Aunt Sass: Christmas Stories Read online

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  Foreword

  These stories should be a delight for any reader, but particularly magical for fans of P. L. Travers’ great masterpiece, the Mary Poppins stories. Many of the preoccupations of those wonderful novels appear in these pages: merry-go-rounds, gorgon nurses, small dogs, smart hats, suns and moons and comets and constellations.

  The spirit is there too, and many of the ideas: predominantly, that children know darkness. P. L. Travers disliked the Disney version of Mary Poppins because she found it too cartoonish and sunny. Her own books made room for the fear and sadness of children, their natural and tragic awareness of impermanence. As she says here, in the story of Johnny Delaney: ‘Children have strong and deep emotions but no mechanism to deal with them.’

  Because these tales were printed privately as Christmas gifts for the author’s friends and family, and because of their tone, one assumes that they are autobiographical. There is some poetic licence but P. L. Travers, who had a keen sense of the spiritual and often dreamed of worlds beyond this one, might not approve of such literal distinctions.

  For example, in Ah Wong Travers explores (as she does so often in the famous nanny novels) the deep unknowability of people. What may read as racial discrimination today bespeaks a fascination with difference, rather than a rejection of it. The story’s end is deeply moving; is it true? Did the young Travers (then Helen Lyndon Goff ) really, in later life, meet an old Chinese cook from her childhood on his deathbed? Was there ever such poetic closure? In her genuine Australian childhood, her father worked in a bank rather than a sugar plantation. Travers added the spoonful of sugar, and possibly a lot more, but it doesn’t matter. The magical, tragical and real have always been mixed up in her work.

  It is the story of Aunt Sass that will bring the most joy to Poppins fans, offering clues to the inspiration for that immortal character. Aunt Sass (surely a version, if not an exact portrait, of Travers’ own great-aunt Ellie) is a grand, sharp, mysterious and contradictory woman, ‘stern and tender, secret and proud, anonymous and loving’. Like Mary Poppins, she twinkles and snaps in spits and spots.

  It seemed to me, when I was researching P. L. Travers for a documentary, that the great author was just such a woman herself. She loved her adopted son and grandchildren deeply, but refused to express this in a sentimental or traditionally maternal way. She brought her granddaughter to live with her for several years–and yet, at home in London, she once refused entry to her daughter-in-law and infant grandchild because it was lunch-time.

  Travers was ‘secret and proud’, certainly. She relished her public success and occasionally gave interviews, but then hated to be asked about either her own life or the genesis of Mary Poppins. She felt that this got in the way of the story. She preferred to suggest that everything came from the stars. I almost felt guilty reading the following Christmas-gift chronicles, redolent with childhood truth in the feeling, if not every last detail, but it was the guilt one feels when gobbling a delicious cake. Nothing so tempting could possibly have been left on the plate.

  Of Aunt Sass, Travers writes beautifully: ‘The sleepless humanity behind that crusty exterior reached out to every heart that came in contact with her.’

  It is clear that a sleepless humanity surged in the breast of P. L. Travers, expressing itself in a myriad of wondrous characters, and no heart that’s come into contact with her writing could remain untouched by it. I feel I know her better for reading these three stories, though she didn’t necessarily want to be known better. I suspect that she, like Aunt Sass and Mary Poppins, was challenging to love–but, to my mind, all the more lovable for it.

  Victoria Coren Mitchell, 2014

  To Eugene and Curtice

  Her name was Christina Saraset. She was a very remarkable person. Her remarkableness lay in the extraordinary and, to me, enchanting discrepancy between her external behaviour and her inner self. Imagine a bulldog whose ferocious exterior covers a heart tender to the point of sentimentality and you have Christina Saraset.

  She was my great-aunt and the oldest person I ever met. This is hardly surprising since she was born in 1846 and died last year at the age of ninety-four, grievously disappointed that she could not make the century. Her life, both in the living and the recounting of it was, in the eyes of her family, compact of adventure and romance. Only those six years were lacking to make the picture complete.

