I Go By Sea, I Go By Land

by P.L. Travers

When German bombs began to fall in 1940, Sabrina Lind, with her young brother James, left home and parents in England to spend the war years with close friends in America. Sabrina kept a very personal diary, recording the swift departure and the dangling feeling of separation and strangeness afterward, the long journey across the ocean, and their adjustment to a new life, where a warm welcome, exciting new adventures and new friends helped to alleviate homesickness and constant worry for their parents' safety. With warm touches, both tragic and humorous, Sabrina learned to accept changes in a life turned topsy-turvy.

Genres: Fiction, World War II, Childrens, Historical Fiction, Historical

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Pamela Lyndon Travers was an Australian novelist, actress and journalist, popularly remembered for her series of children's novels about mystical nanny Mary Poppins.
She was born to bank manager Travers Robert Goff and Margaret Agnes. Her father died when she was seven, and although "epileptic seizure delirium" was given as the cause of death, Travers herself "always believed the underlying cause was sustained, heavy drinking".
Travers began to publish her poems while still a teenager and wrote for The Bulletin and Triad while also gaining a reputation as an actress. She toured Australia and New Zealand with a Shakespearean touring company before leaving for England in 1924. There she dedicated herself to writing under the pen name P. L. Travers.
In 1925 while in Ireland, Travers met the poet George William Russell who, as editor of The Irish Statesman, accepted some of her poems for publication. Through Russell, Travers met William Butler Yeats and other Irish poets who fostered her interest in and knowledge of world mythology. Later, the mystic Gurdjieff would have a great effect on her, as would also have on several other literary figures.
The 1934 publication of Mary Poppins was Travers' first literary success.Five sequels followed, as well as a collection of other novels, poetry collections and works of non-fiction.
The Disney musical adaptation was released in 1964. Primarily based on the first novel in what was then a sequence of four books, it also lifted elements from the sequel Mary Poppins Comes Back. Although Travers was an adviser to the production she disapproved of the dilution of the harsher aspects of Mary Poppins's character, felt ambivalent about the music and disliked the use of animation to such an extent that she ruled out any further adaptations of the later Mary Poppins novels. At the film's star-studded premiere, she reportedly approached Disney and told him that the animated sequence had to go. Disney responded by saying "Pamela, the ship has sailed." and walked away. Travers would never again agree to another Poppins/Disney adaptation, though Disney made several attempts to persuade her to change her mind.
So fervent was Travers' dislike of the Walt Disney adaptation and the way she felt she had been treated during the production, that well into her 90s, when she was approached by producer Cameron Mackintosh to do the stage musical, she only acquiesced upon the condition that only English born writers (and specifically no Americans) and no one from the film production were to be directly involved with the creative process of the stage musical. This specifically excluded the Sherman Brothers from writing additional songs for the production even though they were still very prolific. Original songs and other aspects from the 1964 film were allowed to be incorporated into the production however. These points were stipulated in her last will and testament.
Travers was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1977. She died in London in 1996.
Although Travers never married, she adopted a boy when she was in her late 30s.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of my reviews begin with something along the lines of "chosen in desperation from my shelves when it was time to start a new chapter book with my son, and I didn't have something from the library lined up." This is another of those. Usually such a review goes on to say that I'm pleasantly surprised he liked the book in question. Not this one though. The boy found the early pages of this fictional diary of a WWII evacuee, traveling to America with her little brother, traumatic. The opening is indeed a very prolonged account of every nuance of the sadness that the girl, Sabrina, feels at parting from her parents and her home, and we didn't make it to the more cheerful parts set in the US before he asked if we could stop. Having started though, I found myself hooked, and ended up finishing it on my own. It was a second reading for me, the first being in 1998. I bought the book back then immediately after reading a glowing description of it in Noel Perrin's A Child's Delight. Although the Mary Poppins books were among the perenniel rereads of my childhood, I'd never heard of this more obscure work of P.L. Travers, which was published in 1941, and was probably not in print in the late 70s/early 80s when I was the age of its intended readership. I've always been drawn to WWII stories and Perrin's praise was untempered, so I pretty much expected this to become one of the top ten books of my lifetime. It let me down with a thump.

