Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  The fugitives headed north on the early train from King’s Cross railway station.

  ‘This is such a splendid idea . . .’ shouted Bella as they scurried aboard, but the word adventure evaporated as the simmering train let out a deep sigh. Four hours passed. ‘Nothing is so dreary as an empty train,’ Sandor said out loud to himself. His only relief from boredom was running his eye over the dimly-lit ghost-carriages. Mouldy swathes of hills and mountains bulged as daylight loomed. He could not shake off the small pressure on his shoulder, caused by the dead weight of Bella’s sleeping head.

  Being with someone can feel lonely, thought Sandor, until a red-haired trolley waitress asked if Sir would perhaps like to take a brandy. Whatever their flirtatious exchange, after Sandor had drained his glass, his foot tapped in eagerness to disembark and to marry the woman lying beside him, if only to quench his physical desires.

  To say that Sandor Grosz was incapable of fidelity would be no exaggeration. Today, his family do not conceal the fact that Sandor’s voracious and unpredictable philandering proved the undoing of his marriage. Like many powerful and influential men, as Sandor’s success increased, so too did the need for the relief that came from brief sexual encounters.

  Once over the border, the unlikely pair were united in Gretna Green’s small register office. ‘The last ceremony of the day,’ an official said with a wink, as if the timing of their marriage was more than a little significant. To banish his feelings of being an immigrant, Sandor swirled his signature in the marriage register with his anglicised name – Gross. Bella, intoxicated by her own boldness and swallowed up by her new husband, ordered the memory of her childhood to disappear.

  ‘Bel-la Gro-ss,’ she spelt aloud, neatly leaving her mark.

  As they celebrated over a hearthside dinner of smokies and whisky in the Keeper’s Inn, neither could have predicted that their newly joined lives would remain that way for less than twenty years.

  When asked about her childhood, Phyllis Pearsall – like the sorcerer’s apprentice – could summon up decades of dialogue even half a century later. Conversations – some intimate, some frightening, many contradictory – were repeated by her in a uniformly sing-song voice. A slightly thin voice, it was powerful nevertheless. Rattling at the pace of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, the sentences in her privately published memoirs Fleet Street, Tite Street, Queer Street and A-Z The Personal Story from Bedsitter to Household Name tripped from one slapstick vignette to another, without malice or regret.

  Phyllis saw to it that there were no intervals in the vaudeville performance that became the Gross family history. Backstage misery as she records it, never happened. Restraint was trampled upon as the pair acted out their own high dramas in front of each other. Tears, undying love, impassioned pleas for mercy, hysterical laughter – moderation had never set foot inside the front door of the Gross house.

  Something in all of this does not ring true – in Phyllis’s version of the truth, that is. One listens for her shrill voice. As it begins to seep to the surface of the brain, Phyllis Pearsall takes on the persona of two other female writers, Jean Rhys and Anaïs Nin. All three were contemporaries of sorts: stubborn, mischievous, lonely souls who doused themselves in men but never found peace with them or with their own company. Each penned copious amounts according to the truth – as they perceived it, as they found it and as they wanted it to be. Their formula? Take one fact, conversation or incident. Add one heaped spoonful of elaboration and one of wit. Leave to soak overnight to plump up for a delicious interpretation of the truth. Serve neat. But here was a mind that understood and spoke eight languages. Here was a woman whose eyes, despite sixty years of detailed work, never shrank from brilliance to require glasses. Reading fast was a sport, speaking just as quickly was a game, too. Ask any one of her friends and they would say that Phyllis could repeat, verbatim, an entire afternoon’s conversation without hesitation. So what is real and not far from real are perhaps just blinks apart.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Heavy Burden to Carry

  1901

  A restlessness nipped at the ankles of the newly married Mr and Mrs Gross. They slept fitfully, ate sporadically and, as with any couple thrown together, each feared upsetting the other. Perhaps it is a condition common among immigrants who imagine the ground shifting under their feet before any roots have taken. Maybe the pair were colluding in their own healthy appetites for everything unattainable, or maybe they had touched on their incompatibility.

