea. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here. 

In this blog post, we will visit St Paul’s Cathedral, stroll through Poppin’s Court near Fleet Street, shop for parrot-headed umbrellas at James Smith & Sons and admire the Mary Poppins statue in Leicester Square Gardens.  

St Paul Cathedral, London 

If you find yourself in London, a visit to St Paul’s Cathedral is, in my humble opinion, an absolute must. Its grandeur is astonishing—from the soaring colonnades to the magnificent domed ceiling—and the vast interior, adorned with intricate mosaics, takes your breath away the moment you step inside.

This iconic landmark was especially dear to P.L. Travers, who featured it not only in The Bird Woman chapter of her first Mary Poppins book, but also in her later 1975 Christmas tale The Fox at the Manger. I’ve explored this story in detail on the blog—you can read more in: A Christmas Story by Pamela L. Travers, The Nativity Reimagined by the Author of Mary Poppins, The Fox at the Manger (Part I) and (Part II). 

In The Bird Woman, Mary Poppins takes the Banks children to visit their father who works at the bank, where he, as described in the very first Mary Poppins story, East Wind, “sat on a large chair in front of a large desk and made money. All day long he worked, cutting out pennies and shillings and half-crowns and threepenny-bits.”   

I wish the idea of looking up banks around St Paul’s Cathedral had occurred to me while I was there, but it didn’t—so this will have to go on my list for my next trip to London. I’m talking about the bank where I believe P. L. Travers imagined Mr. Banks working: the Ludgate Hill branch of the City Bank at 45–47 Ludgate Hill, which, according to Memoirs of a Metro Girl, is now a wine bar.

The picture above was taken by Metro Girl and is shared here with her permission 🙂

How do I know this was the bank P. L. Travers had in mind when she wrote “The Bird Woman”? Because she writes: ‘They were walking up Ludgate Hill on the way to pay a visit to Mr. Banks in the City.’  

In The Bird Woman we learn that Mr. Banks is entirely absorbed in material pursuits and has no time for small pleasures. But we can hardly blame him—he is the sole provider for his ever-growing family (by the second book in the series, the Banks family counts five children). Hoping to offer him a rare moment of joy and respite, Mary Poppins and the children plan an outing for tea and Shortbread Fingers. Yet Jane and Michael are far more excited by the possibility of meeting the Bird Woman and her pigeons outside St Paul’s Cathedral than by the promised tea and shortbread.    

Because of the sharp contrast between the Bird Woman’s quiet act of feeding the birds and Mr. Banks’s worldly occupation, The Bird Woman takes on a distinctly spiritual undertone for the adult reader. The doves, traditionally associated with the Holy Spirit in Christianity, serve here as a visual metaphor for the nourishment of the soul. Clearly, P.L. Travers is concerned with our human struggle to balance material responsibilities with the quest for spiritual fulfilment.  

Yet for carefree Jane and Michael, the Bird Woman and her doves are simply companions to delight in and play with. For them, the magic of the day is found in this gentle, enchanting encounter—an experience that carries them beyond the ordinary and into a realm of wonder. 

I love how P. L. Travers conveys Jane and Michael’s understanding of the doves, while at the same time revealing her own gift for remembering how to see the world through the eyes of the child she once was. 

“There were fussy and chatty grey doves like Grand-mothers; and brown, rough-voiced pigeons like Uncles; and grey, cackling, no-I’ve-no-money-today  pigeons like Fathers. And the silly, anxious, soft blue doves were like Mothers. That’s what Jane and Michael thought, anyway.” 

Jane and Michael (and probably P.L. Travers) relate to the animal world far more naturally—and kindlier—than most adults. To them, the birds are not pests but companions, each a living being with its own character. We, on the other hand, tend to brush past pigeons and doves as if they were mere annoyances, hardly pausing to see them at all—too busy rushing for the train or speeding down the highway, intent on our own version of cutting pennies and shillings. 

I experienced my own version of feeding the birds—not at St. Paul’s Cathedral, but in St. James’s Park. While we were there, a little girl, slightly older than Jane and Michael Banks, had a bag full of seeds. She was not only feeding the birds but also offering seeds to passersby who, like me, wanted to join in the experience. It was deeply touching, and here is a short clip of me feeding the birds.

Feeding the birds in St. Jame’s Park

Many of the characters in the Mary Poppins stories—if not all—have their roots in the real-life experiences and encounters of P.L. Travers. She rarely revealed these inspirations openly, though hints occasionally surfaced in interviews she gave throughout her long writing career.  

I have never come across an interview in which P. L. Travers spoke about the origin of the Bird Woman. However, I did find an old picture of a man standing outside St Paul’s, his arms and shoulders alive with pigeons as he feeds them. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, while working as a freelance journalist near Fleet Street, P. L. Travers often passed by St Paul’s Cathedral, and I can’t help but wonder whether this man might have been the true inspiration behind the Bird Woman. 

St Paul’s Cathedral, as P.L. Travers writes in The Bird Woman, was built long ago by “A man with a bird’s name. Wren it was, but he was no relation to Jenny.” That man, of course, was Sir Christopher Wren, England’s most celebrated architect of his day. When my daughter and I visited St Paul’s Cathedral in the summer of 2023, we saw a lovely exhibit inside about Sir Christopher Wren and the reconstruction of the building after the Great Fire of London in 1666. 

Wren designed the Great Model of the cathedral in 1672–73. The version you see in the picture below was executed by William Cleere and a team of thirteen joiners. This design differed from the original in style, evolving from the “Greek Cross” plan by extending the nave and adding a domed bell tower. 

King Charles II, who awarded the reconstruction contract to Wren, requested a slight modification: the domed bell tower had to be replaced with a traditional spire. But Wren was not a man easily discouraged. Once the plans were approved and the contract signed, and construction was well under way, he discovered a loophole in the fine print: it permitted ornamental rather than essential changes. So, he made his alterations accordingly. 