The magic of lowered expectations being what it is, I liked it much better this time around. I knew this time that character development would not be the book's forte. I knew it would end abruptly in an unsettling way -- the time span the diary covers is only about three months, and if I'd thought about it ahead of time, I'd have realized the first time around that a book published so early in the war couldn't possibly come to the sort of conclusion and closure that the retrospective WWII fiction I'm used to usually does. So forearmed with knowledge, I was able to enjoy what the book does well -- presenting a very detailed child's eye view of a transatlantic voyage in a convoy with U-boats on everyone's mind, and the amusements to be found in the New York area (where the children stay with family friends) in 1940. My favorite chapter was about their visit to the 1939 World's Fair (which must have been shortly before it closed). P.L. Travers, who herself traveled to the US on an evacuee ship with her young son, obviously did her homework, and describes the fair in lavish detail, and somehow seems prescient in realizing how all the exhibits about life in the "future" (the 1950s) would seem absurd in retrospect. Travers actually writes herself into this book, in the form of a family friend named "Pel" (P.L) who escorts the fictional children Sabrina and James on the ship, and settles with friends of her own at a close enough distance to take them on outings to New York City. Travers displays what I feel is a shocking lack of humility by having Sabrina write of Pel, "she makes you laugh and dance inside yourself." Hmm. Maybe I know a few people who give me a feeling somewhat like that every now and then, but always? It would get very tiring, I think. More quibbles include a dismay (which I share with my goodreads friend Susann) that Travers chose to make a Jewish boy evacuee who was on the ship intensely interested in playing games for money. Sometimes I think that Travers sincerely finds ethnic stereotypes funny -- the tippling habits of the Irish-born chauffeur of Sabrina and James' host family are also played for humor.

The ending I found more effective this time around. The spoiler space which follows includes not only a spoiler, but also a long personal digression that has only tangential bearing on the actual book.

Two years ago, I attended a candlelit evensong service at my church. It was beautiful, peaceful and moving. The part that touched me the most was a hymn, which to my knowledge, I'd never heard before. It opens "Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh, shadows of the evening, steal across the sky" and two verses later: "Grant to little children, visions bright of thee, guard the sailors tossing on the deep blue sea." The tune is simple, and there is a naivete to the words, but there was some quality about the hushed and tender way a large group of people sang it together that gave me chills, and I found I couldn't go on singing (of the performances I've listened to on youtube, this one comes closest in spirit to how I heard it sung, although we had an organ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKrPK... ). Remembering it later, and playing the tune on the piano to myself, I had a growing conviction that there must have been some movie I saw once, probably one set during WWII, which used the hymn as emotional counterpoint background music, half ironic, half sincere, to some scene of terror and fear -- bombers flying over London or such like. So, it was quite an "aha" moment to see that the words of this hymn close this book. Sabrina and James learn via a telegram that their home, which had stood for centuries, has been bombed, and that night, grieving far away in Connecticut, Sabrina sings James to sleep with "Now the day is over." It surprises me that I seem to have subconsciously absorbed the words well enough that they triggered a sort of memory in a different context fifteen years later, as I think I tend to skim verses and lyrics when they interrupt a story. Perhaps in this case, I was so taken aback at the book's sudden plunge into sadness that I took the time to read all the words. It would be more than a year after the book was published that America entered the war. No one knew at the time how it would end.

[Alex Baugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

By now, you have all probably heard of a new Disney film called Saving Mr. Banks about getting Mary Poppins author P. L. Travers to agree to letting Walt Disney make a movie of her most popular book. But P. L. Travers wrote lots of other books besides her Mary Poppins novels and one of those books covered the three month period August to October 1940 during WWII.

I Go by Sea, I Go by Land was written in 1941 and is the story of the evacuation of two English children, Sabrina Lind, 11 and her brother James Lind, 8. The first part of the novel, I Go by Sea, begins when Sabrina is given a diary to record her adventures once it is decided that she and James are to be evacuated by ship to America now that the Germans are actually dropping bombs on England.

