Disgressed

We promised the girls long ago that we would go and see the current West End production of Mary Poppins, and since it’s coming off in January, we finally got round to it the other day.

It seems to have been a big success, and it’s a pretty good show: the way huge pieces of set roll around at a moment’s notice impressed me. The Prince Edward Theatre was originally designed for large musicals, and was enlarged and updated comprehensively in the nineties, so I suppose the technology is all there.

The audience was enthusiastic, but at times, I think, slightly puzzled by the extensive differences from the film version. Who’s this Neleus? And Von Trussler? Mrs Corry, with Fannie and Annie? Wait, wasn’t there an old lady with two big daughters right at the beginning of the film – but she wasn’t like this… When are they going to jump into Bert’s picture? No dancing Pearly Kings and Queens, no riding on carousel horses? Supercalifragilisticexpialidcious gets sung in a cosmic sweetshop – with different words? There’s no run on the bank? The children get sixpence, not tuppence? Everybody’s flying a kite, but it’s only half-way through? Miss Andrew the nanny, the Holy Terror – is that a kind of joke about Julie Andrews?

“Yeah,” I heard one woman say, “It was great. But I wish they wouldn’t muck about with the story.”

The changes actually represent a move back towards the original stories, a kind of belated and qualified victory for P.L.Travers, the original author. She was, it seems, probably the most difficult writer Walt Disney ever had to deal with: considering herself a literary figure rather above his level, and having already turned down Sam Goldwyn and others, she was not at all in awe of Disney, and it took him twenty years to get her agreement. Condition number one was that the film should not, repeat not, be a cartoon. Disney was quite comfortable with that, but her insistence on her own script and adherence to her own vision of the characters was more difficult to ignore or over-ride – though gradually that was what he and his team mostly did.

By the time of the release, they were keeping Travers pretty much at arm’s length and apparently she had to ask before being given a ticket to the première. What she saw did not please her. Mrs Banks a suffragette? Mr Banks a rich man? But worst of all, right in the middle: a prolonged cartoon sequence!

When she demanded that it be removed, Disney responded, with a degree of satisfaction, one imagines:

“The ship has sailed.”

Whatever his merits as a literary editor, Disney of course did know a thing or two about making successful films, and Mary Poppins went on to be a colossal success, among the best-loved children’s films of all time, with the animated sequence especially celebrated and popular. By and large, Travers bit her lip about her reservations, though one can imagine her response when the ever-optimistic Disney asked about making a sequel out of the further books which she continued to write.

In fact, the very last of the books didn’t appear until 1988, and Travers herself lived on until 1996. She apparently saw the proposed stage version as an opportunity to make some corrections in the popular image of her work, and evidently found Cameron Mackintosh and his people more amenable than Walt and his. The current show is inevitably a compromise: you couldn’t really do it without the Disney songs, and the truth is that Travers’ books have never really been that well known compared with the film; it comes as news to many people that there actually are any books.
However, it does mean that she has succeeded posthumously in denying Walt the last word. It might be that Mary Poppins will now end up like Peter Pan, a character whose various book, play, and film versions all have some degree of authority. Who knows – it’s happened before – perhaps someone will now want to make a film of the musical?

This may not look like much, but I can tell you that it cheered me up considerably. I may have explained before that there’s a road near us, the main way into Wallington and anywhere else, which gets very narrow. For about ten yards, it’s so narrow it’s only just possible for two cars to pass without scraping against each other: larger vehicles can’t fit if there’s anything coming the other way. The footpath along one side is also quite narrow, and used to be protected by bollards at either end. Some years ago, one of the bollards was demolished by a large lorry, and instead of replacing it the council merely patched up the hole.

Ever since then, cars have been driving on the footpath. Without the bollard, they had a nice smooth path up where the kerb was low for the driveway of the house on the corner. It made no difference to most of these people whether there were people on the footpath or not, they were still going to drive on it, within a hairsbreadth of children, pensioners, anyone. Clearly they couldn’t be expected to wait a few minutes, nor to risk scratching their paintwork: far better to career over the pavement and risk someone else’s life. I may sound a bit tetchy, but it really doesn’t get the day off to a good start when some large four-wheel drive mounts the pavement and shoots past within an inch of your small daughter, displaying, inevitably, a sign in its rear window that says ‘child on board’.

At times, of course, there was simply too much traffic for people to shoot past at speed. On these occasions,instead of taking the inch or two of pavement they needed to ensure they could get by without touching wing mirrors, they would normally take all of it, going right up to within an inch of the house at the edge of the path. When you arrived, you would be faced with a traffic jam parked solidly in your way.

Sometimes, it’s true, some of these people would look faintly guilty at the approach of pedestrians, and just once or twice I witnessed them shamefacedly driving back off the path. But more usually they seemed to feel that their need to keep moving at all costs entitled them to do whatever it took. The look of horror and fury on the face of one driver when I slapped the door of his car with the flat of my hand (to draw attention to the fact that if he persisted he was about to crush me to death from a standing start) had to be seen to be believed. The discovery that pedestrians can actually touch your car always seems to be a shocking revelation in these cases, though goodness knows I often considered doing more than touching.

Inevitably there were accidents, including the ramming of an old lady’s wheelchair. None of this seemed to bother the council or the police particularly, although the council continued to send us a stream of leaflets enjoining us to walk to school. Eventually, the local MP convened a meeting with a representative of the council. The official view, it seemed, was that doing anything at all was too difficult and expensive. A camera could not be placed on the road until there had been at least four deaths; traffic lights would be inappropriate; making the road one-way would restrict access. Couldn’t they just replace the bollard which had been there in the first place? Well, of course the council also had to have regard to the free flow of traffic. If local people were concerned, another approach, of course, would be to remove the footpath and extend the road right up to the wall.
Imagine my feelings then, when I discovered that a bollard, smaller than the old one, but a bollard none the less, had finally been restored to the old position. This doesn’t actually stop people driving on the path, but it makes it much less easy, and means that climbing the kerb now involves some risk to your tyres. I hurried home.