St Paul’s Cathedral is also Wren’s final resting place. Below is a photo of a copy of Wren’s death mask—the original is preserved at All Souls College in Oxford. A little morbid, perhaps, yet also a fascinating human attempt at transcending death.  

Now who is Jenny Wren? What did P.L. Travers meant by saying that Wren was not related to Jenny? The reference is a pun woven by P.L. Travers—one I had completely missed, since English folklore and nursery rhymes were not part of my upbringing. For those who may also be unfamiliar: the wren, a tiny brown bird, was affectionately called “Jenny Wren” in English tradition. She appears in old songs and nursery rhymes, often paired with Robin Redbreast as husband and wife. 

Children in P.L. Travers’s time would have instantly recognized “Jenny Wren” as shorthand for the little wren, and the playful wordplay would have delighted them. It signals to young readers that the world is whimsical, alive with hidden connections. The pun weaves together architecture (Wren), folklore (Jenny Wren), and the story’s imagery of birds and the mystical Bird Woman—perfect for a chapter set at St. Paul’s amid flocks of pigeons. 

And for adult readers, there’s yet another layer: an echo of Dickens. Jenny Wren is also a character in Our Mutual Friend. That reference escaped me as well, but this Dickens novel has now joined my ever-expanding TBR list. 

Poppin’s Court 

Not far from St Paul’s Cathedral, just off Fleet Street, you will come across a narrow lane called Poppin’s Court. When P.L. Travers first came to London she worked as a free-lance journalist on a street near Fleet Street and she must have passed by Poppin’s Court on her way to St Paul’s Cathedral, and it is, as her friend Brian Sibley wrote, possible that this is how she came up with the idea for the name of her famous nanny.  

Back in 2023, when my daughter and I visited Poppin’s Court, there was a Poppins Café, which may still be there. Sadly (for me), it had nothing to do with Mary Poppins. I would have loved to visit a Mary Poppins–inspired tea room based on the books.

Leicester Square Gardens 

If you have time, be sure to stop by Leicester Square, where you’ll find several statues capturing iconic movie moments from different decades since the 1920s — and of course, one of them is Mary Poppins. Although the Mary Poppins statue in Leicester Square celebrates the film character rather than the one from the books, I couldn’t resist trying to ‘fly away’ on her umbrella. 

Since this Mary Poppins statue was created many years after P.L. Travers’s death, we can only guess what she might have thought of it. What we do know is that she once wished for a statue of her character in London—though her dream location was Kensington Gardens. I will tell you more about that in a future post on this blog.  

James Smith & Sons Umbrellas  

If you want to get a parrot-headed umbrella like Mary Poppins’, you should definitely visit James Smith & Sons Umbrellas, a tiny shop founded back in 1830. I have no idea whether P.L. Travers knew about this shop or if she ever visited it. According to her own account, the inspiration for the parrot-headed umbrella came from a childhood memory of a servant’s umbrella in the Travers household in Australia (and maybe by something else, which I also plan to tell you about in a future post). But whether or not P. L. Travers ever visited this shop, I thoroughly enjoyed our own visit — dampened only by the scaffolding on the facade, which was under renovation.  

Here is a picture of a parrot-headed umbrella standing proudly beside another famous fictional character. I was tempted to purchase both, but the price tag quickly discouraged me. But two years later I am still thinking about this parrot headed umbrella … 

That’s it for now—thank you for reading! If this post brought you a little joy, just click the subscribe button in the bottom-right corner of your screen and join me for the next stop in my Mary Poppins adventures through London and beyond. You can also follow along on Facebook and Instagram for more glimpses into the magical world of Mary Poppins and P.L. Travers. 

Until next time, take care and be well. 

Gregory Maguire Remembers P.L. Travers and Talks About His Book “A Wild Winter Swan”

Dear Reader,

As a devoted fan of P.L. Travers, you can only imagine my delight in having the opportunity to learn firsthand about a private conversation she had with bestselling fantasy author Gregory Maguire back in 1995, a year before her passing. I hope that reading this blog post will be as much of a treat for you as it was for me to write it.

As a young boy, Gregory Maguire loved the Disney adaptation of Mary Poppins, but he loved the books more. And I believe that this is the case for most of us who first encountered the magical nanny on the page. It was certainly my own experience, but then I never saw Disney’s Mary Poppins as a child growing up behind the Iron Curtain. My acquaintance with the cinematographic version of Mary Poppins came much later and at a time when my mind had acquired its critical abilities.

“The movie is sunny and as sweet as a spoonful of sugar. The books, though, show glimmers of a far more mysterious and even dangerous world. For thirty years before the nanny began to sing on the screen, she stalked the pages of these books with ferocity and power.” (Foreword by Gregory Maguire, Mary Poppins Collection published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)

I couldn’t agree more!

At the time of his meeting with P.L. Travers, Gregory Maguire was at a turning point in his writing career as he was just about to publish his bestselling novel “Wicked”. He was living in London, and after discovering that the author of Mary Poppins also lived there, he sent her a note, and in return received an invitation for tea.

He showed up at Number 29, Shawfield Street, London on the appointed day and time with three of P.L. Travers’s books: one of the Mary Poppins books, “The Fox at the Manger” and “Aunt Sass”.

He found P.L. Travers “an old woman slumped in an upholstered chair set back from the window” in a “shadowy parlor that hadn’t been fluffed up recently”.

The meeting lasted for about an hour, but it was long enough for P.L. Travers to plant a seed for a story in her visitor’s fertile imagination. It was a comment she made about a fairy tale character, the youngest brother in the fairy tale “The Six Swans” by the Brothers Grimm. In this story the wicked stepmother turns her stepchildren into swans, and it is their sister who, in the end, breaks the spell by knitting shirts from aster flowers. Only she does not have enough time to finish the last shirt and the youngest brother is left with one swan wing instead of an arm.