After detailed accounts of getting passports, tickets, packing and goodbyes, the two children arrive in London for the train that will take them to the dock to board ship (not named but they are most likely leaving from Liverpool). At the London train, along comes a family friend named Pel, who writes book, with her baby son Romulus. Pel will be escorting the children to America. Sabrina and James aren't the only evacuees on the ship - there are over 300 others being sent to Canada by the British government.

Sabrina is an observant child, giving more detailed accounts of sea sickness, other passengers, meeting and befriending one of the government evacuees, and of the convoys that are escorting them across the Atlantic. It is a long but uneventful journey and when they arrive in Canada, the second part of the novel, I Go by Land, begins.

After some sightseeing in Canada, Pel, Sabrina, James and Romulus fly to La Guardia Airport in New York, where Sabrina and James are met by their mother's old friend, Aunt Harriet and her husband, Uncle George and their children Georgina, 13, and Washington, 17. Pel and Romulus are staying in Manhattan, but Aunt Harriet lives in the suburbs.

The rest of the novel is Sabrina's description of the touristy things that they do for the first few weeks before school starts. Their visit to the Statue of Liberty, and to the 1939 World's Fair just before it closed because of the war. These visits are wonderfully detailed by Sabrina and totally worth reading, especially since she describes walking up to the Statue of Liberty's crown, something that visitors haven't been allowed to do in a long time.

The rest of the novel is about school, worrying about everyone back in England and ends on a rather upsetting note on James's 9th birthday when they are told by Pel that their beloved old home has been partially damaged by a bomb, though everyone is safe.

This is, indeed, an odd book. There is not a real story, just descriptions of what happens for three months. Yet, it is written with such historically realistic detail that it can draw you in completely. In fact, it is so realistic, and given the friend's name was Pel, I did a little research and discovered that P. L. Travers did indeed travel to New York in August 1940, though only with her own son Camillus. There were about 300 evacuees on board ship at the time, bound for Canada but Travers had nothing to do with them. So, she only have to invent 11 year old Sabrina to turn her experience into an interesting children's story. And it is truly a window into a short but pivotal time in WWII for civilians.

And Travers did an excellent job of it, especially since, unlike Pel, she was not a happy, easy going person and Camillus was not the happy, quiet, content baby that Romulus is.

I Go by Sea, I Go by Land has lots of black and while pencil illustrations by Gertrude Hermes, an artist that Traversactually befriended on board ship in 1940 and remained friends for a while after arriving in America.

The title, I Go by Sea, I Go by Land is take from an old English bedtime prayer.

As much as this is an interesting book for young readers, you should be warned - the adults in the book smoke and have cocktails and a few more things are said that may not be PC by today's standards.

This book is recommended for readers age 11+
This book was purchased for my personal library

This review was originally posted at The Children's War

[Lina Slavova]

At the outbreak of World War II, Pamela L. Travers left England for America at the request of the British Ministry of Education. This book is an account of this evacuation to the United States but told from the point of view of Sabrina, a dislocated eleven-year-old girl who keeps a diary of the adventure. Sabrina and her brother James who is nine, are accompanied on this journey by a family friend named Pel and her baby Romulus.

The book was first published in 1941 while Pamela was still abroad and, as reported by her biographer, Valery Lawson, intensely homesick. A homesickness expressed in the words of Pel: “It’s the earth I shall miss, quite apart from human relationships. It is necessary to me. I feel that my body is made of the woods and rivers.” This is interesting to me because Pamela was born in Australia, but that is another subject.

I got the third edition printed in 1967 which had Pamela’s Foreword. The end of it is quite melancholic and it encapsulates Pamela L. Travers’s belief about life:

“After childhood, our lives are no longer our very own. The world comes in and demands its share and unless we are cleaver or – lucky, perhaps – we forget a very great deal.”

The theme about forgetting what is real in life as we grow up is an everlasting theme in all the Mary Poppins books and in all of Pamela L. Travers’s other writings. Although in this book there is no magic.

