Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  The last touches and crucial final checks on the maps came sometimes as late as 5.30 a.m. Then the transfers were rolled and run through the early morning streets to the printer’s in Shepherdess Walk, off the City Road. Bribing the printer in order to gazump another print run was not uncommon. ‘Just the once,’ rang out as regularly as the damp-collar panic felt by Mr Duncan. Time and time again Geographia crashed into their deadlines with only luck as a back-up. With the first dawn chorus, elation and triumph rippled through the staff. But their contentment only lasted until the next map order – and often that was the same day.

  In her memoirs, Phyllis recalled the first time that she, aged two, and Tony, aged three, were permitted into the Geographia offices. Not, of course, during the sweaty confusion of a deadline crisis – for that spectacle might have left a less pleasant impression on the little girl. It was on the occasion of the Lord Mayor’s show – and the floats and procession then, as they do today, headed west from St Paul’s Cathedral and up Fleet Street. Dressed smartly in a flowery frock, with black patent shoes and her hair neatly brushed, Phyllis stood on the balcony, flicking a Union Jack flag back and forth against the crowds below. In her mouth she sucked hard on a sugar cube covered in camphor oil, administered by her mother to stop the November air causing the sniffles. She, Phyllis and Tony were joined by Sandor to cheer on the parade. For Sandor, the happy picture they made sealed his great satisfaction.

  To be flanked by my own handsome family, in my own office, with my own staff, above the throngs, I feel, he told himself, as patriotic as a true Londoner.

  ‘Why doesn’t little Phyllis have a go at a wee drawing of a map?’ suggested Mr Duncan afterwards, as a reward for her impeccable behaviour. Lifting her on to his high pine stool, he balanced a pen in her hand and guided it to the ink saucer on his bench. He dipped it once into the oily black liquid and then drifted it over to the tracing paper, where he gently steadied her awkward fingers. Phyllis held her breath as she began to mark an outline of a map. Bella watched her daughter’s tiny fist wobble and swerve. Several minutes passed. The lines on the paper were heavy with splotches as the pen dribbled, but her hand kept moving until her imaginary country was born. They applauded her fierce concentration.

  ‘That’s a fine map you’ve drawn, Phyllis,’ said Mr Duncan. ‘How I hope, Mrs Gross,’ he said to Bella, ‘that your daughter follows in your footsteps.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Detours and Dead Ends

  In the swirls of her subconscious and memory, it is highly likely that Phyllis interpreted her family’s erratic dashes around Europe when she was between the ages of four and ten, and their perpetual moving house, as a soothing, lulling momentum. For on such a trip the happy package of mother, father, sister and brother were tied tightly together, and the attention of both parents was bound to their children.

  As an adult, the yearning to roam was, for Phyllis, in part an urge to rekindle the closeness and contentment they had shared back then and sadly, would never manage to share again. At fourteen years old, Phyllis would be a witness to her own parents cutting themselves free of their familial bindings and then standing by, as if helpless, while their son and daughter had their childhood wrenched away from them.

  Abandonment, like a bereavement, manifests itself in various guises and for Phyllis, although she pushed on regardless, her search for that lost time, lost love and lost future, never allowed her to feel entirely free of her past. Perhaps if those early years had been miserable, her education sketchy and her prospects few, then her sense of loss might not have been so profound. Even so, the wise woman that Phyllis became, did refrain from treading a path back to old haunts in a sad attempt to resuscitate those days. To try and retrace, say, a Sunday walk across the Downs taken years ago, or to revisit a pretty market town you once stopped off in when you were younger, Phyllis understood was truly a mistake. Not feeling regret, or not allowing herself to feel regret would prove to be one of Phyllis’s most enduring character traits. A great strength? Perhaps not. Her refusal to succumb to the temptations of nostalgia meant that she never, even in her final years, sat down alone to take tea with her past. On we go – was her own personal motto.

