|
One storm-torn night, Pamela Travers, the original author of the Mary Poppins books, was left with her two younger siblings as her mother - her only living parent - walked into the rain, informing her that she was going to drown herself in the river. Travers, gathering her sisters around her, told a story about a magical flying horse as the younger ones asked, "Could he carry us to the shiny land, all three on his back?" Her mother returned that night, but Travers stories were to grow darker and sparkle less.
Travers, born Helen Lyndon Goth in 1899, was no loveable English matron. Moving to London from her native Australia at the age of 25, she became drinking buddies with British hacks in the pubs of Fleet Street, made friends with the poet Yeats, published under the gender-ambiguous PL Travers, and participated in a string of relationships with men that, it has been strongly suspected, were more than platonic.
© 2010 Broadway.tv LLC