P.L. Travers felt, and rightfully so, that there, at the end of one story, was the beginning of another.

Shortly after Gregory Maguire finished writing his book “A Wild Winter Swan” but before its publication in 2020, he came across in his hand-written journals from 1995 something about P.L. Travers having said to him, “There’ a story – the sixth brother. Give him something to do. The boy with a wing. You know the one I mean?”

As the swan boy had been a beloved figure in his psyche ever since reading Hans Christian Andersen’s beautiful retelling of the Grimms’ fairy tale at the age of ten or twelve, her remark had evidently stuck in his subconscious. But that’s where Gregory Maguire tells us, seeds to stories wait.

This is by far the most exciting interview I have had the opportunity to conduct so far, but before we dive into it, and with Mr. Maguire’s permission, I am reproducing a portion of his lecture “The World at Hand, The World Next Door” presented by the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books for the 32nd Annual Helen E. Stubbs Memorial Lecture in November of 2019. Here is his charming recollection of his meeting with P.L. Travers.

I was living in London. Because somehow, I came across her home mailing address—perhaps in the phone book—I’d written to the author of MARY POPPINS, Ms. P. L. Travers, to thank her for her great work. She’d replied in a shaky hand ordering me to come to tea Tuesday week. Perhaps she preferred to receive tribute in person, I thought. (…) It’s nearly time to go—Number 29 Shawfield Street, London. . . .

A Georgian [row] house with a broad single window, behind palings, a small house on the east side of the street, behind a shocking pink door . . . at street level. The doorbell sharp and hard. I thought she might have forgotten, might not be there. A young woman, maybe part Jamaican, came in jeans and answered the door.

P. L. Travers sat in a chair in the corner, angled so she could watch out the window. She looked up when we came in and said to me, “Who are you?” I introduced myself—and she seemed not to hear me, but when I said again, more slowly, “Gregory” she appended “Maguire.” “You invited me to come by, and so I have, for a very short time,” I said. Mostly, in her face, were eyes and smile; she smiled like a small child; she seemed happy at everything, and smiled as a way of conversing. I had heard she was a bitch, a tart and difficult woman, but only at the end of my visit did one small comment erupt.

What follows is a sort of dialogue I devised that day out of notes I scribbled down on the back of a checkbook immediately after I had left Ms. Travers’ home. By this I mean it is more scripted than it may have sounded as it occurred—one can’t help imposing logic on scribbled notes. But the exchanges are verbatim as I could recall them even if they didn’t come out as sequentially as I put them down. Only a few words have been changed, for clarity.

PLT: I’ve been in the hospital and the nursing home for two years. I just got back. I can move very little.

GM: Can you get out at all?

PLT: Up and down the street.

GM: To the end.

PLT: To the second lamp-post. My world has shrunk to the second lamppost. But when I was out the other day, looking down to watch my feet, I found a present—

GM: —?

PLT: A star. A star!—there in the pavement. I’d never seen it there before. There’s a story—the sixth brother. Give him something to do. The boy with a wing. You know the one I mean

GM: Yes (I thought I might but wasn’t certain).

PLT: At the end of the street is a pub called the World’s End.

GM: At the other end, on the King’s Road, is a café called the Picasso Café. I sat there and a storm came up, and a rainbow came over—just ten minutes ago.

PLT: That was for you, to show you that you’re welcome here.

GM: You live between the star and the rainbow.

PLT: Yes! . . . . this is my whole world. There used to be… acres and acres of lavender, and cows mooing.

GM: Where is Cherry Tree Lane?

PLT: What?

GM: Where in London is Cherry Tree Lane supposed to be?

PLT: I don’t know what you mean.

GM: The house that Mary Poppins lived in. Is it in Chelsea? In Kensington?..

PLT: Oh! Well, no. Well, it’s…. it’s…. (she waves her hand)… It’s between here and someplace else.

GM: Do you know, I grew up on Mary Poppins. When I was ten years old, I sat on our front porch and read the books and ate sour-apple hard candy. I never forget it.

PLT: Do you know, when I came home from hospital, I picked up the second Mary Poppins book, and I began to read it. And I didn’t know what was going to happen! I turned the pages—I found it delightful. …. I didn’t know what would come next.

GM: I’m not surprised. She’s a mystery.

PLT: I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her. . . .

GM: Will you sign a few books?

PLT: It is hard to do.

GM: Maybe three? This is MARY POPPINS AND THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR.

PLT: And this is something special for you. (She draws a star). William Butler Yeats told me only to sign my name, but this is for you.

GM: Do you remember this? (A privately printed copy of AUNT SASS, which Travers had once had done up as a Christmas present for close friends.)

PLT: ! (She opens it.) Look! Stars! Nine stars! Who put those there? But where’s my name?

GM: On the front. (She crosses out the printed name and signs her own name.) And this last. MARY POPPINS OPENS THE DOOR. It’s my favorite.

PLT: It’s not for children.

GM: It’s Mystery. Mystery is for children.

PLT: Yes, but also for adults.

GM: Yes. Of course.

PLT: (She signs it.) I found a picture of myself in the chapter called “Balloons and Balloons.” Me and Mary Poppins and Mary Shepherd.

GM: I’ll look for it when I go home. And I should go soon. I’m flying out tonight.

PLT: Where?

GM: Dublin tonight, and Boston tomorrow.

PLT: I was at Radcliffe once, teaching. And at Smith. I loved Radcliffe. I hated Smith.

GM: Why?

PLT: A man from an American magazine called Life came to every lecture, and all the Smith girls threw themselves at him.