  It was in 1844 that my great-grandfather, with his young wife, sailed from England to Australia to recover health after a long illness. On arrival he made a prompt recovery, seized a huge tract of virgin forest with the grandiose simplicity of a robber baron, and built himself a mansion in the wilderness. Whether he really intended to live there nobody now knows, but the biennial appearance of the inevitable new baby compelled him to settle down. Soon there was a large Victorian family growing up among the Bushmen in rugged, pioneering splendour. Christina headed the list.

  It was at her instigation that all the children were sent backward and forward on the voyage between Australia and England to be educated. ‘I refuse to be brought up like a Savage!’ she is reported to have said. And her father, already sensing the bulldog in her, hastened to charter a vessel. Aunt Sass, as we all called her, would remember for her numerous great-nieces and nephews wonderful excursions when a ship took three months sailing to England; when there was no Suez Canal; and the desert between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean had to be crossed on muleback.

  Her stories of those days, like all her reminiscences, were original and intensely personal. There was little in them of the beauties of nature or the joys of youth. They were pithy tracts of moral behaviour and solid fact. Right and wrong were Aunt Sass’s favourite subjects. Her remembrance of the Sphinx was that ‘the huge ugly thing terrified your Great-aunt Jane. They had no right to put it there–just where people are passing!’ Of the Pyramids, all she had to say was that ‘your Great-uncle Robert was disappointed that they were not larger’. And all the glories of Sydney Harbour were as nothing compared to the fact that ‘your great-grandfather lost a silver crown-piece in it one day when he was out sailing’. I used to think of the harbour floor as paved with silver because of Great-grandfather’s coin.

  That was Aunt Sass. Everything in the world came back to herself–or her family. She used notable people simply as a background for her own life. Her family was hung about with great occasions as Indians with wampum. The universe and the outer unknown worlds swung about the central pivot of Aunt Sass and those nearest her. She numbered among her friends many of the great figures of her time but she saw them not as creatures of history or fate, merely as beings whose human significance lay in their intimate relation to herself. Thus Disraeli was less a statesman than the man who rode to hounds beside her ‘in yellow trousers and black-button-boots’. And Queen Victoria, for all Aunt Sass’s ardent royalism, was chiefly remarkable for the fact that she preferred salt on her oatmeal to sugar, ‘just like your great-grandmother’.

  Her historical facts were equally piquant and irrelevant. Having presided, as it were, almost at the inception of a great commonwealth, the things she remembered best were its small domestic oddities. That fis
h and milk carts were drawn by dogs because of the scarcity of horses; and that people going out to dinner parties, ‘even to Government House’, carried their own bread with them. She never explained the reason for the latter custom and it was not till later that the vision of Aunt Sass setting out for Government House, all lace and taffeta, with a loaf of bread under one arm, ceased to be funny. Brooding over her reminiscences I realised that in those days the clearings in the bush must still have been small and scanty. Much time and energy are necessary to make wattle and eucalyptus give way to wheat and rye. Bread, therefore, must have been infinitely precious.

  But most exciting of her reminiscences was one that told how, wine being costly and difficult to obtain, many low persons–of whom Aunt Sass could have known only by hearsay–drank methylated spirits. And this to such excess that they had only to strike a match for their lips to flare up in blue flame. ‘And many of them,’ Aunt Sass would conclude disgustedly, ‘many of them women!’ We trembled deliciously at the picture, imagining row upon row of women burning like candles in their doorways.

  Aunt Sass, it was rumoured, had once been in love–with a prominent member of the government of that day. He was her cousin and for this reason, it was said, she would not, or felt she could not, marry him. Nobody knew the rights of this story for she kept her own secrets closely. The rumour and the pictures it projected were springboards for innumerable family witticisms. Aunt Sass in love–think of it! Nevertheless, for me there was something about her, something that breathed through the tough outer body–an air, a scent, a whisper–the unmistakable essence of one whom love has struck on the heart. Occasionally, in an old barn, you become aware, though the scent has long since vanished, that once there were apples in the loft. Aunt Sass was like that.