The book is separated in two sections. The first, I Go By Sea, is about the experience of the war, leaving one’s homeland and one’s family and the actual crossing of the ocean. The second part, I Go By Land, is about the children’s adaptation to their new life in America.

Although the story has no plot, there are no dull moments. I simply loved it. It is my favorite of her works right after the Mary Poppins books. In this book, as in all her books, there are a lot of lovely descriptions of places and characters. Pamela was a masterful composer of exquisite yet short descriptions. Below are some examples:

“Then suddenly there were five loud explosions and then six more and the earth seemed to be running and running under the house and the house trembled and the explosions were thumping in our ears.”

“Today the wind has been blowing very hard. From the Pole, the First Officer said, and you could imagine it sweeping over Greenland’s Icy Mountains and ruffling the fur of Polar Bears before it got to our part of the ocean and knocked us over every time we stood up.”

“You could feel that she (Mrs. Floriano) had a lot of life behind her, too, and that it had made her steady and endless and undeniable like History. Even to die would not surprise her, it would be just pulling slowly in to another wharf.”

Pamela’s sensibility and her ability to write convincingly as an eleven-year-old is impressive. And then maybe she was channeling her own inner child. There are two passages in the book that caught my attention and made me think that maybe there is a connection between the Sabrina character and Pamela’s own inner child.

The first is when the Able Boddied Seaman asks Sabrina if she looks like her Ma and Sabrina replies:“ Well, she has a small deer’s face and she looks shy and young and enquiring and as if she didn’t want to get hurt.” This reminded me of a passage about her childhood that I read in her biography Mary Poppins She Wrote. When Pamela was very young she often wondered if her mother was more like a doe or more like a serpent. That might seem peculiar as a question, but I believe it had to do with the fact that her mother used to be hot and cold with her in the early years of her childhood.

The second passage is about Sabrina’s anxieties while watching Pel sleep: “I am frightened when I see grown-ups asleep. They look as tough they have forgotten everybody and gone right away into themselves. I feel that perhaps they will never wake up again and we shall be left quite alone and I kept going close to Pel to make sure she was still breathing. She has a very small breath just like mother’s. No sound at all and hardly a movement. Mother makes me very anxious. Sometimes when she is asleep I am afraid she is dead and I think of it in the night. Once, I thought of that and went into her room. It was dark and very still and I was afraid to go near the bed.” I believe this to be an autobiographic element. I believe Pamela truly experienced this sort of anxiety. Her father fell ill when she was seven years old and the last time she saw him was before going to bed; he was dead the next morning. And as if that was not sad enough, her mother attempted suicide a couple of years later. It is not difficult to see the connections here.

Another interesting character in this book is Pel who is a writer and travels with a baby in a bassinette named Romulus. It looks like Pel stands for P.L. and baby Romulus, for Pamela’s adopted baby Camillus. And I had the same feeling about Pel as I had about Mrs. Brown-Potter in the story Friend Monkey. I believe it to be an expression of Pamela’s higher self, the ideal she wanted to embody: “She (Pel) makes you laugh and dance inside yourself and at the same time you feel that she is somebody who will always be there and that is a very safe feeling.”

In real life, Pamela did not make people feel good in her presence nor did she provide any emotional security to her son Camillus but this will be discussed on my blog project themarypoppinseffect.com

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not know why this book is not more widely read. I knew as soon as I started it that it would be a five star book.

[LaCitty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Romanzo grazioso, scorrevole che racconta la storia di due ragazzini, James e Sabrina, mandati in America dai genitori per metterli al sicuro dai bombardamenti sull'Inghilterra durante la II Guerra Mondiale.
Il punto di vista è quello di due bambini privilegiati che possono viaggiare con tutti i comfort del caso, però, pur essendo una storia fondamentalmente leggera, emerge la tristezza per avere lasciato casa, il senso di solitudine per essere lontani dai genitori e dalle persone amate.
In finale è inaspettatamente amaro. Immaginavo qualcosa di più rassicurante visto che il target di lettura è di giovane età.