GM: This has been an extraordinary afternoon for me. I will never forget it. Thank you. (I kiss her.) Goodbye.

PLT: Goodbye. Write about this.

GM: Pardon—?

PLT: Write about coming here to tea.

Cheryl shows me to the door. I leave PLT sitting in the corner of the room, all eyes and smile, in a blue cardigan, knees together, hands on her knees. The big square window is now dark with dusk.

Something intriguing about the conversation: “Here I divert from my journals to insert a memory that I didn’t write down at the time. Ms. Travers elected to address me as the man who came to read the meters, and kept telling me they were out back, through that door. She seemed entirely unfazed that the meter man would arrive carrying rare copies of her hardcover books and would be conversant in arcane details of her career and work. I’ve often wondered if she wasn’t having me on.”

Reading about the man who came to read the meters made me smile. She was, most probably “having him on”. Her life quest was all about finding the meaning of life and the questions she asked in her essays were “Who are you?” and “What is man a metaphor for?” It is possible then that she was probing her guest in the manner of her spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff, who used to shock and surprise his pupils with strange statements and behaviours in order to break down their habitual thought patterns and thus strip off their masks.

Now, onto my interview with Mr. Maguire and his delightful book “A Wild Winter Swan”.

LS: Is there is a possibility for a sequel of “A Wild Winter Swan”? In the ending Laura explains the swan boy’s arrival into her world in these words: “No, he has flown away from them once because he could not bear to be other than wholly human. Now he has to try the alternative. He really doesn’t have a choice. Do we.” But what if that alternative does not prove to be the solution either?

GM: I have not contemplated writing a sequel to “A Wild Winter Swan” —but I never say never with conviction. I had not contemplated writing a sequel to “Wicked”, and it was ten years before “Son of a Witch” came out. There have been five more books about my take on Oz after that one—so far.

Still, in regard to “A Wild Winter Swan”, I admit there is something both sad and satisfying in the loss of a character whom one has come to love—even one who is ultimately bewildering. Not unlike, come to think of it, a certain Mary Poppins herself. I tried to leave the reader with a sense of insecurity about how and even why this boy, Hans, had landed in Laura’s life.

LS: Yes, I did wonder about that too. Did Laura somehow summon him because she herself was in a liminal state of being; suspended between the dreamland of childhood and the demands of adolescence, all in the background of the dire circumstances of her personal life? Or was it the other way around. Why did the swan boy happen to Laura?

GM: Why does anything happen to anyone? Why did Peter Pan land on the nursery windowsill of the Darling family instead of the family next door named the Oblenskys, with their fat little cousin visiting from Moscow, the one who dangled the family turtle from a third-floor window and nearly decapitated it? It just happened. Wendy’s mother told stories, after all, and Peter wanted to hear the stories.

Hans might just have landed on Laura’s windowsill by chance. Things happen in stories. On the other hand, Laura had just read the Andersen tale to those first-grade students. Then she’d come home and helped rescue a worker about to fall off Laura’s own roof. The conditions of Hans’s arrival were established in her mind by the events of the day. Maybe they helped her recognize him when it happened—or maybe it was happening largely in her mind, a dream and hope of escape and of rescue from her increasingly dire situation. (Of course, no one else saw the visitor except the cat, and there is the matter of the bloody eels, the most proof that someone else is in the house with the Ciardi family. But maybe the cat did get the eel itself, and Laura was inventing what else must have happened in the terms of the story going on in her head.)

This makes a sequel hard to position in my imagination, for in order for there to be more to Hans, I would have to be more definite about how, and what, he actually is—and that he lives outside of the story Laura is busy telling herself in her own head. And I’m not sure of that myself.

The point is, while I think that Hans is real, and so does Laura, others might not be so sure.

LS: I believe Hans to be real too, but maybe other readers will interpret the story differently. P.L. Travers said that a book is only half the writer, the other half being the reader. I wonder if you intentionally made the parallel between Laura’s inner strength and that of Elise in Andersen’s story.

Elise must knit shirts from stinging-nettle without ever saying a single word and at the risk of perishing because of it. Laura does speak in the story, but she is mute about the existence of the swan boy, and she goes about his rescue in the most secretive way despite all the challenges that his presence creates in her already troublesome situation.

I found Laura to be just as self-contained, determined and resilient as Elise in Andersen’s fairy tale. And just like in Andersen’s fairy tale, by saving the swan boy, Laura saves herself. Did you start writing the story with the end in mind, or did the narrative unfold organically in this way?

GM: When I began to write the story, I wanted Laura to be clever imaginatively but not socially—perhaps a bit backward in school. I never know how stories are going to end when I start them—that means I am uncovering the story in an organic way, as I want readers to do, too. I didn’t realize until about 2/3 of the way through the story that as Laura didn’t have the capacity—as Elise in Andersen’s story didn’t, either—to do surgery upon the swan boy and convert his swan wing to an arm, there really was only one other choice: she had to return to him a second wing, and confer upon him agency to fly away. This is also what she has to do for herself, and so I intended that the act of rescue for Hans should be synonymous, or at any rate practice, for the act of rescuing herself.

LS: Why did Laura’s grandparents choose a boarding school in Montreal as an alternative to her education? I live on the south shore of Montreal and work in the city, so naturally, this caught my interest.

GM: There is one main reason for this. As I loved books like “A Wrinkle in Time”, “Mary Poppins”, “The Wizard of Oz” and the Narnia books—among many others—I noted even then that there is a consistency of literary genre in these beloved titles. I didn’t know the word “fantasy” until I was in high school, I mean not as applied to a type of story. I called them “magic books” —books about magic (though they seemed to do magic, too, in how they made me feel!)