  But though she remained unmarried, her spin-sterhood never succeeded in damming up her activities. She was a born ancestress and matriarch and used the children and grandchildren of her brothers and sisters for her own dynastic purposes. Each new child was taken to be looked over by Aunt Sass much as the children of old were carried to the Temple to be blessed. If the child pleased her, its future was assured.

  In spite of the fact that she had two brothers, Aunt Sass assumed the position and privileges of head of the family when her father died and retained them until she herself followed him to the vault. She was like the central shaft of a merry-go-round. When her whistle blew the family revolved about her like so many wooden horses. Only the hardiest had courage to flout that fierce face and the deep voice like the sound of a bass viol. But these had their reward for they were the ones who came nearest to her heart. She respected courage above all things and from behind that belligerent exterior would watch it with a heart melting with pride and gentleness. But if anybody hinted at the existence of such sentiment she would go to the most devious lengths to deny it. She not only did good and blushed to find it fame, she did good and was ready to vilify anybody who discovered it.

  It was her habit to disapprove of all suggestions and projects on principle. ‘Idiotic nonsense!’ she would shout. But as likely as not would send a cheque for the furthering of them. She calmly dis-inherited a great-niece of four because the child, kissing her goodnight, remarked, ‘Oh, Aunt Sass, your moustache does prick!’ But she balanced fate by showering the delinquent with such gifts that when Aunt Sass died the disinherited one was found to have received more than her rightful share.

  ‘I never mention anything I want in front of your Aunt Sass,’ Great-aunt Jane used to say, ‘because she merely says “Don’t be a fool, Jane!” and rushes out to buy it for me.’

  Aunt Sass had only to hear of somebody in trouble to remark with almost gleeful callousness and that curious convulsion in her nose that was something between a snort and a sniff, ‘Well, they’ve made their bed, let them lie on it!’ Thereafter, having thus presented herself as a complete harpy, she would secretly set about making the bed as comfortable as possible.

  She was already ancient when I was born; had embedded herself in the social life of two countries, England and Australia; had made the journey between them seventeen times; amassed unlimited friends and memories; broken her hip and mended it at the age of sixty-five and written her reminiscences. Later, when these came into my hands, I begged her to have them published. She reared and snorted like an angry horse. ‘Published! Don’t be a fool. They were written to please myself, not for strange persons in book-stalls. What! You put me in a book! I trust you will never so far forget yourself as to do anything so vulgarly disrespectful!’ Sniff, sniff.

  From the first she was for me a figure of romance. She had a tall, gaunt, graceless frame, a grim face with a long upper lip that curled at the corners when she smiled, and a voice like the Father Bear’s voice in the story of Goldilocks. Her face was exactly like her character, definite, sharply outlined, with no suggestion of muzziness. Steering a path between good and evil had no dangers for Aunt Sass. Everything was black and white; grey had no place in her world. I saw her as somebody very near to God, the only person who appeared to be in His confidence. He and Aunt Sass were always right and woe betide anybody who thought differently!

  As far as Aunt Sass was concerned, the best things had already happened. And of course they had happened to her. The most notable experiences, the handsomest people, the grandest festivities, the gloomiest funerals–all had congregated to Aunt Sass. It was her fixed conviction that there was nothing left for anybody else. The future, as she saw it, was a constantly diminishing return.

  After recounting some incident in her career she would fold it up, as it were, and lock it away in her own private safe with the contemptuous conclusion–‘I can hardly imagine anything so interesting is likely to happen to you!’ If one commented admiringly upon any of her possessions, or praised one of the photographs that stood in close military formation on piano, mantelpiece or table, she would retort–‘Well may you say so! Quite the most beautiful person (or object) you are ever likely to see!’

