These stories should be a delight for any reader, but particularly magical for fans of P. L. Travers’ great masterpiece, the Mary Poppins stories. Many of the preoccupations of those wonderful novels appear in these pages: merry-go-rounds, gorgon nurses, small dogs, smart hats, suns and moons and comets and constellations. The spirit is there too, and many of the ideas: predominantly, that children know darkness.

P. L. Travers disliked the Disney version of Мary Poppins because she found it too cartoonish and sunny. Her own books made room for the fear and sadness of children, their natural and tragic awareness of impermanence. As she says here, in the story of Johnny Delaney: ‘Children have strong and deep emotions but no mechanism to deal with them.’ Because these tales were printed privately as Christmas gifts for the author’s friends and family, and because of their tone, one assumes that they are autobiographical.

It is the story of Aunt Sass that will bring the most joy to Poppins fans, offering clues to the inspiration for that immortal character. Aunt Sass (surely a version, if not an exact portrait, of Travers’ own great-aunt Elbe) is a grand, sharp, mysterious and contradictory woman, ‘stem and tender, secret and proud, anonymous and loving’. Like Mary Poppins, she twinkles and snaps in spits and spots.