Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  The year was 1900 when Sandor Grosz landed by ferry at Dover and made tracks to London, the largest city in the Western world, where one in three of its 5.5 million citizens lived below the poverty line and 250,000 existed in workhouses. Unaware of his own miniscule but significant role in Britain’s future, Sandor was confident that here was the place to build his fortune. He was determined to become one of the 41.5 million citizens residing in Britain and a member of the British Empire, the biggest and the richest the world had ever known. An empire that covered 11.5 million square miles or one-fifth of the land mass of the globe; one in every four human beings lived within its boundaries and nearly one billion spoke the English language.

  Why twenty-year-old Sandor chose to head for London at that point remains a mystery. Perhaps he had sucked dry his sources of hospitality overseas, for all he carried was one small pigskin valise and a few farthings in the pockets of his damson tweed suit. But it was more than likely that he was side-stepping enlistment for military service with the Austro-Hungarian Army by fleeing from his native Budapest. In exchange for freedom, and not for the first time in his life, he would succumb to the dragging ache of loneliness and the shame of being a penniless immigrant.

  As with many men before him and many today, his priority was to secure himself a pretty young girl for a wife. Attaining respectability was, he decided, of paramount importance before setting himself up in business. What business? Well, that would come to him. He would think of something.

  In those days, the Elephant and Castle area of South London was not dominated by a shocking pink shopping centre, and the pavements were not pock-marked by chewing gum or littered with McDonald’s fast-food wrappings. Flanked by parkland, the creamery was a respectable meeting place for courting couples and it was here that fifteen-year-old Bella Crowley earned pocket-money as a part-time waitress, after school and at weekends. As Sandor Grosz plotted his next move, he decided to spend his last few coins on a glass of milk. He had not eaten for two days but that would not, he thought, stop him from smiling as he breezed into the creamery one Sunday afternoon.

  As this gesture did little to prompt a reaction from the other customers, he flipped character and acted self-consciously alone, nursing his tall glass and toying with the white paper straws. And then Sandor allowed his eyes to feast on the young ladies present. His waitress, he concluded, was plain. If there was one thing that he would later drum into the heads of his children, it was that both members of a couple should be good-looking.

  Scanning her body, he saw that her fitted white blouse and long charcoal skirt suited her very well, and her glossy waist-length dark braids revealed fine health. Her large eyes – a hazelnut brown – were unremarkable. But she would do.

  ‘One more apple, one more ginger, one stewed pears and cream,’ Bella was singing in her head as she scooped out ice cream into lily-shaped glasses for three gentlemen seated under the candy-striped awning outside. The girl had found that the combination of it being a Sunday and the first sunshine of the new century, helped her to forget a pile of Latin homework that lay in wait for her return. She sighed and asked Our Lady very politely if she might be spared this ominous task.

  Looking up from behind the oak serving counter her eye swerved to a small, nutmeg-coloured man who seemed ill-at-ease in his gaudy, foreign suit. He beckoned Bella over, and as she inclined her inquisitive head, he whispered very charmingly into her ear.

  A proposal.

  My first, she thought.

  ‘To marry you, I want,’ he murmured seductively.

  This was the first time that Bella Crowley encountered her future husband. Like the many other women who came to know and love and later revile him, Bella Crowley often regretted the day Sandor Grosz disrupted her quiet, unsophisticated life and turned it into a Victorian high melodrama.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Heading in a New Direction

  If you believe in fate then perhaps Isabella Crowley, of Peckham Rye, South London, daughter of Arthur, a lapsed Irish-Catholic priest and Maria, an Italian, was always destined for a stormy ride through life. You might argue that all convent-educated girls turn out wilful, but at the dawn of the twentieth century, Bella would seize upon the radical causes of a new age as if she was possessed. ‘How can women possibly move ahead,’ she demanded, ‘with a Queen at the helm who has practically buried herself alive?’ ‘How can women possibly think of deserting their families in the name of emancipation?’ replied her father dryly.