But I had one favorite title from childhood that was not a literary fantasy. It was the novel by Louise Fitzhugh called “Harriet the Spy”. You’ve heard of it, and perhaps you’ve read it. Harriet is a sixth-grade girl who spies on her classmates, writes things down in her journal, and intends to become a writer when she grows up. She is wildly curious and, like all children, quite naive, but she is working at increasing her bank of experiences so she can understand the world better.

In writing “A Wild Winter Swan”, I wanted to pay homage to Harriet a little. I set the story in roughly the same patch of neighborhood where Harriet lives, on the Upper East Side of New York—and in very nearly the same couple of years. (“Harriet the Spy” came out in 1964, I think, and my story takes place in 1962.) I imagined Harriet and Laura passing one another on the pavement. I didn’t want Laura to be a writer per se, as that would be too imitative, and besides Laura’s capacity to “see” and experience Hans is predicated on her simplicity, perhaps her simple-mindedness—so working arduously with words the way Harriet does would contradict Laura’s open and believing nature. Her gullibility, perhaps.

Instead, I had Laura “think” stories—narrate her own experiences in her head as she would write them—if she were a writer. She is not shy of imagination and thoughtfulness, after all—or of imaginative sympathy—but she is not academically robust, either. This method allowed me to have Laura comment on her own experiences but only in her head. It’s another proof that she lives in her mind, and therefore another hint that the incidents with Hans may be self-generated. (You might say she is having a schizoidal break, unable to separate between reality and fantasy. I mean some might say that. I wouldn’t.)

In “Harriet the Spy”, the child’s beloved governess leaves the household about halfway through the novel to get married. She tells Harriet she is going to move with her beau to Montreal. To Harriet, Montreal seems as far away as the moon. “Mon-tre-ALLLL?” she wails when she hears the plan. My threat of sending Laura to Montreal was a quiet tip of the hat to Louise Fitzhugh.

I like Montreal, though. My big sister, who was a little like Laura in 1962, grew up and married a Canadian man and spent all her adult life in Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto, and is now retired as a grandmother in Ontario. So, growing up in Albany NY, Montreal was to me a place of warmth and attraction, and I liked, and like, visiting.

LS: In your interview by Kristen McDermott, you say that “Magic helps the young reader skip over some of this as-yet-imponderable mysteries and supplies instead a set of inchoate influences that organize a mystifying world to the young mind.” What role and significance does magic hold in the world of adult readers?

GM: At this point in my life I think fantasy is largely a gift for the young. I don’t seek it out to read as an adult (though I do love to return to books I loved as a child). There are some exceptions. The Philip Pullman novels come close to matching, in moral seriousness, what Ursula Le Guin managed in her Earthsea books. But I think a sort of disservice has been done to the reading of fantasy by the technical marvels of CGI in the film industry. When virtually anything can be pictured, and pictured convincingly, thanks to the wizardry of computer animation etc., then the thrill of reading of something impossible happening on the page is somewhat demoted.

The strength of fantasy in the lives of children is still potent, though. Fantasy still has power to charm because children have not yet finished pacing off the dimensions of the structure of reality. In fantasy, they are playing with “what might be” without being entirely sure. Of course once they get to the age of five, most children realize that humans don’t fly, and can’t fly, and they won’t—and yet they can fly in their dreams! So what’s that all about? And there are other enchantments (the thrill of romance and sex, when they get there) that will seem to open up the world to them in ways they couldn’t have anticipated a year or two earlier.

While adults, having convinced themselves that they’ve (largely) got the measure of reality, must approach fantasy in literature with a different expectation. Indulging in that literary art is a bit nostalgic, perhaps; it can more easily be read as metaphoric; in any case fantasy is at least diverting and a consolation, allowing one to turn away from the vicissitudes of our increasingly hostile and dangerous life on this planet. But as a rule, fantasy literature for adults can no longer tempt as a possible alternative construction to reality that we might someday find our way into embracing—as Laura does, in my story. That magic casement is closed. Peter Pan knows it, and so even does Mary Poppins.


About a Forthcoming Biography of P.L. Travers 

Dear Reader, 

A new biography of P.L. Travers is scheduled for release in 2025 by Pen & Swords, a British publisher specializing in history and true crime. The author of this biography is Elisabeth Galvin, a British journalist and author who currently resides with her family in Brisbane, Australia.   

Last year after discovering this blog, Elisabeth reached out to me, sparking a correspondence that eventually, to my delight, culminated in my contribution of a chapter about P.L. Travers’s spiritual beliefs. 

Elisabeth Galvin has written two other biographies of famous children’s writers. The first one, “The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit”, which will be the subject of this blog post, was published in 2018.   The second, “The Real Kenneth Graham”, was published in 2021.  

P.L. Travers was in her own words “a tremendous Nesbit fan” and read her books again and again even as an adult.  

I think so highly of her, and I’m absolutely sure that such writers as C.S. Lewis, for instance, good though his books are, could never have existed without Nesbit.” 

Transcripts of A Talk About Sorrow, July 1965 

P.L. Travers and Janet Rance 

Elisabeth Galvin drew some interesting similarities between the two writers during a recent conversation we had, and I’ve decided to share some snippets of it here for the benefit of the readers of this blog. But just before, let me provide a brief note about the life of E. Nesbit for those of you who are not familiar with her work.  

E. (Edith) Nesbit was an English author and poet. She was born in 1858 and died in 1924, the year when P. Travers first came to London, so the two women never met.  Edith lost her father when she was only four years old and had to change homes and schools often as her mother traveled frequently to France and Spain seeking a cure to the ailments of Edith’s older sister Mary.  

Edith married Hubert Bland who later became an influential socialist journalist and with whom she co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  

She wrote numerous short stories, poems and novels both for children and adults. Her most well-known works for children include “The Railway Children”, “Five Children and It”, “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”, “The Phoenix and the Carpet”, and “The Enchanted Castle”. 