[Susann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughtful and funny, absolutely. Very glad I have a copy and I'm sure I'll want to re-read it.

The pacing felt uneven, with so much of the plot taking place on the ship when–what I really wanted–was the evacuee perspective of the U.S. I wish Travers hadn't made the ship's Jewish evacuee so interested in winning money at card games, and I could have done without some other bigoted depictions. And I can't stand the device of filling a child's dairy, i.e., diary, with spelling mistakes.

[Kiri Lucas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I chose this book because I love the Mary Poppins books. The story is a diary, written from the perspective of eleven-ear-old Sabrina Lind, who is being sent to America from England during World War Two. The blurb promises a “moving story” but there isn’t a narrative thread that really holds everything together. It also feels unfinished. It was sweet and simple but there are many other wartime stories that I think are more impactful, even for a young audience.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was too lovely. Sabrina reminds me of a shadow of Francie Nolan, with her poignant insights of what it means to be a growing girl, between worlds, trying to make sense of hard times. It was not intense or as deep by any means, as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and it wasn’t trying to be. But it was perfectly good at what it was trying to be.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

So it took the author of MARY POPPINS to give me a good story after reading a few duds. Imagine that! I hadn't heard of this story by Travers, written in 1941 - about brother and sister, James and Sabrina, who are sent to America to stay with a friend of their mother's while the war wages on in England. From Sussex, the young pair journey across the ocean with America being their adventurous destination. Half the book is by sea and the other by land. The writing was lovely and you just can't go wrong IMO with a book by P.L. Travers. Fun one! Great edition. Vintage find from a local used bookshop.

[Barbara Mader · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never cared for Traver's Mary Poppins books; I think I had already read the Nurse Matilda books by Brand, and preferred those. However, I really like this book, set in the early days of WWII, and published in 1941. Written as a "Dairy" by an 11-year-old girl who has been sent, along with her almost-nine-years-old brother, to America, it reminds me a bit of Nesbit's books, especially The Railway Children, with a touch of the humor in The Treasure Seekers. I find it quite touching, and while it may be a little heavy-handed that way at times, I somehow don't mind. I've read it several times, and just re-read it again yesterday.

[Vonnie Skaggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a cluttered, forgotten corner of a used bookshop, I found a hard back copy from 1966 of this book. A book by P. L. Travers that I had never heard of. I grew up reading ALL of her Mary Poppins books, but this was something very different.

A story woven through journal entries by a little girl named Sabrina as she and her little broher, James, were sent away from England, to a family friend in America, for their safety during WWII.

It is a delightful book, but it is moving too, and thought provoking. Reminding one again of the true atrocities of war.

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

What bothered me about this book is that it was presented as a nonfiction book with the author writing about the fates of the two young English children who traveled to America to safely survive the war. By the end of the book, I realized that it was fictional. It was fairly interesting. The children were privileged children living with a wealthy family on Long Island. It seems that P.L. Travers is only interested in writing about wealthy children.

[Lady_bercilak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming story in diary form (or is that Dairy?) written by Sabrina Lind aged 11, about the voyage she and her young brother made to America in the early years of the Second World War. The fact that the book was published in 1941 before the outcome of the war could be known adds an extra layer of poignancy to the story.

[Manuel Messina · Rating 4 out of 5]

La magia e l'incanto degli occhi di due bambini in un viaggio verso l'America, in fuga dalla loro Inghilterra colpita dalle bombe... Tra umorismo, sogni, curiosità, paure, tristezza. Un grande romanzo per ragazzi su temi universali e mai superati.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow.

[Autumn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming story of Sabrina and James told in the form of a diary that Sabrina keeps for a few months during WWII when she and her brother are sent to New York to escape the bombings of England. Sweet telling and I was sorry to see it end.

[Kay Robart · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my review here:

https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2021...

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

engaging diary-style story of life in America for 2 English children during WW2. I liked the narrator's voice, her thoughts were realistic but insightful.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, and wanted to read it since I saw it recommended in Noel Perrin's book, A Child's Delight. It wasn't as compelling as the Mary Poppins series, but still an enjoyable read.