  Fuelled by an almost inhuman energy, they worked eighteen-hour days without a honeymoon and without holidays in a rat-infested oil-lamp shop, that Sandor had spent his savings on, in Brixton, South London. Never missing a trick, Sandor even sold pornographic postcards from his back door – until he was cautioned by the police.

  Within a year, the rush amongst the middle classes for electricity was on. This, Sandor sensed, was his future, and the oil-lamp business began to flicker and fade as he stretched their profits to purchase stores in Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow.

  The couple’s reward was their first home – a new, redbrick terraced house in Court Lane Gardens, Dulwich, which Sandor named ‘Budapest’. I am King of all I survey, he must have thought, as he viewed the fine Wilton carpets, the pretty maidservant and rose trees in the front garden. In later years, though, constantly moving house would become another outward symptom of their unhappiness.

  When seventeen-year-old Bella fell pregnant with their first child, the very next year, it was Sandor’s triumph. ‘I did it, I did it!’ Phyllis records as her father’s words after the baby, a boy, was born.

  For Bella, the birth wrenched and wrung out most of the life from her. Weakened to the point of death, the chances of recovery were believed by the physician in attendance to be slim. A priest was summoned and her limp body was made comfortable. Sandor wailed as he caressed and plaited her hair to make her ready for the casket, as if, thought the physician, he was a mourner from one of those foreign countries.

  It was partly Sandor’s sobbing and fussing which finally coaxed back Bella’s spirit which, if truth be known, was wallowing in his uncompromised attention. The physician advised Sandor to treat Bella to a boat trip, ‘to revive,’ he whispered, ‘the little soul’.

  The frailty of women, Sandor mused, as he finally managed to bundle his ailing wife aboard a boat at Tower Bridge, which took them on a ten-day trip along the eastern coastline up to Berwick-on-Tweed. Whether Bella reluctantly left her baby under Sandor’s instructions, or whether she happily gave him over to a wet-nurse is unclear. But the couple were not to see their firstborn again.

  The seas were rough and the spray revitalising. Storms delayed their return by one day. It was dead of night when the boat docked and there, on the quay, an elderly couple huddled under an umbrella, their forms swinging in and out of vision as a storm lamp flashed across them.

  An ominous presence, sensed Bella, who instinctively recognised her estranged parents. Without ceremony, Maria Crowley greeted them with the news that their baby son had died that morning of an infection.

  A single wail from Bella, stranger than any noise they had ever heard, rose out from the depths of her crumpled body.

  ‘I did not even name him. What punishment is this? I did not even name him. My baby will go to hell.’

  With some difficulty her parents propped up their daughter and together they embraced her grief. Somehow no one noticed that Sandor remained outside the huddle, apparently unmoved.

  Bella was to take to her bed until she could no longer fight the lingering, invasive depression that hinted at the mental illness she would fall prey to until her death.

  I cannot abide this weakness. How am I to cope? thought her husband. Observing his wife convulsing with tears repulsed him. He marched out of whichever room she happened to be in – their bedroom, the empty nursery, or the front parlour – perhaps to take a turn in the garden, perhaps to retire to his study. But what about compassion? Did tha
t ever stir in the pit of his belly? Guilt occasionally, but compassion – no.

  Despite his impoverished upbringing, Sandor’s invincible health only served to emphasise Bella’s frailty; her valiant efforts to plump up her own milky-skinned fragility with sheer will-power were futile.

  ‘Anything that interrupts business is a nuisance,’ Sandor once told his daughter. ‘Illness, weddings, death. I may seem selfish but that is how it is. When I see somebody crippled or hear someone has died, I’m glad it isn’t me.’

  The frustration of his wife, according to Phyllis, culminated in the first of many angry outbursts.

  ‘Pull yourself together!’ he yelled again at the little figure, bandaged in shawls, motionless on their bed. ‘Pull yourself together!’