Her ability to blend fantasy with everyday experiences resonated with readers and contributed to the evolution of children’s literature and as such had a significant influence on later writers, including C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson. 

Now to my conversation with Elisabeth Galvin.  

LS: Why did you choose to write a biography about E. Nesbit? 

EG: Well, I always wanted to be an author, and I became a magazine journalist, and I absolutely loved my job. Then, when the opportunity came to submit some ideas for biographies about children’s authors to a publisher, I knew I had to take that chance. I thought about all the stories that I loved when I was younger, and Railway Children was one of my favorite stories.  I still have the book that my parents gave me, a red leather-bound book with a gold spine – it’s such a lovely story, and E. Nesbit led such an interesting life as well, and I believe that is why I chose to write about her.   

LS: Yes, she did have a tumultuous life, and I really enjoyed reading your book because you recreate the atmosphere of that period so vividly. I imagine you had to visit some of the places you write about in your book.   Could you share some insights into your research process for the book?  

EG: Yes, of course. It was an exciting process because as a journalist, I love meeting and talking with people and exploring different places. A notable experience was visiting Well Hall, where E. Nesbit lived with her family for some twenty years. I had the privilege of exploring it in the company of a member of the E. Nesbit Society, which truly brought the whole experience to life. We walked around Well Hall; while the original house was demolished in 1930, parts of the original gardens still remain and I saw the wooden statues portraying characters from E. Nesbit’s books, so yes, her spirit was definitely there. 

(Picture taken from “The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit” by Elisabeth Galvin. Dame Jacqueline Wilson at Well Hall unveiling the wooden sculpture of the Psammead, commissioned by the E. Nesbit Society in 2013.)

I visited another one of E. Nesbit’s residences, Halstead Hall in Kent (click on the link to see the pictures). It was one of her childhood’s homes. It was lovely, it had the quintessential English garden and that is where she loved to spend time reading during her teenage years. I think she was 13 when she was there.  The vicar who lived in the village at that time lent her his books and that is when she first came across Shakespeare.  I could imagine this impressionable young girl lying in her garden looking at the apple trees and the roses and get a picture of her character, so it was very helpful going to those places. 

Surprisingly, after E. Nesbit’s death, her personal papers were sold to The University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. She never went to America but was published there too, so I had to go there. I spent five intense days reading letters and other materials from the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds and then suddenly came outside to see a Taco Bell and fire engines. It was a funny experience.   

LS: Yes, I can imagine, it sounds like a real time travelling experience. Now, what proved to be the most difficult part in writing the book? 

EG: The most difficult was knowing that I would never meet her, or talk to her or hear her voice, or ask her questions. A lot of biographies really are speculation, even if it is unintentional, your natural biases do come out. As a journalist you always want to tell the truth and be as fair as you can, and there is a sense of responsibility when delving into someone else’s life. 

LS: Definitely, and this also applies to P.L. Travers, especially considering she did not want people to inquire about her private affairs. You mentioned previously that during your research on both women you noticed certain similarities between them. Could you tell us more? 

EG: Well, it is amazing, actually.  The more you think about it, the more similarities there are – both physically and in terms of their personalities. The way they approach life, the events that unfolded in their early childhood as well as their literary works exhibit striking similarities.  

Firstly, both were very tall women with short curly hair. They possessed a somewhat androgynous appearance, attracting men and women. They were both, in a sense, single parents.  E. Nesbit was married, but her husband was not particularly supportive. 

They both had a “get up and go” attitude toward life. They experienced significant hardships, losing their fathers at a young age, and both had a nomadic childhood—P.L. Travers throughout Australia, and E. Nesbit across Europe, attending school in France and Spain.  

Despite the disarray of their early years, they shared a deep love for reading, voraciously consuming any available books. Their affection for Shakespeare and a natural flair for writing emerged early in their lives. Both harbored aspirations to become poets, and perhaps even experienced a tinge of disappointment for not receiving the recognition they desired. 

And they both wrote about ordinary children and everyday magic. Their skill was to remember what it was to be a child and to transpose the essence of childhood into their writings. And I don’t know if it is because they had such unusual childhoods, losing a parent at a very young age, but they always had an idealized version of family life.  

LS: Do you think they would have gotten along if they had met? 

EG: I am sure they would have had a lot in common to talk about. E. Nesbit loved bohemian parties and thrived on that kind of energy. Similarly, P.L. Travers loved to meet new people and make new friends. They were not solo writers, they loved sharing their knowledge and taking part in artistic gatherings.  

And I believe they would have connected on the fairy tale aspect as well. P.L. Travers wrote about Sleeping Beauty in the 1970s, and E. Nesbit was also deeply interested in fairy tales, writing her own collection of fairy stories. 

LS: I agree, they would have had a lot to talk about. They even shared common acquaintances, George Bernard Shaw for example. Their lives and literary contributions provide an endless well of discussion and we can go on for hours.

I want to thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with the readers of the Mary Poppins Effect blog, and I hope to share more about our collaboration and your forthcoming biography of P.L. Travers in the coming months. 

Halloween with P.L. Travers

During her stay as a writer-in-residence at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in the autumn of 1966, P.L. Travers was invited to give a lecture about myths, fairy tales and their connection to everyday life. The following year the lecture was published in ‘The Quarterly Journal (Library of Congress, USA) and later in 1989 included in P.L. Travers’s compilation of essays published under the title ‘What the Bee Knows’.    

Because the lecture happened on Halloween, P.L. Travers concluded with a brief comment on its history, which she told the audience began as a pagan celebration of the dead and later on was integrated into a Christian celebration by one of the Popes, ‘Boniface IV, perhaps, in the seventh century, who decided to do away with all the pagan saturnalia and turn it from what it so significantly was, into a commemoration of the saints and martyrs’. 

