It is Travers's and Disney's fraught tussles over whose Mary Poppins would finally triumph that is brought to life in Saving Mr Banks, the new film starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks.Īnyway, as Travers's text makes clear, Mary Poppins is no beauty. I know now that this hard-cornered Mary Poppins was not some careless slip on Shepard's part – the book preceded the film by 30 years and, as far as Travers was concerned, it was Walt Disney who got it wrong when he added spoonfuls of sugar, not to mention some larky cartoon penguins, to her really rather dark text. This was the kind of nanny, magical or not, from which any sensible child would shrink.
In fact, she resembled a stiff peg doll, thin and hard, with a peg nose and two spots of high colour on her wooden cheeks. Drawn by Mary Shepard, daughter of EH Shepard who illustrated Winnie-the-Pooh, this Mary Poppins looked nothing like the soft and lovely Julie Andrews. But far worse was the picture of Mary Poppins on the cover.
Anyway, pink was not then the absolute obsession with little girls that it has since become, and I had been hoping for the luscious, bleeding colours of Disney's Technicolor. This, I now think, was a nod to "strike me pink", one of Mary Poppins's favourite sayings, or perhaps to the blossom in Cherry Tree Lane. For a start the cover was a muddy, slightly sinister pink. Over the years I had been the recipient of endless cover versions of branded toys – knock-off versions of Barbie, Caran d'Ache and Ladybird – and this Mary Poppins looked distinctly counterfeit too. My parents had form when it came to missing the point. Like a bad fairy princess bullying her court musician, I made Grandma play on and on until the moment when it seemed that we might both spin ourselves into a cloud of coloured chalk dust of the kind that Bert the pavement artist uses to sketch his magical alternative worlds.īut the moment I unwrapped my present I knew something had gone horribly wrong. And, at home, I sternly presented my grandmother with the sheet music of the Sherman Brothers' score. I did, though, definitely win the competition for who could say "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" backwards. At school I won the unofficial prize for the person who had seen the film the most times (I said eight, although it was actually only six: but in the Disney universe, believing something hard enough is the key to making it come true). A thrill, because for the last five years I had lived and breathed the Disney version, which had come out in a blaze of glory in 1964. B eing given a copy of Mary Poppins by PL Travers for my eighth birthday was both a thrill and, as it turned out, one of the greatest disappointments of my young life.
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