Master Thieves And Witchcraft

The following is a follow up to something I wrote awhile back. Should I happen to meet a bad and mysterious end, it'll probably be the ghost of P.L. Travers strangling me in my sleep.

Freak Accident Provides Closure On Century Old Case

London (Reuters) Over a century ago, strange things were seen in the fog around London. Chimney sweeps dancing on rooftops. Senile admirals firing off cannons from the top of his manor. A street entertainer and jack of all trades with a secret. A bank chairman who died laughing- while floating in the air. And a peculiar woman who spoke to animals, flew through the air by umbrella, and described herself as “practically perfect in every way.”

In the fall of 1910, these events came together on one tragic night when eight year old Michael Banks plunged to his death from a staircase of smoke that hung suspended over the London skyline. The son of a banker, Michael was in the company of his sister Jane and two adults- a nanny by the name of Mary Poppins and a street busker and chimney sweep named Bert- though his working identity turned out to be a façade.

Years later witnesses described the vision of a staircase made of smoke, ascending from the area around Cherry Tree Lane, a quiet, affluent neighbourhood at the time, and seeing a woman, a man, and two children walking up it- until one of the children fell through, falling over a hundred feet to the pavement below. Michael’s funeral was a sad and somber affair, with his parents, George and Winifred, seeming shell shocked, while ten year old Jane Banks was in hysterics.

“Gran never got over it,” Felicia Warwick, granddaughter of Jane Banks-Warwick, told reporters this week. “She would tell stories of Mary Poppins, the strange nanny who would take her and her brother on adventures in sidewalk drawings and tea on the ceiling and cleaning up a room with magic. You know, it might be tempting to have wondered if it was dementia, but in every single other way, she was perfectly rational to the end of her life, and she was telling stories like that long before she got old. So it wasn’t dementia.”

Miss Warwick shook her head before continuing. “One moment she had Michael’s hand in hers, the next she felt it slip away and heard him scream. She heard the sound of his impact. Can you imagine the effect that would have on a girl? It always stayed with her. She spent the rest of her life blaming herself, wondering if she had done something wrong, if she could have saved him. Her parents both drank their way into the grave by the time she was finished at Oxford. The family never got over it.”

Poppins, a tall and distinctive looking woman by any description, vanished in the aftermath, sought by police for questioning, but never found. For years afterwards there were occasional sightings and rumours of a Poppins incident, as they were called, but nothing positive. As for her chimney sweep consort, he was detained at the scene, but more strange events kept him from justice. Bert, as he was known to local residents, was more than he seemed. Albert Geoffrey Wentworth III, the heir to the Wentworth shipping fortune, had been long absent from the world of high society, adopting a Cockney accent and friendly demeanour- while carrying out a life of crime. His arrest that night revealed him to be the mastermind cat burglar behind the Autolycus robberies, and yet he escaped from holding the following day- and vanished into history, the only trace of him being the occasional heist of jewels and art across Europe for years after, bearing his signature.

Authorities for years sought both suspects- Poppins for her strange, unexplained abilities and role in the death of Michael Banks, Wentworth for his master skills as the world’s greatest cat burglar. Time faded for the families around Cherry Tree Lane. Admiral Thaddeus Boom was committed to a nursing home two months after the incident. George Banks lost interest in the world of banking and became a committed drinker. Winifred Banks turned her back on suffrage for women and joined her husband in an up close and personal examination of the drinking life. Jane Banks would go off to college, get married, and not pick up her family drinking habits, but something about her would always be marked by the absence of her brother. And Michael Banks would lie in his grave, joined in the years that followed by father, mother, and finally sister.

Experts had their own theories, some out there, others seemingly less so. Some suggested Poppins was an expert in sleight of hand and stage magic, making it appear as if she was doing something extraordinary while in fact she was doing things that could be explained. Others put forth the idea, strange in the early twentieth century, that Poppins was a practicing witch in the very real sense of the word.

“Not one of those current day Wiccans who hold hands and chant around Stonehenge, mind you,” Genevieve Richardson, a professor on the occult at Oxford told reporters. “The concept was that Poppins had to be the real thing- spell casting, communing with the forces of real magic. Some scholars wondered if she spent her time as a nanny to gather the spirit energy of young children for her spells. Others looked to unexplained incidents going back hundreds of years, and pored over old paintings and etchings of women who looked just like her. If you subscribe to the theory, Mary Poppins, or whatever her real name is, could have been hundreds of years old. I don’t subscribe to it myself, I mean come on, flying with umbrellas?”

And yet this week saw a shocking mid-air event that may well have brought closure to the strange case. A passenger jet flying from London to New York had a collision in flight just out over the Irish Sea. Initially the thought of the flight crew suggested birdstrike that damaged one of the engines. Turning back, the pilots safely landed their aircraft on English soil. Ground crews discovered something very different upon beginning to examine the engine, and called in government investigators. Civil Aviation Authority investigators are just beginning to investigate the case.

Sources close to the case, however, suggest that blood samples found in the engine wreckage are human- and match DNA samples going back to 1910- and belonging to Mary Poppins. Shredded remnants of what are described as an umbrella and black women’s clothing have also been found. If this was indeed Mary Poppins, the peculiar nanny met a fast but horrible end… with a spoonful of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious terror.