The (Fake) Story of Mary Poppins

Some of you have read the first few paragraphs of this before. Here it is with the rest of the story.

The Banks kids had an interesting childhood. Their father, George, was a banker for one of the biggest banks in London: the Dawes Tomes Mousley Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. Jane, nine years old, had just learned the name, but Michael, six years old, still called it the Dogs Tombs Mostly Grubby Fiddley Fix-me-a-sherry Bank. And we won’t get into what John, Barbara, and Annabel (the three other children) thought it was called…if they weren’t cool enough to make the leap from the book to the movie, then I see no need to bother with them now.

George Banks was a well-respected man around town. When he foreclosed on homes, he made sure that every i was dotted and every t was crossed. None of that robo-signing higgledy-piggledy for him. If the Dawes Tomes….oh, heck, let’s just save ourselves some time for the rest of this and just call it the bank…if you lost your house to the bank, you deserved to.

Their mother, Winifred, was almost a polar opposite. She was a suffragette (George had a different definition of the word, but certainly thought that she made him suffer), always talking about womens’ rights, and votes for women, and almost acting as if she thought they should be almost equal to men (I know, right?). She felt bad for people who lost their homes. She would have taken them in like stray kittens if she thought for a moment that she could have gotten away with it.

Of course, both parents were far too busy for their children. They only had kids in the first place because it was good for their image. Plus, they were pretty sure that it was a law or something that if you had sex, you had to have a kid. In fact, George and Winifred had only had sex four times. Jane and Michael were the result of two of those times. The other three kids had been adopted to cover the other two times, and in case a neighbor thought that their cook Mrs. Brill’s caterwauling was sex once (said neighbor was invited to dinner for the express purpose of having them equeate the sounds she made with a person cooking, not two people cookin’). But again, enough about the other three kids. I’m already giving them more attention than their parents do.

The kids like to hang out with Bert, who is a middle-aged jack-of-all-trades because it was cheaper than paying more actors to play all the characters that were combined into Bert in the movie (and since Dick Van Dyke was already playing dual roles, why not?), but he’s not one of those middle-aged men that hangs out with little kids. He did a bunch of stuff to keep the kids entertained…drawing on the sidewalk, playing his one man band, letting them play in other peoples’ chimneys…good clean fun.

One day, Jane and Michael were watching Bert draw on the sidewalk when the shadow of a head perfectly filled a very convenient empty frame that had been drawn. Bert know the silhouette right away, because Mary Poppins always wore that same damned hat.

Mary had just blown into town (one guy said she arrived on the wind, floating on an umbrella, but he was pretty drunk so this is not likely). She and Bert had once had a fling when they were in high school. Bert still had feelings for Mary, but Mary never felt the same. She a ho, Jerry. She a ho.

Bert introduced Mary to the kids. They explained how their most recent nanny had quit (leaving out the cruel tricks that they played on her). They asked Mary to move in with them, because that’s what kids do when they meet someone that they like. Mary agreed.

Mr. Banks wasn’t as keen on the idea, but Mary Poppins proposed some new bank fees, and told Mr. Banks that, while the public would cry foul at first, they would not actually close their accounts and would even pay the fees that they thought were so unfair.

Plus, she said, the fees would cause more people to go broke, and default on their bank loans. Mr. Banks was incredulous, saying that this was incredibly bad for business, but Mary Poppins explained that the bank could then foreclose on even more properties than before, and sell them at a profit, keeping the repaid portion of the loan PLUS the price the house sold for. Mr. Banks was so excited, he didn’t even know that he was hiring a nanny…he just thought of Mary Poppins as his personal consultant.

One day, Mary and Bert took the kids to see Uncle Albert. He was a jolly old gentleman, who sounded a lot like the Mad Hatter. He was floating around the ceiling, but you could totally see the wires holding him up. Still, he was a fun guy, so the kids played along and even pretended not to notice when they were strapped into their own harnesses for a tea party on the ceiling. Well, actually, it was a tea party just below the ceiling. If it had been on the ceiling, then the table and chairs and everything else would have been upside down, and the tea would have spilled everywhere.

On the way home from Uncle Albert’s, Mary Poppins and the children met up with Admiral Boom. Admiral Boom was known as the timekeeper of the neighborhood, always shooting off his cannon every hour. Well, today he wasn’t at home, so he had Binnacle, his assistant, load up a pistol with a double charge. Mary Poppins, not at all happy at seeing a gun pulled in front of her and the children, pulled a dagger out of her waistcoat and cut Binnacle across his throat.

“Blast my gizzard!” exclaimed Admiral Boom, at seeing his long-time companion bleeding out with a look of terror on his face. Sadly, Mary Poppins took this exclamation as an order, and shot Admiral Boom with the pistol that had been meant to mark the 4:00 hour. Admiral Boom made more of a “thud” sound than a boom as he fell. Jane seemed to be easily placated, almost happy to have seen the bloodshed, but Michael kept saying that he was going to tell his father. Mary Poppins bought his silence for tuppence.

I bet you didn’t expect violence in a Mary Poppins story, did you? Neither did I, to be quite honest. Not quite sure how that happened.

Anyway, Michael wanted to use his tuppence to feed the birds. To buy bread crumbs to feed the birds, that is. Even if a bird did take his tuppence, one bird would fly away with it and that would be the end. With bread crumbs, he would get to spread out the fun, watch the birds fight each other for the handout while he laughed…follow in his father’s footsteps, in other words.

Well, Mr. Banks found out about the tuppence (Jane kept silent about the killings, but ratted out Michael for the tuppence) and told Michael to put it in the bank. Despite what Disney may have you believe, Michael was actually sort of keen on the idea after the song and dance number by the heads of the bank (Dawes Sr., Dawes Jr., Tomes, Mousley, and Grubbs) convinced him that investing his tuppence could make him a millionaire.

Sadly, when Michael signed the paperwork to open his account, he was then presented with a statement detailing the new account fees, teller fees, breathing bank air fees, even a chalk pavement drawing entrance fee, and he now owed the bank £187,493 and had 90 days to pay it off or lose his home.

Well, the damned liberal news media had a spy in the bank, and reported this, and got all the little peons up in a huff, and a bunch of people tried to close their accounts. When they were told that they actually owed the bank money, not the other way around, they rioted. Even after they were forced out of the bank, they broke windows, overturned horses, and set fire to old ladies.

George Banks and his fees were blamed for the chaos, and he was fired. He went home and slapped Mary Poppins across the face, and told her that she had ruined him. Mary told him that he can’t fire her, because she quits, and she slapped him back.

As she was packing her things into her carpet bag (which was easy with the big hole in the bottom that led to a big burlap sack on a hand truck), the bank called the Banks’ and asked to speak to George. Turned out that the fees that the bank had been collecting had turned enough of a profit to cover all the riot damage while still leaving the bank richer than it had ever been. The elder Mr. Dawes had died of shock when seeing the profit margins, and Mr. Banks was being offered a position as a full-fledged partner of the now-named Dawes Tomes Mousley Grubbs Banks If You Don’t Give Us Your Money You Aren’t Patriotic Bank.

So Mary Poppins had done what she came to do. She had gotten Mr. Banks a promotion, killed a guy, and had a little fun with Bert then left him heartbroken all over again. But it was OK, because Bert knew that she’d be back when she ran out of other booty calls who would put up with her antics. Plus, he got to charge £19,800 per kite when the bankers decided to swing by for a lark, even though he only charged the neighborhood kids two farthings. That would be enough to support him for the year…as long as he didn’t put it in the bank.

And here we leave the Banks family as well, because they’re really pretty boring without Mary Poppins around to liven things up.