THE MUSICALS THAT MADE ME #8 - Mary Poppins

The dash of salt in the spoonful of sugar

My mother did not cook much. I remember her Cornish pasties. The pastry was the ideal texture, the filling rich and peppery. I was at university when I learned they were bought frozen from Bejam. Yet I still remember her in the Kilburn kitchen, rolling out the pastry as I sat at the table writing short stories, occasionally glancing up at her as she worked. Where does that memory come from?

Apple pie, perhaps. That is what I actually remember. My mother making apple pie; peeling and boiling the cooking apples, adding sugar and a surprisingly large dash of salt. I have taken one memory of her making pastry and I have cut and pasted it onto other memories. Did she really make jam tarts and mince pies and sausage rolls and steak and kidney pies? Not at all. My mother did not cook much.

Dad was the family cook. Our traditional Sunday lunch was not a roast dinner. After church on Sunday Dad would stand in the kitchen for an hour or two slowly simmering his speciality - spaghetti bolognaise. The house would fill with the tang of onion, garlic and sweet tomato sauce. My friends at school thought it crazy that we didn’t have a roast dinner. Dad told me to tell them we were adventurous and cosmopolitan, and he was educating our palates to world cuisine. My mother told me not to talk about what we did at home. They could have told us the truth, that it was cheaper than a roast, instead they gave us a lesson in perspective. It is how the world sees you that matters.

Sunday was for Church and spaghetti, Saturday was for cleaning. On Saturday the air was always filled with the scent of Pledge furniture polish. How I longed for the magical power that might make cleaning into a game. A click of the fingers, perhaps. Downstairs, in the areas that might entertain visitors, the rooms were filled with mahogany furniture. Most of this was arranged in the dining room. Two cabinets featured shelves with a library of Readers Digest classic novels bound in red leatherette, their titles embossed in gold. I think I was the only person in my family who ever read a single one of those books.

The Banks family house at 17 Cherry Tree Lane in Disney’s film Mary Poppins reminds me of the houses I grew up in. My parents shared the Banks’ taste for dark, heavy furniture; tassels on cushions and curtains, oil paintings in gilt frames, chandeliers overhead. They shared the same certitude that polished surfaces held moral weight. When Mary Poppins runs her finger along the mantlepiece I see my mother doing the exact same thing before ordering us to clean it again.

In the dining room, against a wall, was a sideboard that contained Dad’s collection of musical LPs. If I was careful I was allowed to use this unsupervised. Finally, in the centre of the room, my parents’ pride and joy: a mahogany dining table which could comfortably seat eight people. Every Saturday we would open the curtains, roll back the protective cover that sat on top of the table, rub beeswax in until our elbows ached, finish with liberal sprays of Pledge. We polished that table until we saw our faces reflected in it. Then we rolled back the lambswool cover. When we finished we would close the curtains again. We only used the room for special occasions.

After Sunday lunch we would gather in the living room so Dad could snore through a film. Ever since Maria von Trapp had whirled into my life one Christmas Day, musicals had helped me make sense of the world. They gave structure to feeling. They were my guide. Perhaps it was one of those Sunday afternoons I first encountered the Disney version of Mary Poppins.

“Never judge things by their appearances,” Mary Poppins advises. “I’m sure I never do.”

My own small library of books lived upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my brother. Those tatty, well-worn paperbacks were not suitable for display. In amongst the Enid Blytons and Roald Dahls and Noel Streatfields, I had the first three of P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins books. In Travers’s original, Mary Poppins was terrifyingly mercurial. I adored her. She was glorious and vain and distant. Appearances mattered a great deal to her, she was always checking her reflection, always seeking validation from others. Today, of course, I look back and understand I saw my mother in her. I never felt on secure ground with her. There was an edge of danger never far from the surface. She was the dash of salt in the apple pie.

As a child I did not care much for Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins. Hers was more pep and less pop and I found her saccharine and sweet. But while I did not care for the characterisation, the film was undeniably magical and the score was enchanting. I spent hours listening to the LP in the darkened dining room. In the dark the score had space to reveal itself.

Mary Poppins is about reframing perspective, how an acceptable artifice is constructed, about deceptive appearances. Its score borrows the sound world of Broadway even as the film insists on its own specifically cinematic magic. The composers, the Sherman brothers, realising the film was structured like a stage musical insisted on hiring Broadway’s Irwin Kostal to orchestrate the score lending it a rich, symphonic sound without sacrificing the primacy of the voice, a hallmark of Broadway. In this way, the score reframes the perspective of the listener by borrowing the sound world from another medium. We have the appearance of a film but the construction and sound of a stage musical.