  At home, Phyllis and her brother, Tony, were not nearly so happy. For without the illusion of space and freedom given by exotic foreign vistas like the Riviera, or Lake Lugano, the conflict between Sandor and Bella swelled in the confines of the house and their marriage started to tear at the seams. While at home, who can imagine what strains the children were party to, long before school age? Phyllis once said: ‘Dinner parties were our chief dread; and the new cold tone in our parents’ raised voices after the guests had gone. Barefoot, in our pyjamas, our arms about each other, we would crouch, shivering on the landing at the top of the stairs, fearful that the ranting – with Papa shouting Mama down – would end in violence.’

  As with the unpredictable nature of world events that erupt overnight without a breath of rumour beforehand, so too did Geographia burst into full-speed action, giving no advance warning, lurching from one map to another, chasing and plotting the course of invasions, attacks, retreats, explosions and coups that occurred in the years immediately preceding the Great War. And it was just this spontaneous steaming towards a deadline that kept Sandor alive. It force-fed his megalomaniac tendencies, for he was now praised for being indispensable to the Daily Telegraph, and permitted him to neglect what he undoubtedly felt was the mundane routine of family life. Bella and the children were left to trail behind in his affections, a poor second to his job.

  No one is so craved, so missed, and so loved as the absent father, the aloof patriarch whose brilliance is heightened by his very remoteness. The long after-tea hours, spent idly scuffing her shoes in the front garden, plucking rose petals, and waiting, waiting, waiting, for the clickety-click of her father’s steps to herald his arrival home, would lodge forever in Phyllis’s mind. Indeed, she would spend the rest of her life hoping to attract the attention and admiration of her father, her persistence undiminished whatever his behaviour or however adverse his reaction to her.

  It started with her first ever letter to her parents from Roedean, her boarding school in Brighton, Sussex. Aged ten, she simply wrote:

  Dear Mama and Papa,

  With Love, Phyllis.

  Her reluctance to divulge to them the misery they insisted on putting her through was not reciprocated. Within a few years, weekly letters would become for Sandor and Bella sharpened tools for propaganda as their marriage soured, each bargaining, pleading and condemning the other to their daughter.

  I have divorced your mother. She admits adultery. How your mother has persistently deceived me, wronged me, and how she has wronged you and Tony. Never have I been unfaithful to your mother. Alas, though it hurts me to say so, to your unnatural, unfeeling mother.

  As adults the destructive closeness between father and daughter would grow as their professional paths crossed into mapping; their differences would be thrashed out in a spontaneous flurry of correspondence, often by letter and even more often by telegram after Sandor moved to America. Why they did not simply pick up the telephone to sort out the following problems hints that both Sandor and Phyllis thrived on exasperating the other – Sandor with his innate bossiness and Phyllis with her innate naiveté:

  MAP IT

  MAP WHAT

  MAP CORONATION ROUTE

  Yet the impatient tone of Sandor’s voice was never challenged by his daughter. Even when she was in her forties, her letters often began:

  My Darling Friend and Father,

  I know how wise you are . . .

  and were signed:

  Lovingly and gratefully, Phyllis

  Sandor was not touched by his daughter’s longing for approval – as a girl, or as a grown woman. Far away, he reeled in the daily challenge of a newspaper, where the brief might change direction at any moment. There were no anxieties or low points, only highs of various peaks. The professional recog
nition that he received was partly due to his intuition, for he never failed to elaborate on any country or war he half knew about, and also for motivating, albeit not always by fair means, his team of draughtsmen at Geographia, to pick up speed and produce excellent maps to newspaper deadlines that might otherwise have taken months.

  So too might print journalism have ensnared Phyllis, if maps had still been in such demand from newspapers twenty years later, for father and daughter shared the speeding brain of a quick wit and the natural resource craved by every professional – unlimited energy.

  Even in the final months of her life, aged eighty-nine, when Phyllis was dying from melanoma cancer, and liquids were all her stomach could tolerate, her energy was inspiring. Over an April weekend, she and her best friend, Dr Esme Wren, travelled early in the mornings to London by taxi, so that Phyllis could paint the beautiful exterior of Claridges – her last work. As she was wheelchair-bound, the porters brought out a table for her paints. Over many hours, she delved into her final reserves of concentration to get the façade just so, while Esme walked around Mayfair. Then it was back home in the taxi, and up again early the next day, to start all over again.

