The Australian who wrote the now classic children's books about the English nursemaid Mary Poppins was interviewed when she flew in to Sydney for a short visit to her family.
MARY POPPINS' creator refers to herself simply and firmly as P. L. Travers. Pamela Lyndon Travers, if one insists.
The initials leave her, she says, in a web of anonymity. "I believe that writers should be anonymous, because it's what's written that matters the writer himself is of very little consequence."
On the contrary (I suggested), a writer needed to be of considerable consequence before he or she could withhold all personal details from the admiring public. Hadn't she had trouble with the American Press?
"Initially," said Pamela Lyndon Travers superbly, "but I gradually trained them."
She is probably the only writer to break off a TV interview half-way through (this happened in New York) because the interviewer didn't know who Mary Poppins was.
"I found myself having to sell Mary Poppins on the spot, which was" terrible," she said. "So I wrote a note – it said, 'I do aot care to continue this interview' – and passed it to him."
He was rather agitated, one gathers, because he had another quarter-hour to fill.
In case you, too, are lamentably ignorant of Mary Poppins, she is, roughly speaking, a fairy. "I hope you do not think of all fairies as fluffy, gauzy little things," said P. L. Travers with a flash of compelling blue eyes.
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