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Neighbor across the way

While I was looking up Roger Daltry’s pile, I spotted a thing calling itself the Mary Poppins House. One kilometer away as the crow flies (Google Maps has a neat measuring device which told me that).

Yup, sure enough – P.L. Travers lived there while writing Mary Poppins. It doesn’t appear to be open to the public, though.

I read and loved all the Mary Poppins books, but I never looked up Travers before. I am not surprised to learn she was odd. She was an Aussie who moved to England in her twenties. She had fleeting relationships with men, but lived for some years with a woman with whom she had an “intense” and “ambiguous” relationship.

After parting ways with this woman, at the age of 40 Travers adopted a little boy who was one of seven children. She never told him he was adopted, though, and he never knew until the age of 17, when his twin (!) appeared at her door drunk and demanded to see him.

I highly recommend the Poppins books. They are dark and strange and trippy and `not in the slightest like the movie. I can see why she hated it.

April 14, 2022 — 8:00 pm
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