  Yet where did Bella rank in Sandor’s life – his once proudly displayed business partner and adoring wife and mother to his children? There is a saying that goes something like this: when a husband influences his wife, he will always tell her he has done so, but when a wife influences her husband, she would be wise to never let him know. And aye, there’s the rub.

  Bella harboured a different, more creative strain of intelligence than Sandor’s, which frustrated him, and despite his sharp rebuttals of her brilliant ideas, Bella refused to stay mute. ‘How on earth will that work, Bella? What a ridiculous suggestion! Leave important business matters to me.’ Those same brilliant ideas would then be polished by Sandor and flagged up as his own.

  In later years, Bella turned to writing, to fill in the time after the children had gone to bed and before her husband requested her company at dinner. She submitted a series of children’s stories to the publisher, Cassells. Her pink excitement, when they offered her a three-year contract, with £500 a year plus royalties, could hardly be contained.

  ‘Look, Sandor,’ said Bella after opening the letter at breakfast. ‘I am to be a children’s author. My nom de plume, I’ve decided, will be Vernon Bell. You can call me Vernie.’

  Her husband’s mouth turned itself downwards.

  Scanning the details, he snorted and then skimmed the letter back to her across the table and continued to eat his kippers. ‘Why give them the profit?’ he grunted between mouthfuls. ‘We’ll publish them ourselves.’

  The stories were printed, but Bella never saw a penny.

  Outside the office, Sandor’s competitive streak ruined their time together. Once, having employed a lady dance teacher to give private lessons, he sulked after only half an hour, as he watched his wife prove lighter on her feet and spin merrily with the teacher along to the tune of, ‘If you were the only girl in the world and I was the only boy . . .’

  Sandor grew to resent his wife’s English breeding. Her English accent. Her giggle. Women, in his homeland, never questioned the authority of a man. Never. A husband was obeyed, respected and left free to do just as he pleased. Of course, one desired a wife who was something more than a street girl, but not one who wished to be the centre of attention. Bella, he decided, had too much to say. She sent smiles and whistles rippling among his staff, entranced and flirted with his friends and, most despicable of all, thought Sandor, she did not allow him to correct her faults.

  Sandor even came to resent his daughter, partly for her resilience, which reminded him so much of himself, and partly for what he believed to be her undeserved mapping success. HOW CAN YOU, he wrote in one telegram, after she had asked his advice about printers for the A-Z, TAKE WEEKS ON A JOB I COULD ACCOMPLISH IN A TRICE?

  Despite his disparagement, Bella’s dedication to her job with Sandor at Geographia did not ebb. Slipping thousands of maps into envelopes, addressing and mailing them ran into many wearisome hours. ‘For him the glory, for me the donkey-work,’ Bella quipped to her children, seemingly without qualms that her grumbles would be squirrelled away in their tiny, yet analytical minds. And soon her watery eyes and little sighs stacked up higher and higher until their judgement was swayed, forcing Phyllis and Tony to take their mother’s side in what some would argue ought to have been their parents’ private dispute.

  It was early on 8 May 1910 in Venice, where the Gross family were taking a spring break during the Easter holidays. Sandor had left the hotel in search of an English newspaper. Within minutes, he returned waving one as he ran up the Hotel Daniele’s marble steps. Into their bedroom he charged.

  ‘Get up now. Get up all of you, and pack. King Edward the Seventh is dead. I must get to London so I can map the funeral route!’

  Clothes. Suitcases. Chaos. Phyllis yanked on her trousers over her pyjamas and put both feet into one leg. She tripped.

  ‘Where did these clumsy children come from?’ muttered her father.

  No moments were spared for sadness or reflection. Two days earlier the King had succumbed, the paper reported, to bronchitis. His funeral, Sandor believed, would be within ten days. When Sandor had wired instructions to Mr Duncan in London, he, Bella, Tony and Phyllis scrambled to board the first train home.

  ‘It’s a new project, children – now let’s all concentrate.’ Fixated by his plan, Sandor elaborated out loud as they whizzed past grey stone suburbs and then on board the ferry back to England. ‘I shall get them to widen the streets on the funeral route, thicken their outlines . . .’