This is a recurring theme of the score. In Mary Poppins, style is never merely decorative. Each musical idiom tells us how a character wishes to be seen, while also hinting at the truth beneath the performance.

Mrs Banks leads a spirited march in Sister Suffragette and her enthusiastic exhortation of the suffrage cause may superficially suggest she is a bold and radical outlier but musically we hear a different story. Stylistically, Sister Suffragette is a pastiche of Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operettas. Mrs Banks sings in the key of political liberation, but we hear the music of satire. Her activism is performative. Interestingly the same idiom appears in Fidelity, Fiduciary Bank which also borrows from Gilbert & Sullivan. When it comes to the status quo in this world, the performance of it is meant to be understood as inauthentic.

Mr Banks is also performing a role. Across his three main songs he moves through distinct stages. The Life I Lead is a march, rigid and clipped to match a man bound by convention and rules. In Fidelity, Fiduciary Bank that rigidity becomes something closer to parody, a performance of institutional authority rather than a fundamental belief. By Let’s Go Fly A Kite he has softened to something more lyrical. He has learned a different rhythm and melody. Just as Mr Banks changes, so too the audience comes to realise that, in a film titled Mary Poppins, the real protagonist is George Banks. The score maps his dramaturgical journey. In P. L. Travers’s original, Mr Banks is largely absent, a space at the centre of the story.

We first see Mary Poppins in the opening sequence. As the camera pans across a painted cyclorama, an artificial London at twilight rendered by a scenic artist, we catch her; a figure between heaven and earth, night and day. We see her just as the overture swells to her theme tune, A Spoonful of Sugar, perched atop a cloud, touching up her makeup, checking her appearance, polishing the surface before she descends like a god from Olympus.

But mortals rarely encounter gods directly. Gods, like mothers, are at best whimsical and at worst vengeful and punitive. In mythology, fairy, and folk tales, there is often a guide, a go-between. Odysseus had Hermes, Cinderella a fairy godmother. The Banks family have Bert, as do we, the audience.

Bert establishes himself as our guide at the beginning through his use of direct address, breaking the fourth wall to invite us in. Throughout the film it is suggested that Bert exists in a liminal space, moving between the world of magic and the ‘real’ world of the film. He is the interlocutor, explaining the rules, keeping us safe. His musical motif is that of Edwardian music hall, rooting him firmly in the ‘real’ world and establishing him as a performer. In this way he is an amalgam of a number of recognisable music hall tropes; the Chairman introducing the speciality numbers, the coster comedian, the ballad singer. Even when he reprises Mary’s theme, A Spoonful of Sugar, he modulates it into his own musical idiom. He is the Banks family interpreter and, for the viewer he translates the artifice, the painted backdrops, the set constructed on a studio lot.

And what of Mary? In the film she is less the bringer of chaos than in the books yet despite her Disneyfied sweetness she is still a subversive figure. Even her theme, A Spoonful of Sugar is a subversion: a kind of musical veneer. It presents as light entertainment, a polite Edwardian nursery ditty, yet it proposes an entirely different relationship to authority, work and family life. The bitterest pill can be swallowed if it can be made palatable. Many of Mary’s musical numbers operate in a similar manner; Stay Awake is a trick disguised as a lullaby, Feed the Birds suggests a traditional hymn but upends institutional authority. This is a feature of musical theatre: subversion beneath showtunes. We must always look beyond the surface. Mary Poppins shows us the way.

I recall one afternoon after school when my mother and I dropped in on a friend of hers. What should have been a five minute visit stretched into half-an-hour, then an hour, then two. My mother’s friend offered me some toast and, hungry, I gratefully accepted. I remember the small satisfaction of it, the barely consequential kindness. Shortly after, my mother gathered together our coats, kissed her friend goodbye and we drove off. As soon as we turned the corner the screaming began. I had embarrassed her, I had made her look like a bad mother who didn’t feed her children, on and on she raged. Never, ever make the family look bad. Never, ever tell anyone anything about our home life.

Children do not have guides to ensure their safety when dealing with gods.

In the books of Mary Poppins I had found a figure I recognised, a maternal figure both frightening and caring. The film robbed me of that recognition, replacing P. L. Travers’s damaged family with a picture-perfect one I did not understand.

When I moved into my first flat in London in my twenties, my mother gave me the cabinets I had polished so often as a child. Only then did I finally see it: like the books that were never read, the visitors who never came, the oil paintings that were only reproductions. The mahogany was veneer.