  On the ground floor of their shambling Victorian villa, a dwindling second-hand piano shop kept the Crowley house in a perpetual state of discord. They were a wild lot, according to Phyllis’s niece, Mary West. Neighbours would strain to hear if the fast passionate arguments were being conducted in Italian or high-speed Dublinese. Rarely did Mrs Crowley leave the tiled confines of the kitchen, where she began kneading bread on the refectory table long before the Wyandotte hens started up in the back yard, and where she steamed and starched the men’s shirts well into the following morning.

  Bella had no need to question why her mother’s strong slate-coloured hair had been invaded by white, nor why her swollen hands bore more scalds and scars than her father’s. Devotion, the girl decided, was too akin to sacrifice.

  Perhaps as the middle child, in a stifling and rowdy household, Bella felt her voice evaporate as she competed against her five brothers and three sisters. When I am grown, I will not go quietly into some marriage, she thought as she wrote in her diary, seated at her desk in the attic box room. I will make them all sit up and listen – with plays performed at the theatre perhaps. The psychologists among us may nod sagely as we learn that as an adult, Bella won the attention she sought by taking up the Suffragette cause. Even when she had streaked past her teenage years, Bella would be consumed by restless self-seeking behaviour that was for her as destructive as it was liberating.

  If Victorian women repressed and constricted their sexuality behind overtight underpinnings, then Bella Crowley effectively ripped out all the intricate bindings of her clothes to allow herself to breathe in all that life had to offer, fully and deeply.

  Long after the floral wallpaper in Bella’s bare bedroom had crisped and faded, as had the sounds of her quick steps in the hallway, her parents would squabble over their Sunday roast as to which of their rogue relatives might have contributed to the girl’s unreasonable behaviour. ‘Why else would she be so disobedient?’ her mother would repeat, fretful that out of a brood of nine, even one had turned out bad.

  Without doubt Bella was a man’s woman. Tall enough to retain her dignity if she swept into a rage but even so, small enough to tuck her arm deftly under that of a gentleman and then to rest her head with a sigh, lightly on their shoulder. She was, in short, the sort of woman not to leave alone with one’s fiancé – if he was of a weakish disposition. Phyllis Pearsall, her only daughter, would portray Bella in much the same way that the popular novelist of her mother’s day, Thomas Hardy, depicted his flibbertigibbet character, Sue Bridehead, in his novel Jude the Obscure. Ironically, Bella Crowley was the female mirror image of Sandor Grosz. With one crucial difference. Whereas for Bella, Sandor was the only recipient of her love and devotion, Sandor was incapable of returning the honour. To be spoilt, fussed over and respected was, he believed, what a man should expect from his wife. How foolish, he believed, for any woman to truly expect a man to be faithful. After all, if she was given trinkets and trappings and children – what more could she want?

  And how exactly did Bella see herself? Her giggling was not reserved for special occasions and she never rationed flashing her eyes in the direction of anyone who might be looking. In fact, whether she was swathed in sable as Mrs Gross of Claygate or posing naked as Delilah for her American artist lover, by the time the soil was sprinkled over Bella’s pauper’s coffin she had run up a long list of eyebrow-raising achievements. Slated by critics for her outrageous feminist play Break the Walls Down, performed at the Savoy Theatre, s
he abandoned her two children for her lover, wrote children’s books, was a victim of domestic violence, a drug addict who battled with alcoholism and spent her final years in Bedlam mental hospital. And all this before the age of fifty.

  But back to the easy days of the creamery, where the young Isabella had felt her ears burn at the flood of words that slipped out from the foreign gentleman. Was this love at first sight? No. Rather it was the dangerous introduction of two unchannelled energies, whose combined personalities were toxic. Like a malevolent thunderstorm, they would surround and singe any unfortunates who became caught up in their lives.

  They both understood that the following months were a mere formality. A handwritten note from Mr Crowley invited Mr Sandor Grosz to Saturday-afternoon tea. All members of the family had been alerted by Mrs Crowley as to the importance of this occasion. ‘And would all of you please,’ she begged, ‘see to it that your hair is brushed and your nails scrubbed.’