  ‘Why not run a black border around the edges, like a mourning card?’ Bella suggested to her husband.

  ‘Don’t you think I haven’t already thought of that?’ he snapped.

  Within five days the map was a reality. Spread across a sheet of stiff white paper, it became a sombre memento, bought by thousands to mark the closing of a chapter in British history.

  The culmination of Bella’s marital humiliation would come in 1913, in the form of what was, in retrospect, a ground-breaking play. The plot and characters of Break the Walls Down were extraordinarily emancipated, despite the fact that the Votes for Women Campaign was still some years away.

  In the play, the female protagonist sets up her own dressmaking business behind her husband’s back and employs a French couturier. When her husband discovers the arrangement, he jealously dismisses her efforts. However, while her company flourishes, his declines and in the final scene – at a creditor’s meeting – she steps in to save him from bankruptcy.

  In her own mind, Bella must have fantasised that she was the sole director of Geographia. Indeed, she displayed all the necessary skills for the job, and without over-stretching the finances, as her husband was prone to do. In the wobbly first few months of their company, Bella must surely have bitten her tongue many times when she saw just how close Sandor was prepared to take them to financial ruin. To save him, to do something that would make him indebted to her, grateful to her and to love her absolutely was Bella’s motivation in writing the play.

  But her fantasy remained just that.

  ‘I’ve written a play, Sandor.’

  ‘Fetch it, then. So that is what you have been up to. Read it to me.’ By all accounts, Sandor was transfixed as Bella read the three-act play. Midnight passed.

  ‘Well? Please do not laugh, Sandor. What do you think?’

  ‘The fruit of my educational influence. Brilliant.’

  Sandor then telephoned his friend, the actor Willy Pogany. ‘I know it’s late, Willy, but come to the house and listen to a new play – Bella’s masterpiece and mine.’

  ‘This is very fine, Sandor. I’d be proud to be in such a play,’ said Willy, after he had read it aloud with Bella.

  ‘Then I shall finance a production,’ the little man announced. ‘Find the best cast you can, my friend.’


  Today, the sum Sandor lavished on the project would run into thousands of pounds. Break the Walls Down was performed at the Savoy Theatre, in London’s West End, after a run of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sadly, no amount of chocolates and orchids and champagne, served in the finest red velvet box, could make up for the critics’ words. They shredded every line of Bella’s work and dismissed it as Suffragette nonsense. A woman in business? Oh dear no.

  Quite simply, the critics believed that the British public were not ready for strong women – especially not those who were also financially astute. The play ran for one week.

  Always poised to accept the blame, Bella lacked the courage to realise that her ideas were way ahead of the times. ‘I am so sorry to have cost you all that money Sandor,’ she said shamefacedly. ‘How kind you are to me.’

  ‘Then let it be a lesson to you. My wife will not be a martyr to women’s rights.’

  This ritual of Sandor encouraging his wife to achieve something, in the sure knowledge that she would fail so he could then gloat of his superiority, was nothing new for Phyllis. From the age of seven or eight she had observed the rise of her father, in wealth, in importance and in the domination of his family. His assured ascent did not come without its pains. She and Tony watched as he practised the slow, calculating demoralisation of their mother.

  The incident that would stand out most clearly in Phyllis’s memory occurred one late summer afternoon in 1914, when a garden party was held at their beautiful home, The Firs, in Claygate, Surrey. All the wounded soldiers and their families who lived in the town had been invited and ‘no expense’, Sandor had declared, ‘was to be spared, for these fine men.’ For days the farm and garden had been ransacked for flowers, vegetables, strawberries and peaches. The sight of these pale young men in uniform, many on crutches, all smiling as they hobbled or were wheeled past the rhododendrons onto the lawns, pinched Bella’s stomach, although she would have never allowed it to show. Although Sandor keenly led the mothers, the girlfriends and wives by the arm to tour the rose garden or admire the fine lilies on the pond, his eyes slid uneasily over the wounded servicemen. Perhaps he was reminded of the uniform he might have worn to protect his own country, and perhaps he was embarrassed by the scars he knew he could never have borne so courageously.