The creator of the beloved Mary Poppins, the children’s-book character who is now heroine of a Walt Disney movie, tells how that crusty English nanny slid up a banister and dropped into her life.
These are the questions that have been flung at me thousands of times and from every point of the compass ever since Mary Poppins first appeared in book form. Children put them to me in large round writing, elaborating their queries with bursts of enthusiasm and, occasionally, reproach. When Mary Poppins flew away again for the third time, a boy wrote to me mournfully, “You should not have done that, Madam, you have made the children cry !" It was so grave and beautiful a protest — like an elegy — that I kept the letter as a treasure. "I am not surprised." I said in reply. ”I cried myself when I wrote it down."
„But how did you get the idea?" From the first that question seemed to haunt me, like a constant, recurring ghost. Nobody had ever asked me where I got an idea for a poem — perhaps poems are taken for granted — and I could never think of a reply that seemed suitable, factual and adequate.[…]
