I wrote this as an introduction to a book, by Giorgia Grilli, about Mary Poppins. Currently I have a small son who is determined to go up the chimney, like Bert, and is determinedly trying to get into every fireplace and up every chimney he passes. It seemed like a good time to put this piece of writing back out into the world.
I encountered Mary Poppins, as so many of my generation, and those that followed it did, through the film; but I saw the film as a very small boy, and it stayed in my head as a jumble of scenes, leaving behind mostly a few songs and a vague memory of Mr Banks as a figure of terror. I knew I had enjoyed it, but the details were lost to me. Thus I was delighted to find, as a five or six year old, a Puffin paperback edition of Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers, with a picture of pretty Julie Andrews flying her umbrella on the cover. The book I read was utterly wrong – this was not the Mary Poppins I remembered – and utterly, entirely right.
Not until I read Giorgia Grilli’s book on Mary Poppins did I understand why this was. I am not sure that I had given it any thought previously – Travers’ Mary Poppins was a natural phenomenon, ancient as mountain ranges, on first-name terms with the primal powers of the universe, adored and respected by everything that saw the world as it was. And she was a mystery. Mary Poppins defies explanation, and so it is to Professor Grilli’s credit that her explanation of and insight into the Banks family’s nanny does nothing to diminish the mystery, or to lessen Mary Poppins’ appeal.
The patterns of the first three Mary Poppins books are as inflexible as those of a Noh play: she arrives, brings order to chaos, sets the world to rights, takes the Banks children places, tells them a story, rescues them from themselves, brings magic to Cherry Tree Lane, and then, when the time is right, she leaves.
I do not ever remember wishing that Mary Poppins was my nanny. She would have had no patience with a dreamy child who only wanted to be left alone to read. I did not even wish that I was one of the Banks children, at the Circus of the Sun or having tea on the ceiling, and perhaps that was because, unlike many other children in literature, they did not feel permanent. They would grow, Jane and Michael, and soon they would no longer need a nanny, and soon after that they would have children of their own.
No, I did not want her for my nanny and I was glad the Banks family, not mine, had to cope with her, but still, I inhaled the lessons of Mary Poppins with the air of my childhood. I was certain that, on some fundamental level, they were true, beneath truth. When my youngest daughter was born I took the older two aside and read them the story of the arrival of the New One. Philosophically, I suspect now, the universe of Mary Poppins underpins all my writing – but this I did not know before I read Professor Grilli’s work.
It would not be overstating the case to suggest that Professor Grilli is the most perceptive academic I have so far encountered in the field of children’s literature, and I have encountered many of the breed. She understands its magic and she is capable of examining and describing it without killing it in the process. Too many critics of children’s literature can only explain it as a dead thing in a jar. Professor Grilli is a naturalist, and a remarkable one, an observer who understands what she observes. We are fortunate to have her, and we should appreciate her while she is here, before she too walks through a door that is not there, or before the wind blows her away.
Neil Gaiman