Normally I should have taken her word on the matter, she knew so much and I so little in comparison, yet for some unknown reason I felt compelled to do a quick factual check. To my surprise I discovered that it was not Pope Boniface IV in the seventh century, but Pope Gregory III, in the eighth who decided to morph the old beliefs into the new Christian religion. 

Obviously, her historical reference was wrong but getting the dates right was beside the point she wanted to make, and in all fairness, she did use the word ‘perhaps’, meaning she was not sure of the factual accuracy of her statement. Yet, its truthfulness remains, the old beliefs were indeed transmuted into the new system of beliefs but were unfortunately, in her opinion, deprived of their essential purpose. Luckily, people knew better than Pope Gregory III and a version of this pagan celebration remained to our days.  

In ‘Only Connect’ P.L. Travers acknowledged our human need to remember the dead and to come to grips with our own grieving and fears of death and the unknown. These needs, old as humanity, need an outlet, a ritual to allow us to turn our faces back to life.  

From time immemorial, stories are what allows us to create meaning out of our human experiences, and fairy tales were for P.L. Travers the guideposts in our personal lives. Then, it is only normal that she had written her own version of this pagan celebration in Hallowe’en a story in Mary Poppins in the Park, where not ghosts but the shadows of characters from fairy tales come to party in the Park under a Blue Full Moon. I have written about this story before, and you can read the blogposts here and here.

Now rereading ‘Only Connect’ leads me to believe that the idea for the story may well have been inspired by her own observations of the modern ritual of trick-or-treating; a night when children in the guise of fairy tales characters, heroes and villains, hand in hand, roam the streets at night in search of treats.

Happy Halloween!  

‘Paper Stars’ a Musical About P.L. Travers, the Creator of Mary Poppins 

Photo: Cameron Jones

Three years ago, Miranda Middleton, a young writer and theatre director from Australia had the brilliant idea of a theatrical production centered around P.L. Travers and the writing of the Mary Poppins books.  

The initial idea has now crystalized into ‘Paper Stars’, a musical first developed by The Hatch Lab Musical Theatre Residency Program at Salty Theatre in 2021. From there ‘Paper Stars’ was further workshopped at the Victorian College of the Arts, and last May a stage reading was presented at the Australian Musical Theatre Festival in Tasmania. 

By a fluke of circumstances, I got the chance to meet with Miranda Middleton via Zoom and talk about ‘Paper Stars’ and all things P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins. I am sharing here some snippets from our conversation which begins with a predictable question, and one that was despised by P.L. Travers, but one that honestly, we cannot help but ask creators. 

LS: How did you come up with the idea of ‘Paper Stars’? 

MM: I was quite a theatrical child with a big imagination, so naturally I adored the ‘Mary Poppins’ film, even though it made me sob at the end! I was totally devastated by the fact that Mary Poppins had to leave, and I think I carried that grief for the character into my adulthood, as I too lost people in my life that I loved. Then I saw the film ‘Saving Mr. Banks’ and I discovered that in fact P.L. Travers – the author of ‘Mary Poppins’- was Australian.  I couldn’t believe that I didn’t know she was Australian! And this is basically how the idea for ‘Paper Stars’ was born. From there I recruited my playwright friend Grace Chapple to develop the story with me, and she said, “I think it needs to be a musical.” So, then we asked Luke Byrne to write the music and it has just kind of gone from there. 

LS: ‘Paper Stars’ is not a biographical piece, is it? 

MM: I guess we set out to write ‘Paper Stars’ to add to the canon of biographical material about P.L. Travers. We wanted to cover the period of her life when she was creating this magical character so that gave us the period between 1925 and 1935, during which there really isn’t much written about what was going on for her internally. But that was also interesting for us as writers because it meant that we could bring out our own imaginations to the table. I think the way that we describe ‘Paper Stars’ is that there is a HUGE spoon full of creative license in there So…  it is the somewhat true story of how Mary Poppins came to be, but we are not calling it biographical –it is probably more fictional than biographical.  

LS: ‘Paper Stars’ explores the difficult relationship between P.L. Travers and her mother, their painful separation back in Australia, and then also P.L. Travers’s relationship with Madge Burnand. 

MM: Yes, we were very interested in this idea that Pamela was living with a woman in the 1920’s which was controversial and unconventional – it is those qualities about her that we loved. We were also interested in her relationship with her mother because ‘Mary Poppins’ (the first book in the series) is dedicated to her, not to her father, who she purportedly adored. We were just so fascinated by that fact. So, I guess we dreamt into that backstory. 

LS: Another insight that I gained from ‘Paper Stars’ is that P.L. Travers wanted to be taken seriously as a writer and this is the reason why she kept her Australian origins secret. 

MM: Yes – the cultural cringe! It is a big thing for us Australians, we are very cautious and aware of being kind of looked down upon by the mother land or people overseas. 

LS: Back then or now? 

MM: Even now, I think Australians are kind of still conscious of it. 

LS: The songs are quite touching and emotional. I enjoyed all of them, but my favorites are “Great Story” and “Everyday Magic.” 

MM: Luke who wrote all the music is so clever! The emotional impact of the songs and the story on the audience (at the staged presentation in Tasmania) was really touching to me. Lots of people were crying and wanted to stay around afterwards to talk about the show. I’ve received a number of messages since  saying: “I think this is a really important story to tell.” “It really touched me.” Yes, so I was surprised by how emotionally impactful the story was and so, I am excited to take it to the next stage. 

LS: And what happens now, what are the next steps? 

MM: We are in an interesting phase now where we are talking to various venues about its eventual premiere. It is not official yet, but we are hoping that something will happen next year, because 2024 is the centenary of P.L. Travers leaving Australia. We’ll see what the stars have in store! 