  ‘Why, Mater?’ whined Charlie, Bella’s seven-year-old brother. ‘Why must I wear my Sunday best on a Saturday?’

  The sweet mix of shaving soap and fruitcake smells slipped through the house.

  ‘Now tell me, what exactly is your young man like then?’ asked Frank, sidling up to his favourite younger sister who was rubbing lavender wax into the banister rails.

  ‘Let him speak for himself,’ Bella replied smartly, pursing her lips tightly as she shrugged her shoulders.

  From a boarding house in Islington, Sandor Grosz meandered a good six miles through the West End and over the Embankment to Peckham on a stomach that had lain empty for five days. It is surprising how pride can keep you alive. Starving, Sandor convinced himself, is a matter of will.

  To ward off his hunger, Sandor’s mind teased him with images of Csurog. And of his mother, wiping her eyes as she relived her favourite tragedy. Of her beloved Zoltan – her husband and Sandor’s father.

  I begged him not to leave the house. He wanted to play cards with his friends. A blizzard sang outside the door. ‘You’ll catch your death of cold,’ I said. I was six months pregnant with my second baby, but still I laid down in front of the door. He put on his sheepskins. He said not a word to me. I screamed, ‘Don’t go, Zoltán!’ He stepped over me and went into the darkness. They found him a week later. Upright in his cart. Frozen with his horse.

  The moral of the tale sidled into Sandor’s consciousness. The stubbornness that keeps us alive may well kill us in the end . . .

  In his urgency, Sandor arrived an hour early for tea. It is true that a gentleman would have kept himself away until the appointed time, but Sandor’s preoccupation with his own well-being meant this was not even a consideration. ‘At last an English family, at last an entry into the heart of England,’ he sighed, taking a run up the brick steps to lunge at the front door bell-rope.

  It was Bella who coyly greeted him, swamped by a cleaning overall, a duster bandaging her hair and a broom in her hand.

  The following scene might, indeed ought, to have put an end to their romance. Instead, Sandor’s words instilled in Bella an insecurity about her appearance that never left her. A flash also appears of Sandor’s lifelong battle to enforce his own will, and subjugate that of his wife. In later life, Phyllis would say that, not only was her mother shamed from that moment on about her provincial choice of apparel, but that her religious beliefs and duties would also be ‘sledge-hammered out of her’.

  ‘Glamour mattered to him immensely,’ Phyllis once said of her father, in a newspaper interview, ‘but women didn’t. They were just people to get into bed with.’

  Disappointingly for Sandor, his future wife would turn out to be neither weak nor submissive – and what animal, however big or small, does not fight its captor?

  ‘Never will you dress so terrible again! My wife must always be attractive,’ said Sandor in disgust at Bella’s charlady disguise.

  Tears and whimpers followed as she charged up the stairs to return buoyantly in a navy blue dress. ‘This is what you were supposed to see me wearing,’ she smiled coquettishly.

  ‘That I like,’ nodded Sandor, who was duly let over the threshold.

  So desperate with hunger was he, that Sandor struggled to pace himself with the plump white bread and strawberry jam tea. Rendered mute by the presence of her suitor, Bella examined and re-examined and then counted the eye-hooks on her black patent boots. In turn, Sandor was overwhelmed by her parents’ hospitality and he gauged, quite inaccurately (for they were not a wealthy family) from the mint-thin porcelain, that he had bagged a fine future. Without a moment’s consideration, Sandor suddenly sank down on one knee and then, with an embarrassing flourish of his hand, kissed that of his sweetheart, and proposed. Sandor performed before the ten members of the family – clustered in the front parlour, with only the sound of the grandfather clock as accompanying music.

  ‘But tell me, Mr Gross, that you are a Catholic Hungarian and not a Jewish Hungarian?’ Mr Crowley enquired, taken aback by this gratuitous display of sentiment.

  ‘The inquisition,’ Arthur Crowley explained later that night to his wife, ‘was because I did not want to see our daughter fall into eternal damnation – at least not before the age of sixteen.’

