Mary Poppins Opens the Door...

    Pamela Lyndon Travers, that is P.L. Travers, author of The Mary Poppins series, might well have stayed in this home in Loughrea in the West of Ireland with her friend William Butler Yeats. 
    (The owner of the home, Joe Barrett, told me that he knows for certain Yeats stayed often at this 18th century home as he had to live a bit "handy".  The Irish equivalent to "I have always relied upon the kindness of strangers."  Writers and poets not always flush, you know, said Joe.)
    Born Helen Lyndon Goff in Queensland, Australia, in 1899, Travers was a published poet while still in her teens. She was a talented actress and toured Australia and New Zealand with a Shakespearean troupe before leaving for England and Ireland in 1924. 
    In Ireland in 1925, George William Russell introduced her to Yeats.  How her imagination must have spun and  sparked as Yeats opened the door on Celtic and world mythology.        Biographer Valerie Lawson writes that Travers family was largely Irish in background, so I believe, she resonated with Yeats, with the mythical West of Ireland, her background becoming her foreground.  Indeed, Lawson titled her book The Mystic Life of P.L. Travers.
    Russell went on to introduce Travers to Alfred Orage, a highly respected writer and editor and Orage in turn, introduced her to one of the greatest spiritual masters of the 20th century, Gurdjieff. To read an interview with Lawson, click here interview with Valerie Lawson .
    On my ninth birthday, my aunt gave me a copy of Mary Poppins Opens the Door.  It didn't seem at all odd to me that a British nanny could twirl out of the sky and return to the Banks household on Cherry Lane to restore order.  I would read in bed in my round room in our old shingled Victorian house.  My bed faced three windows with wide wooden sashes.  One cold night I finished the book just as my mother opened the door to my room.  I saw her reflected in the large, frosty,  middle window, opening the door; this mirrored absolutely the end of the book.  Mary Poppins opens the reflection of the nursery door and disappears through the window.
    And in that instant, before my mother could kiss me goodnight, it all appeared possible.