LS: Well, I hope the musical goes into production soon and maybe one day I will get to go to Australia too and see it! 

A Little-Known Friendship 

The friendship between P.L. Travers and Helen Keller is a little-known fact and one that was brought to my attention by a generous reader of this blog. I am forever grateful to my readers who share my interest in the world of P.L. Travers and Mary Poppins and freely share their knowledge with me.

A few letters kept in the archives of Helen Keller reveal that she and Polly Thomson stayed at P.L. Travers’s home during their visit to the UK in 1946. Helen Keller recollects the visit in these words: 

“How often Polly and I recall the cozy evenings we spent with you, Camillus, and Moya by the fire in that dear, war-tried little house, surrounded by objects upon which your artistry has bestowed a fairy grace! “

And in another letter: 

“I prefer to tell you how two pilgrims in search of ways to succor the war-blinded of Europe were rested and cheered by their visits with you, Moya and darling Camillius. Besides taking you to our hearts we loved your house, bomb-wounded yet warm and sweet to the core, your fire crackling with a cheery message of peace that shall someday inundate all homes, the simple hospitality making us feel natural and free instead of feeling “guests,” and the talk on whose wings the hours flew unnoticed.“

The connections I make from reading P.L. Travers’s interviews and writings usually require time and effort, and although I enjoy the process, I must admit that it is immensely satisfying, albeit I feel a little mischievous, to read P.L. Travers’s private thoughts on matters she never discussed in interviews. 

Her correspondence with Helen Keller contains candid details about her relationship with her son, Camillus, and her feelings about single motherhood. In her interviews P.L. Travers rarely talked about Camillus and when she did, it was indirectly, by making references to a boy she knew well or a boy dear to her heart. This may appear strange, but I believe that she was trying to avoid questions about his adoption.  

The adoption of Camillus is discussed in P.L. Travers’s biography Mary Poppins She Wrote by Valerie Lawson, as well as in the documentaries about her life, and so I am not going to delve into the details of the adoption here, but just mention briefly, for those of you who are not familiar with the story, that P.L. Travers never told Camillus that he was adopted and that he had a twin brother, and other siblings. At the age of seventeen he discovered the truth when his twin brother came knocking on P.L. Traver’s door.  

As you can imagine Camillus was hurt and felt betrayed by the person he trusted most in life. His anger was mighty, and he never completely forgave her. This was a terribly sad and tragic event for both and P.L. Travers’s biggest regret in life was that she had not been a good enough mother for Camillus.  

And maybe from the outside one can say that she should have made better choices when it came to her son, the truth is she could not have done differently because she did what she could, what she thought was best, based on the level of awareness she had at the time.  

In her letters to Helen Keller, P.L. Travers writes about teaching Camillus how to swim and row during their summer vacation in Ireland and in the Wales, and how she is teaching him to handle a canoe on the Regent Park Lake. She mentions that he is taking violin lessons and “being very musical and with a good ear.”  

But what I find most interesting in this correspondence is that P.L. Travers appears to have been nostalgic of Camillus’s earliest childhood years. It is almost as if she was grieving the loss of their deepest connection, feeling the bond between them beginning to weaken as he was growing up and losing touch with the dreamland of fairytales. In a way they no longer shared a common way of perceiving the world. Camillus, like most of us when growing up, was interested in the external affairs of life and of becoming, whereas P.L. Travers always kept one foot in the land of myth and fairy tales, and looked for a deeper meaning of life, beyond the illusion of the ordinary. She wrote to Helen Keller: 

“He, when he first heard poetry, was enchanted by it, but now at the age of eight only wants it now and then. He is so busy being a gangster one moment, supervisor another, a policeman the next. Everything now is acting and there is very little dreaming. The house shakes with his thundering feet, he is always coming from or going somewhere and only at night remembers that he has a mother and is still small enough to sit in her lap and be rocked in the rocking chair.”  

This sentiment of hers was so strong that it made its way in Every Goose a Swan in Mary Poppins in the Park. Camillus is the Boy in the story. The Boy is engrossed in pretend play, he is a fearsome one- eyed pirate, but then when the Tramp dares him to go to Dead Man’s Drop he suddenly remembers that he has a mother, that if he leaves she would be anxious and that after all she was making pancakes and it was better for him to stop acting and be his other self. 

Another interesting aspect of this correspondence with Helen Keller is P.L. Travers’s frankness about her difficulties as a single parent, the frustrations of domestic life, and her difficulty at reconciling it all with her deep need to write.  

“Helen, you will understand how sad I have been at having to face the possibility of sending Camillus to boarding school. I aways wanted to keep him at home with me and let him go to a day school. But daily living becomes ever more difficult in England and the almost impossibility of finding anybody to help in the house will probably make it imperative. (…) I have broached the subject with him and his cheerful reply was “I will hit you if you do send me away!” However, as he grows I think he will quite like the idea and I hope to find a simple loving school which will not try and mould his abundant nature into too conventional a pattern. Then perhaps I shall have time to write.”

The boarding school she chose for Camillus was Dane Court Preparatory School for boys in Surrey. Joy Davidson, the wife of C.S. Lewis, sent her own two sons there after consulting P.L. Travers over tea. P.L. Travers’s high praise confirmed Joy Davidson’s impression of the school.  

“The one she liked best was Dane Court, in Surrey, about twenty miles southeast of London. It was the most expensive, “gracious, well-established, comfortable without being luxurious and modern without being faddist,” having adopted a progressive policy of not “whack(ing) the children.” 

Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis, by Abigail Santamaria. 

In conlusions, P.L. Travers did what she could to give Camillus a good education and a good start in life.

There are other things in the letters that will probably prompt me to write other blogposts, but this is it for this one, and I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading it.