Mary Poppins and the gingerbread stars: musings on the magic of P.L. Travers

Watching "Saving Mr. Banks" left me with an itch to know everything about the story's primary source material. (I dropped generous just-before-Christmas-hints about my lack of said material and Santa delivered).

Reading the first book was a revelation. If the Disney incarnation of Mary Poppins was cold (which was my opinion, even as a child), the real, original deal is an absolute ice cube. She's so cold I couldn't understand for a while what made the books so popular, unless it was, of course, the lovely element of magic. The movie exhibited this in spades: the laughing uncle who has tea in the air and sidewalk paintings that lead to different worlds. And the book contained additional magic only hinted at in the film: Mary Poppins is a sort of Dr. Doolittle who can communicate with animals.

 But I still wasn't quite getting it until the end of chapter eight which features an odd character named Mrs. Corry who is supposed to be a charming seller of gingerbread but who berates and belittles her adult daughters in front of strangers. Okaaay. Anyway, she and Mary Poppins conspire to steal from the children some carefully saved and stored paper stars (part of the gingerbread wrapping) in order to paste them onto the night sky. The children watch this activity from a distance, enchanted:

 Then Jane and Michael saw a most amazing sight. As soon as she arrived at the top of her ladder, Mrs. Corry dipped her brush into the glue and began slapping the sticky substance against the sky. And Mary Poppins, when this had been done, took something shiny from her basket and fixed it to the glue. When she took her hand away they saw that she was sticking the Gingerbread Stars to the sky. As each one was placed in position it began to twinkle furiously, sending out rays of sparkling golden light.

'They're ours!' said Michael breathlessly. 'They're our stars. She thought we were asleep and came in and took them.'

Jane doesn't say much until the very end of the chapter:

'What I want to know,' she said, 'is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?'

Aside from the unfortunate Kleptomania involved, this is a breathtakingly magical scene and I think I may be getting closer to understanding why Disney worked so hard to bring this book to the screen.

 In the meantime, I'm going to keep reading. I have three more Travers books to get through after this one and I hope to "paste a star" on this blog every time a scene touches me.


I wrote one post regarding another lovely magical element and one revealing something a bit darker.