The apartment, at least as I saw it that rainy Saturday afternoon, was not unusual. Hot tea boiled on the stove in the kitchen. Japanese sengai paintings hung on the walls, and jars of candy lay around everywhere. Miss P.L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, lived here, in simple splendor of her position as Radcliffe's "writer in residence." But only a few clues to this fact caught my eye.

There were two frisbies, gifts from some admirers, that lay on a table. One had a flower and Miss Travers' name painted on it. She had her typewriter out, along with a dictaphone. But there was little else. The strong-fibered, slightly aging woman who had greeted me at the door was obviously doing some writing--it was impossible to guess what--and she wasn't about to tell anyone.

From the beginning of our conversation I could tell how much she relishes her role as resident celebrity. "Someone came up to me the other night and said: 'I see what you're doing here, you're instituting a dialogue.' That is quite right, for I don't like to lecture," she told me. She has spoken all around the University, and on Thursday receives visitors at Whitman. She matches wits with hordes of her readers--all now much older than they were the last time they read Mary Poppins.

During that quiet, rainy afternoon in her apartment, we talked mostly about her travels. She was born in Australia, "but I never really enjoyed being in Australia as a child," she said. Her parents were Irish and they had relatives in London whom she was permitted to visit when she was quite young. Upon arriving in England she sent a poem she had written to a family friend in Ireland who happened to be editor of the Irish Statesman. The family friend was A. E. (George Russell), poet and intimate of William Butler Yeats. He liked the poem, and sent the young poetess two guineas for it. "He said he was sure no one but an Irish person could have written it and he asked for more," Miss Travers said. She traveled to Ireland, and came to know A. E. and Yeats well.

For a while she tried journalism, which didn't suit her. She continued to write poetry, but then "one day in the country, while I was recovering from an illness, I began to write down Mary Poppins. I have an idea that I've been writing her all my life along with my poetry, because she and the poetry refer to each other. My sister says I used to tell her stories about Mary Poppins as a child, but I deny that." She refuses to say, or perhaps doesn't know, just where the idea came from. But the books were popular from their first appearance in 1934. Their author has since been able to travel and encounter people all over the world, with almost as much speed and aplomb as her heroine.

She visited Russia during a grim period of heavy rationing, and so brought along several lemons for her tea. The Russians were unfriendly to strangers, and the people working at her hotel "had been refusing to serve me, but when they saw the lemons their whole attitude changed. We had a sort of football game in the lobby with the lemons, and for the first time I saw that those people were absolutely human. There is always some key, but it takes some finding. Perhaps the next time it wouldn't be lemons, perhaps it would be something quite different."

While guiding me throught the ancient English tea ceremony, ("Have you know me for seven years? If so then you may pour."), she told me how much she would like her books to be read: "I've told my agents not to worry if the Russians ever steal them. I've told them I'd like them to hide the books in lavatories, in the parks, anywhere that people might pick them up and steal them." She is quite jealous of every word, and every representation of her words. She carefully goes over each picture for her books with her illustrator, Mary Shepard, who is the daughter of the man that illustrated Winnie the Pooh.

Miss Travers was leery of what Walt Disney intended to do with Mary Poppins from the time of their first meeting in New York during World War II. After some time of discussing and being unable to persuade her to come to Hollywood, Disney finally reached into his coat pocket "and pulled out a watch. It was very old and had a cracked face. He looked at it, pondered a bit, counting up the figures. Finally he said: 'Twenty minutes past five...that means five to seven. I must be off.' Well, I can tell you that that watch almost got me."

Her commitment is not to children but to childhood. "Mary Poppins was not written for children," she has said. "It is my experience that no book that children like is ever for children." Her commitment to childhood reveals itself in her devotion to fable and legends, to the elemental thought of the east, to all that is strange, new, and quaint, and to old customs--especially Christmas, childhood's most glorious moment. Just before I left she typed out a Christmas poem and gave it to me.

After a few more words--"I loved the blackout," she said. "It was beautiful and mysterious"--I left. It was twilight, and the Radcliffe quad was covered with ground fog. One of the street lights was very strange. It blinked on and off, on and off, like the light on a Christmas tree.