“Guess what!” I exclaimed joyfully “They’ve put the bollard back!”

Katharine’s face fell.

“Oh.” she said.

“You’re… disappointed?”

“Well, look Peter, I mean, I don’t drive on the path very often, but… Not very often, really. Probably only three times since that public meeting…”

Neither a taker nor a giver be, of advice about trains, as Polonius might well have said. It rarely turns out well. One Friday recently I was on the train at Streatham and a man asked me if it went to Wimbledon.

“Well, yes. ” I said, “Via Sutton.”

“Via Sutton?” he asked, sounding slightly puzzled.

“Yes.”

The doors closed and off we went. He was clearly uneasy.

“Sorry,” he said, “But this does go to Wimbledon?”

“Yes,” I said, “Yes, it does. Via Sutton.”

He left it another few minutes, shifting in his seat.

“Sorry,” he said, ” I don’t mean to be… These stations we’re passing through… It really is the Wimbledon train?”

“You know,” I said, lowering my book again, “that this line ends in a loop? Some trains go round it one way, some go round the other. This one goes via Sutton, which is the long way round if you’re going to Wimbledon. But it certainly goes there.”

“Oh, the long way?” he said, irritably, and stood up to look at the map displayed by the door. After a few minutes he sat down again.

“I now see,” he said, indignantly, “that I should have done better to have changed at Streatham. It’s much shorter the other way.”

“Yes, it is,” I replied, “But you would have had to wait fifteen minutes for a train going the other way. I don’t know whether you would have got to Wimbledon any sooner. Hard to say.”

“So how many stations do we go through, this way?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long does it actually take, this way?”

“I don’t know.”

I’m not going to Wimbledon. I don’t care. I’m not the railway advice service. I’m not actually your mother, either; and I don’t care whether you’re wearing your vest. You asked me a question, I gave you an accurate answer; what you do with it is your problem. At worst, you’re going to lose about five minutes; at best, it may be that there’s a problem with the Tooting train, by no means an unknown contingency, in which case you’ve saved yourself half an hour. Oh, and by the way? Piss off.
He sat opposite me fuming until I got off at Hackbridge.

“I hope you have a good weekend.” he said, furiously.

“You too.”

On another occasion a man in jeans and a rather formal white shirt leaned in at Tulse Hill and asked whether the train was going to Beckenham Junction. I opted not to answer on this occasion, but a friendly man in glasses sitting opposite me looked up and said:

“Na, not this one. You want platform one, over the bridge.”

“Thanks!” said the man in the shirt, and disappeared.

Now a man in a green waxed jacket looked up.

“Did you tell him platform one? Are you thinking of Crystal Palace? The fast one to Beckenham Junction goes from platform three, doesn’t it? Should be due about now.”

“Oh, God, yeah, you’re right. I think you’re right. He did say Beckenham, didn’t he? He’s gonna miss it.”

Taking a slight risk (although this train often stands at Tulse Hill for five or ten minutes), the helpful man in glasses got out and went across the platform to where, across the tracks, he spotted a white shirt walking onto platform one.

“Oy mate?” he shouted, waving one arm, “Beckenham? Do you want Beckenham? It’s platform three? Oy, mate? Beckenham?”

The man in the white shirt stopped and looked across the tracks. It was at this point it became clear that he was not the man who had asked about the Beckenham Junction train, but someone else altogether who merely happened to be wearing a white shirt.

“Oh, er..” muttered the helpful man.

The new man in the white shirt shaded his eyes for a moment. He pulled a face deeply expressive of incomprehension and contempt, and then, with the courtesy for which London travellers are rightly known, rounded things off with an elaborate mime indicating the term “dickhead”.

“Oh shit…” muttered the helpful man in glasses. It think this may be the only time I’ve actually seen someone literally cringe with embarrassment. He turned and got back on the train, but unable to face us, he chose a completely different carriage where he presumably pretended to be getting on for the first time.

For a long time now, people have been trying to turn stations into other things. I don’t quite know why: perhaps the sight of large spaces where people are standing around doing nothing sort of inspires a reforming urge.

In the eighties, everyone was trying to turn stations into shopping malls. In London, many of the terminii were rebuilt with office blocks above them, yielding the funds to fill the concourse with shops. Originally it was just the kind of cafe and newsagent which had always been on stations, only more of them and grander. Then niche shops selling socks, ties, chocolates, and so on. Nowadays you even get Marks and Spencer looking weirdly out of place opposite Platform 6. Not that I mind – sometimes it’s handy to be able to pick up a last-minute ready Chicken Cacciatora with Penne without missing your train.

More recently, there’s been a school of thought which held that stations should be dance halls, with flash mobs turning up at unexpected times and silently gyrating to their own iPods. This is not so acceptable to your hardened commuter, whose only real desire is to be allowed uncluttered access to any trains which may happen to be available.
Now we have a whole new development. At Stratford, an Australian company is putting on Small Metal Objects. The audience, for £12 a time, sits on an upper level with headphones while the thespians enact a drama among the seething travellers below. Seething is probably the word: Stratford is confusing enough as it is, offering as it does not just several levels and many platforms, but three completely different train systems (Overground, Underground, DLR).

This piece is a new one, but you can’t help thinking about what former glories of the theatre might be revived on station platforms. Long Day’s Journey Into Night? Look back in Anger? A Man for all Seasons? It’s strange in a way that punters pay £12 to watch from a distance when you could go down there and stand next to the actors. For that matter, you could take part in the improvised role of, say, Second Irritated Commuter.