Aunt Sass

by P.L. Travers

Genres: Holiday books; Short Stories

Synopsis

Published for the first time, here are three holiday tales by the author of Mary Poppins—a gift for all ages.

P.L. Travers wrote with a signature blend of sugar and spice; her characters, including Mary Poppins, are endearing, outsized, and cozy. Her talent for capturing the perspective of children shines through in Aunt Sass: Christmas Stories. Each of the stories in this book was written as a holiday gift, sent to her friends and family and never published. Now her millions of readers and generations of filmgoers will recognize how she used her life story to inform her fiction. Whether it is Aunt Sass herself—who Travers admits is partly her inspiration for Poppins—or the Chinese cook whose “heathen” ways show the narrator the path to salvation, or the crass ex-jockey whose life work is not at all what it appears, the characters are unforgettable.

Release date: October 20, 2015

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 128

Sample

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 fish 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 clear. . .