Sometimes a good book is adapted into a film that is quite different from the book, but very good in itself. Stanley Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s The Shining (the book was 1977, the film 1980) keeps the original characters and the basic story, but adds in images and events that are not in the original book,and it works very well. The book is quite different, but also excellent. (Apparently King did not like the film at all.) The same could be said (more or less) about the 1970s TV series based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Mary Poppins is another example of this. The Disney film (1964), directed by Robert Stevenson and starring Julie Andrews and a powerful cast, is completely different to P.L.Travers’s book, which was first published in 1934. I saw the film when I was around 5 and I was enchanted by it. Then, when I was 9 or 10, someone gave the book by P.L.Travers (1899-1996) to my younger sister for Christmas and I grew to love that too, although we often wondered why it was so different to the film.
I’ve written before in this blog about how children quickly adapt to books which have elements in them that they don’t quite understand. This was certainly true of the Mary Poppins book. Coming back to it as someone who has taught history and read widely in the intervening half-century, I know now that upper-middle-class women in Britain as late as the 1930s went to extraordinary lengths not to rear their own children. When Fanny, in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, goes to live in Oxford with her husband who is a ‘don’ (an Oxbridge academic, not a mafia boss), she is horrified by other dons’ ‘ghastly’ children who have never been ‘thwarted or cleaned up by the hand of a nanny’. In Mitford’s weird world, nannies are needed to prevent children from being spoiled by their mothers – and of course, to do the toilet-training, nose-wiping and general disciplining that mothers (who did not, by the way, go out to work) would shrink from. We accepted servants in the Mary Poppins film because it was ‘olden times’, (though we never thought of Mary Poppins as a ‘servant’ as such) but we found it hard to understand how (in the book) the ‘modern’ Mrs Banks, with her household staff of three and nothing to do all day, so desperately needed somebody to mind her children. But we suspended our disbelief, just as we did for the magic which Mary Poppins makes happen. In the film this magic is performed with a smile and a song by Julie Andrews, but in the book it is done impatiently by a skinny, sober-suited, sharp-nosed woman, who always denies it subsequently, with an indignant sniff. Nowadays the book-Mary Poppins (as I will call her) would be summarily dismissed and blacklisted for emotional abuse. But when we were small, most adults were a bit imperious and impatient, and we took it on trust that bossiness and grumpiness were often a mask for generosity and goodness. (Often they weren’t, too.) So, the book-Mary Poppins was more familiar to us than the film one.
In the 1964 film, Mary Poppins arrives in Cherry Tree Lane so as to reconcile the Banks parents with their two emotionally-neglected children, Jane and Michael, and when her work is done, she flies off with her umbrella, a tear in her eye. Mr Banks has stopped worrying so much about work and Mrs Banks has given up all that silly suffragette nonsense. (I know. But I would forgive this joyful film a lot.) And the film is set in the Edwardian period, which offers far more potential for gorgeous costumes and settings than the rather flat 1930s in which the original story is set. Admiral Boom is brilliantly done, the chimney sequence is mesmerising, the bank part is very funny, the songs by the Sherman brothers are catchy and memorable (I’m humming them as I write) and the film really feels like London, despite the fact that it was not shot on location.
The book, on the other hand, is set in the interwar period, the twilight of domestic service, and that is why Mrs Banks is so desperate to get a nannie (as it is spelt in the book) that she accepts Mary Poppins, who expects to be hired without any references, with a cheeky manner from the very start. (The suggestion in the book that the nannies would be queuing up outside the gate waiting for interview, and that Mr Banks would have to tip the policeman for keeping them in order, is a little in-joke for the servant-starved middle classes. But that queue, and what happens to it, makes a fantastic introductory sequence in the film, which is, anyway, set in the Edwardian period when there were more nannies available.) The book-Mary Poppins introduces the children to all kinds of magical scenarios, some of them fun, (up on the ceiling with Uncle Albert, the zoo with all the people in the cages and the animals roaming free), some of them frightening (the tiny sweetshop owner Mrs Corry who breaks off her fingers for the children to eat, and bullies her two giant daughters Fannie and Annie), some of them fascinating – around the four corners of the earth with a compass. Sometimes the book-Mary Poppins can be polite and appreciative, as when she goes out with Bert (without the children), and even loving, as she is with the baby twins, John and Barbara.(They are left out of the film, but there’s a strangely sentimental chapter in the book devoted to them.) But mostly, Mary Poppins is cross, and whenever she says anything she does so (just to pick a few adverbs) snappily, sharply, contemptuously, rudely, pityingly, darkly. She is always admiring herself in shop windows, but woe betide the butcher who tries to flirt with her. There is no ‘story arc’ in the book, as in the film – Mr and Mrs Banks are as silly, each in their own way, when Mary Poppins leaves, as they when she arrives. Nobody has ‘learned anything’. I’m not mad about the book sequels – the whole point of the first book is that Mary Poppins came and went, and that should have been it. And she didn’t come because she thought the children or their parents needed her, or leave because her work was done, but just because she felt like it.
A clear example of the difference between the book and the film is the Bird Woman chapter/sequence. In the book, the woman who sits on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral feeding the birds is a ragged old automaton, who cannot say anything except ‘Feed the Birds, Tuppence a Bag’, and is impervious to everybody and everything, even the birds. Mary Poppins despises these creatures (‘sparrers’) who peck at the berries on her precious hat. Later, when Jane and Michael indulge in a little fantasy about how the Bird Woman sits there all night protected by the birds who love her, she corrects them scornfully. In the film, however, Mary Poppins sings a song (which I somehow know off by heart) which eulogises both woman and birds, and describes how the saints and apostles on the Cathedral look down and are happy that somebody is feeding the birds whose young-ones-are-hungry-their-nests-are-so-bare. This kind of sentiment would be entirely foreign to the book-Mary Poppins, who might be magical, but is never whimsical. And yet, only for her, the children would never see the Bird Woman in the first place.
Brian Sibley’s afterword to the Collins Modern Classic edition (1998) tells us that Pamela Travers, as a child in Australia,was fascinated by the stories servants told and didn’t tell – the hidden world of their lives outside the house, the alarming things that happened to their relatives, not for children’s ears, and the actual stories they told too, to amuse the children and keep them quiet. Mary Poppins (the book) is a celebration of the exoticism of domestic servants for young upper-middle-class children, and a suggestion that the very things that made them sometimes risible and always recognisable (possessions like carpet-bags and warnings like ‘if the wind changes your face will stay like that’) were in fact signs that they belonged to another, magical world, sometimes pleasant and piquant, but just as often, frightening and fierce.
Stacy Schiff, an American writer, in a really good article I read years ago ( in the British Independent, so that dates it), argued that in children’s lives, as in children’s literature, the real adventures happen when parents are absent or absent-minded. But children need to feel safe, too. The book-Mary Poppins is always the same, cross and impatient, but she never puts the children in danger. They know they can rely on her not only for adventures, but for warm milk before bed.
C.S.Lewis, a decade later, would take the dangers of magic a step further, exposing his child characters to genuinely perilous situations. I might write about the Narnia books at some stage.
P.L.Travers, Mary Poppins (London: Peter Davies 1934); Collins Junior Classics edition, London 1998, with afterword by Brian Sibley.
Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate (London: Hamish Hamilton 1949).
Stephen King, The Shining (London: Hodder Headline 1977).
Clear Classic Books 
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