  What was wrong with our eyes, we wondered? What, indeed, was wrong with life that it had allowed Aunt Sass to use up all the best bits before we arrived? It was not until we grew older that we began to perceive that in spite of Aunt Sass’s appalling rightness, there might still be something left.

  But that very rightness, coupled with her fierceness, was a wonderful adventure for a child. The grim face was stony with conviction, the deep voice rumbled and you felt a delicious tremor of fear and anticipation fly through you. Any minute, any second, some terrible miracle might happen. Would the world fall in two if you brought her the wrong knitting needles? Would you go up in smoke if you tweaked Tinker’s tail or Badger’s ear? (She kept a succession of small dogs, two by two, and the pairs were always called Tinker and Badger, inheriting the names as though they were titles.) The terror and delight of that strange manner infected all children and they adored her as something more than human. She issued orders as though she were a general at the War Office and spit-spot, off you went, trembling, to carry them out or perish. Sometimes she would communicate with you in doggerel verse made up on the spot, her voice rumbling and her eyes snapping ominously.

  I looked through the window and what did I see?

  A bad little boy who wouldn’t eat his Tea.

  I said ‘I will spank him and send him to bed!’

  (Pause for effect.)

  But I gave him a large Chocolate Drop instead.

  Or she would give her own sudden unexpected twist to nursery rhymes, far more exciting than the known and expected rythm.

  Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep

  And can’t tell where to find them,

  Leave them alone and they’ll come home Saying

  ‘What a thoroughly careless little girl!’

  or

  Augustus was a chubby lad

  Fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had

  And everybody saw with joy

  The disgustingly overfed unhealthy-looking child!

  Ever
y time a new baby came to our family I, being the eldest, was sent to Aunt Sass. Whether as a means of preserving the other children or as a treat for myself, I never found out. But treat it was. It was a long overnight journey. After the guard had put me to bed on the luggage-rack in his van I would lie listening to the train shrieking its lonely whistle through the lonely bushland, seeing it cutting its own way through the forests, feeling that its sole purpose was to carry me safely to Aunt Sass. It was as though she, all-powerful, had sent the train for me. It was an iron thread, a fiery necklace stretched between the bulky body of my mother and the skinny frame of Aunt Sass. And always at the end of the journey, there she would be–the tall belligerent figure faithfully waiting, an ivory and ebony stick in its hand, a hat with two pigeon’s wings on its head. One wing would have been enough for anybody else. Aunt Sass had to have two.

  The greeting was always the same. ‘Hurrumph, here you are at last! The train was half a minute late. Very careless. Now, I trust you will be a well-behaved little girl and give Elizabeth no trouble.’ Elizabeth was her personal maid, as old as Aunt Sass and even more gaunt and forbidding, and during my visits she performed the duties of nurse. Performed is the exact word, for it was a complete vaudeville act. Elizabeth brushed my hair till it fell out, scrubbed my face till it bled, tweaked and pinched me into my clothes and spoke of these maltreatments as her ‘daily burden’. Her daily burden! I was very glad when Elizabeth died.

  The only time the greeting varied was when the hat fell off as Aunt Sass bent to kiss me. She jammed it brutally back upon her head with the pigeon’s feathers facing the wrong way and said to me furiously, ‘Why didn’t you remind me to wear my hatpins!’

  Living with Aunt Sass was a precarious adventure. When you were old enough you took luncheon with her every day. Her appetite was so large that it was always touch and go whether there would be any of the best things left for you. Often I have been thankful to get the bare bones from the stew. I once saw her eat a dozen peaches at a sitting. She then took up the last remaining peach, remarked loudly to herself, ‘Well, it’s hardly worth while leaving one!’ and finished that, too. ‘You,’ she said to me, ‘may take an apple. Apples are good for the teeth.’