  The Crowley family rallied round at afternoon tea, their favourite gathering, giving free rein to disgusted whispers of how their son-in-law was treating their poor, dear Bella. ‘And perhaps his only child too,’ tutted Mrs Crowley.

  Whenever he could manage it, Sandor sneaked out of their company. In the hall he pulled out a handkerchief from his top pocket and rubbed his eyes until onion raw. He stepped back into the parlour as Maria Crowley was pouring tea, his head bowed.

  ‘Perhaps I was too harsh. I misjudged poor Sandor,’ she remarked to her husband on their way home.

  Sick is how Sandor felt when the couple were left alone again. All this business is making me sick, he thought. Homesick, he diagnosed. I long to see my poor dear mother.

  ‘Come, we shall take a trip,’ he whispered to Bella. ‘To Csurog. A belated honeymoon, my love.’

  Another chance, Bella believed. She would try to be strong again for Sandor. But it was too late; the damage was done. Perhaps it was his desire to find in Bella the peasant strength with which his mother bore her troubles, but Sandor did nothing to encourage or reassure his wife.

  For now, the fresh breeze of being on the move again, criss-crossing Europe on a two-month trip, and the absence of daily domesticity preserved their relationship, although the young woman’s body would take two years to recover from the loss.

  On 19 March 1905, Imre, a gentle soul who would later be known as Anthony or Tony, was born in Dulwich. As if by genetic rebellion, his talents when an adult would be artistic and could not have been less important to his father.

  The following year, on 25 September 1906, Phyllis Isobella Gross was born. A small baby, she grew into a tiny child, with her father’s cornflower-coloured eyes set in a heart-shaped face framed by masses of dark, wavy ringlets. Shortly before his death in 1957, her father revealed to Phyllis that neither he nor her mother had ever considered her a beauty. ‘A spiritless suet pudding she called you.’

  Self-absorbed she might have shown herself to be, but as a mother Bella truly believed her children were her priority. It is unlikely, therefore, that she would ever have remarked that her daughter resembled a pudding or lacked spirit. Yet the phrase, which would have been instantly dismissed by anyone who had met Phyllis, carried all the provocative characteristics typically used by Sandor to stir, to insult and to goad into action. If he thought his authority or supremacy as head of his family and of his business, were at risk (which he obviously assumed in this case – despite nearing death), he would try to reassert his position. One of his favourite aggressive tactics was to undermine Phyllis, just as he could not resist undermining the confidence and capabilities of his wife.

  Admittedly, when standing side by side with her conventionally beautiful mother, Phyllis was happy to be eclipsed, so she never felt the need to compete with her. Phyllis’s colourful artistic dress sense and short chaotic hair haloed a sensitive rather than a pretty face. But if there was one thing that struck every one of her friends and colleagues, it was her spirit – always present in her inquisitive blue eyes and keen energy.

  Unlike her formally trained sibling, Phyllis preferred spontaneous painting, and sketching and writing. From the moment she first picked up a whiskery sable brush, she trained her eye to be accurate, and when she prepared her palette, she felt like a true artist.

  ‘Where, oh my goodness where,’ Sandor shouted in exasperation to Bella, years later, at their home in Claygate, ‘do these children get this feminine art obsession from?’ His eyes punched those of his wife in search of the answer, and their dinner of duck and port wine sauce congealed on the plate. Bella looked up at the chandelier to stop her tears from brimming over. ‘Who will make the money?’ Sandor shouted over and over again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Geographia: Marking Out the Future

  How amazing it would be, if in the infancy of the twenty-first century we were to unfold the most up-to-date Ordnance Survey map of London and then compare it to another from the turn of the last century, only to discover that the modern, parasitic conurbations mounting one another, and the thin, multiple boundaries encroaching and gnawing down every last defensive line of green, were slowly receding rather than advancing with time.

  And instead of the march of progress demanding ever more sophisticated cities and suburbia, what if we were to rebel and take up the more worthy challenge of keeping the lines on a map and so too, in our lives, as simple and as straight as we could? Yet we are too greedy to adjust the speed at which we move – too greedy for more. For more what? Well, that we don’t know until we see it.

