GNOSTIC POPPINS (via Mike Daley)

Nanny knows: Profile: Mary Poppins (Daily Telegraph, 19/12/2004)

Mary Poppins arrives at the front door of 17 Cherry Tree Lane on a gust of wind. The question that has bugged readers ever since is: where from? The Banks family's otherwise presentable new nanny appears to have no references or previous addresses - not even a fast-tracked visa.

The 1964 Walt Disney film version of P L Travers's novel conveniently ignored the question of Mary's provenance, as, to an almost equal degree, does Cameron Mackintosh's new West End stage version, which opened to raves last week. To some extent this is excusable. "I never explain anything," says Mary in the story, but in attempting to make sense of her it is the kind of thing we need to know.

For the real Mary is an arch-unsettler of delicate middle-class sensibilities; a darker, edgier character than the one played by Julie Andrews in the movie. At the risk of knotting literary cross-currents, she could have blown in from Hogwarts.

The passage of the book that describes Mary taking human form from a vague shape "tossed and bent under the wind", bears a striking resemblance to one in The Voice of Silence, a densely occult tome written by the 19th-century mystic thinker Madame Blavatsky. Here an account is given of a yogi-like being, "formed of the wind; as a cloud from which limbs have sprouted out". Pauline Travers's mentor and onetime lover, George "AE" Russell, a fashionable Irish poet and intellectual of the 1930s, was a lifelong devotee of Blavatsky. He appears to have convinced Pauline that she was a fairy, and versed her in the codes of magic and mythology and the texts of esoteric religions.

Much of this knowledge later went into the seven Mary Poppins books that Travers wrote between 1934 and 1988.