  But as easily as a fish slips through a fisherman’s hands, Sandor replied in the affirmative. ‘I am Catholic,’ he declared, ‘and I would be honoured to marry your daughter.’

  ‘Your prospects?’

  ‘Excellent.’ He lied as easily as the first time, brushing the crumbs from either side of his mouth.

  A heat haze simmered on the brow of Lavender Hill. The late summer afternoon had paralysed the women and children who slouched down to the river; even the occasional dull clacking of horses’ hooves was leaden. Viewed from above the rows of terraced villas, a lone figure busied himself up and down the garden paths, carrying a clanking assortment of oil lamps that swung from his shoulders. ‘Kerosene?’ Sandor would say years later. ‘Why, the smell still makes me sick to my stomach!’

  The housewives who cautiously opened their back doors to Sandor were suspicious of his dove-white shirt, with the cuffs turned up only once, and his squeaky shoes that tat-tatted as he sped on to the next house, whistling. His prices were not dear, but goodness – why would a respectable man be flogging gas lamps in August? Gambling, assumed many of the women as they returned to their chores, tut-tutting, or perhaps a bad investment overseas.

  As with any family tale repeated from one sibling to another, from grandmother to grandchild, the emphasis fluctuates into its own reality. A favourite anecdote is stretched a little further, the dull character is written out and an extra line or two welded in for a funnier ending.

  Phyllis could recite her family history without blinking, but so too could her elder brother Tony. Whose memory or interpretation of their past is more accurate will never be discovered, but Sandor’s modest start as an Englishman had a more heroic feel in Tony’s unfinished memoirs.

  ‘Within a few days of my father arriving in London, he had been robbed of the little money he had brought with him and was penniless. But soon he made himself a fortune.

  ‘One day he overheard two men talking Hungarian in a tea shop. This was a strange enough coincidence in London in those days, but he heard one of them telling the other how he had just made money by selling gas mantels, a new invention from Germany. My father begged and borrowed money with which he bought gas mantels and in a short time had enough capital to strike out.’

  But selling oil lamps from door to door does not sound profitable. Your average London working man would have sniffed at it, but ‘pitiful’ and ‘demeaning’ were words that Sandor did not understand. Then again, your average London working man did not dream night after night of gorging on gold sovereigns.

  My dream is a peculiar one, reflected Sandor as he shaved in chill water early one morning. He thrust out his greedy chin, surveyed his Roman profile and settled for it being a sign of future affluence.

  �
�This is not the sort of business a gentleman wants to pursue,’ Mr Crowley remarked to Sandor, exasperated that his future son-in-law was unable to grasp the basics of the British class system.

  ‘Too late,’ muttered Sandor who, armed with the natural patois of a salesman, had already saved six sovereigns in a Rowntrees toffee tin.

  Elopement with Bella was his next move. The following morning, Sandor settled the bill at his boarding house, leaving no trace of his stay. Which was just as well, for the Crowley clan had finally challenged him about his true faith. ‘You have nudged,’ began Mrs Crowley, ‘roast pork around your plate one time too many. I ask you, sir, why you refuse that meat, as if to take one mouthful would be against your religion!’

  A mortifying silence fell on the gathering, until Sandor stood up, bowed and backed out of the room. Brothers Frank and Charlie would have given chase. It is a certainty that Bella fled to her bedroom, in the firm belief that she was about to die of grief.

  I forbid you, Arthur Crowley wrote to the bogus Catholic, to see my daughter and I forbid you to enter my home.

  Bella was inconsolable until one night, after midnight, when Sandor hurled pebbles at the window of her bedroom.

  ‘Knot your sheets!’ he called up. ‘Two or three if you can. Hurry now!’

  Bella dangled and swung and squirmed down on to the lawn below.

  ‘We are going to Dublin,’ Sandor informed his fiancée.

  ‘But lovers get married at Gretna Green,’ she replied, tugging at his cloak.

  Sandor found his heart plummeting to his feet. Then, as those in the first flush of passion are wont to do, he acquiesced to his fiancée’s alternative plan. My little one is wild, he thought, never suspecting for a minute that he would ever have trouble in training her.