  For Sandor Gross the greed began in 1908, when he had begun to lose his quivering fear of writing cheques. ‘I am surrounded,’ he said to himself, ‘by an infectious breed, whose single most important desire is to explore and to expand. Social climbers. I’ll show them.’

  And he did.

  Queen Victoria had been dead for seven years. Her stringent personality, which had soured the nation for forty years and frowned on the happy-go-lucky British psyche, evaporated and, as if waking from a slumber, the Heart of the Empire stirred. The pace of life quickened. The pulse of cities strengthened. Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham, Liverpool and Manchester stretched their boundaries.

  Fifteen years earlier, England, Scotland and Wales had been mapped by the Ordnance Survey at twenty-five inches to the mile. The Victorian obsession with drawing thick rules around the Empire had then turned its attention to internal labelling and defining. The lines were pushed back as nearly half a million Britons a year sought new lives and resettled in other parts of the Empire.

  Within this country, over a million migrants were on the move from the East and West of England to London, seeking positions as skilled artisans or domestic servants. Whitechapel and Southwark became home to the Irish who filled jobs as labourers, shoemakers and tailors. They were joined in the East End sweatshops by a swelling number of over 100,000 Jews, fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. The working classes spawned a new class – the lower middle class – made up of clerks, bookkeepers and schoolteachers, who jostled for space alongside the middle classes. A small but militant band of women, led by Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, demanded votes for women. The Suffragettes built up their numbers and carried out radical, sometimes violent protests.

  Huge social divisions across the East and West End of London sparked disgruntlement and competitiveness. Money, in this new century, was to be earned, not inherited. More so than ever, for London was a working city with eleven docks clearing over 10,000 ships a year for export. Marmalade, gas light, India rubber, leather and sugar consumed the days of the East End workers. Factories replaced workshops and business offices invaded the City. Fleet Street, Holborn, the Strand, Oxford Street and Regent Street pulled the smart and richer inhabitants from the North, South and East of the River Thames towards the West End. Knightsbridge, Kensington and Bayswater saw a rash of department stores such as Whiteley’s, which boasted, ‘We sell everything from a pin to an elephant.’ Humble drapers’ shops were soon deemed too old-fashioned. Marks and Spencer opened a Penny Bazaar on the Edgware Road, and W.H. Smith established railway station bookstalls. It would be the following year before Harry G. Selfridge presented his
grand store on Oxford Street – ‘dedicated to the service of women’ – which employed over 3,000 members of staff in 160 departments. H.C. Harrod was already the talk of the town after his grocer’s shop on the Brompton Road had continued to expand since its opening in 1850. Now set on a 20-acre site, Harrod’s drew the crowds by installing the first moving staircase in 1898. Indeed, more than 15,000 multiple stores vied for attention on Britain’s high streets, from Boots the chemist, to Lipton’s the grocers, and shoe shop Freeman, Hardy & Willis.

  In the first six years of the century, the first electric trams, the first double-decker buses, the first telephone boxes, the first taxicabs and the first fire brigade had all sprung up in London. The suburb of Ealing saw the creation of the British film industry, while Shepherd’s Bush hosted the 1908 Olympic Games. The financial capital of the world looked indefatigable as the population topped seven million.

  A world in sepia was soon to breathe in colour. Science, communication, transport and travel were exercised by their great champions Guglielmo Marconi, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and pushed to their limits. Rushing and racing and running became twentieth-century diseases as everyone tried to make their mark on the new century. Automobiles, telephones, telegrams, photographs – can we get there sooner, can we speak this minute, can we warn them now, can I see what they look like today – became a reality.

  Time was indeed of the essence. Little did anyone suspect that this seemingly unstoppable sprint in global development was about to be cruelly nipped in the bud by the Great War. On 4 August 1914, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith declared war on Germany. Over the next four years, millions of men would lose their lives in a conflict that cost millions of pounds.