Bella, however, was not afraid to shake the stubs, where there should have been hands, or to smile into the dark hollows that should have held an eye, or to wink at a quiet boy with no legs at all. Her sadness channelled itself into delight, into kindness and cheerfulness, so that for however short a time it might be, Bella would make these maimed young men feel happy.
‘Mama, spot-lighted by an inner glow, exquisite in white georgette, her trim waist belted, her hat at a becoming angle, seemed everywhere,’ Phyllis tells us. ‘She joined in games, jokes, laughed, let nobody feel left out. Slowly as the guests departed, they congratulated Papa – much to his vexation . . . “Your wife was wonderful,” they told him. “Your wife was the life and the soul of the party.’ ”
Apparently Sandor waited until the maids had left for the evening, and then he exploded. ‘So you fancy yourself as Prima Donna, do you? Do you? Do you?’ he bawled.
As he smashed his fist on the kitchen table, crockery spun itself and shattered, while the remnants of a strawberry pavlova jumped into the air and landed under the nose of the family retriever, Blackie.
‘Children, go to your rooms and get into bed,’ Bella said in a calm voice. ‘Please hurry now.’
The noise of shouting drowned all the laughter that had, for once, filled the house and lawns of The Firs, before the children had even reached the top of the staircase.
‘All this luxury – is it progress, Sandor?’
They were the last words Phyllis heard before she buried her head in her linen sheets. It was not bedtime. It was barely after six o’clock. No matter. Neither Tony nor Phyllis made a fuss. And somewhere, albeit small, a part of Phyllis began to daydream about what she might someday achieve, to validate her own existence and that of her mother.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Parallel Lines
When Phyllis Pearsall was around eight years old, an incident occurred in her family that nearly ended in tragedy. What a lucky escape, you might think, but it could, instead, be seen as a vicious warning – from God, from fate, from whatever power you believe in. Yet only their mother would prophesise beyond the event. Coming from an Irish/Italian family, Bella’s strict Catholic observation was topped up by a healthy respect for superstitions that had been drummed into her since a child.
‘Look, children, there’s a piebald horse. Make a wish.’ Or, ‘Don’t put those new shoes on the table – it will bring bad luck.’
Sandor had been expanding his geographical business by devising and drawing up maps for pioneer aviators based at Hendon, North London. The accuracy of their flight paths so far had been limited, due to distorted readings given by the compass because of the magnetic pull on their planes’ engines; this meant they could only navigate via landmarks. To advance their flying, Sandor devised extra-large-scale plans of England, after countless hours spent in the cockpit of a bi-plane, taking aerial photographs.
Such was his success at improving the quality of maps that he became internationally known in aviation circles and was even commissioned to draw up a route map for Jules Védrines, the French competitor in the 1911 Daily Mail Thousand-Mile Air Race Round England and Scotland, which was reportedly watched by over two million people across the country.
‘Bring your family to meet us. Let your little girl and boy sit in the cockpit.’ The pilots warmed to the man who was devoting the majority of his spare time to improving their flying conditions. ‘Would you like to learn to fly, Sandor?’ they asked him every time he strapped himself into the cockpit and crossed himself.
‘Not if I was asked by the King himself,’ he would chuckle.
Then, as a treat one Saturday morning, Sandor took the pilots up on their kind offer and drove the children and Bella to the Hendon aerodrome. Skinny landing strips were fringed with little planes. A few groaned and dipped and soared in the sky above. The wind was light.
Phyllis and Tony were then introduced to one Mr Gates, a widower, who according to Sandor spent hours in the clouds searching for his late wife.
‘Come and feel her lovely smooth body,’ said Mr Gates, encouraging the giddy children to pat the red metal shell. Shrieks. Tony crawled underneath the body of the plane and sprawled on his back.
‘Look at me under here,’ he crowed.
Phyllis tapped the propeller.
‘Up we go, little ones,’ Mr Gates said, lending an arm as they clambered up into the cockpit.
Flash.
‘Smile for the birdies,’ said Bella, her camera poised.
They smiled.
Flash, flash.
‘Let me take them for a spin, Sandor,’ said Mr Gates.
‘Yes! Yes!’ came the shrill replies of Bella, Phyllis and Tony.
‘I forbid it.’
‘Oh, please!’ begged Bella and the children.
‘No.’
Forlorn, their heads bowed, the children slunk down from the cockpit and sought the enfolding arms of their mother. She kissed their heads before turning her attention to the pilot.
‘Smile, Mr Gates,’ said Bella. ‘One for the family album, my dear.’
They all stood back to watch the sprightly Mr Gates leap into the cockpit, the propeller now fuzzing and whirring. The wheel-chocks were removed and the plane staggered into the soft clouds.
Another flash.
Not from Bella’s camera.
Silence as black smoke and red flames engulfed the giant fly and then a sickening drone as it flipped, twisted, and was pulled hard towards the earth before crunching into the field below with a cracking explosion.
Unless you are a parent it is hard to comprehend the emotions that must have overwhelmed the couple. Not only had they witnessed the horrific incineration of a dear man, but also the fragility and insignificance in the universe of their own family.
‘Sandor, you saved their lives,’ sobbed Bella. ‘Thank you and bless you. Promise me you’ll never fly. And children – promise me that you won’t either.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag (and Smile, Smile, Smile)
It was a European crisis, but for a few men it came as a godsend. The man who made the flags, the man who made black armbands and the man who owned the ammunition factory watched their profits sprint out of sight. And so did Sandor Gross.
Their generous benefactor was one King Nicholas of Montenegro. On 8 October 1912, he had fired the first shot from his revolver and declared war on Turkey. Ten days later, Turkey declared war on Bulgaria and Serbia. Two weeks earlier, the splash in the Daily Telegraph had proclaimed a Serbo-Bulgarian treaty. Even so, the editors seemed to dismiss the potential threat to the rest of Europe but Sandor, insisting on the seriousness of the situation, made an appointment to see the editor.
‘Do you know what this means?’ he demanded, and rumour has it that he thumped his fist upon the desk of Sir John Le Sage. ‘This means war. Full-scale war.’
According to Phyllis, Sir John then skipped around his desk, kissing the air. For if there is one thing to make a newspaper editor drool with delight, it is a good old-fashioned war.
‘What do you have up your sleeve, Gross?’ he asked.
‘A 30 × 40 inches coloured Daily Telegraph Map of the Balkans folded into self cover.’
‘When can I have it?’
‘Two weeks today.’
The scale of panic at Geographia was predictable, unavoidable and unbearable. The pressure on Sandor to show Sir John the completed work on time was flimsy compared to the pressure he put on his staff. ‘Not one of you can afford to let me down,’ he told them.
The map was delivered. By the deadline. Sales of the Daily Telegraph soared. And so Mr and Mrs Gross, formerly of Dulwich, could afford to move to the prosperous North-West of London. They purchased a newly built, squarely spacious corner house on North End Road, nestled in the heart of the literary quarter, between Hampstead Pond and Golders Green.
‘How happy can a man be, Bella?’ he rejoiced. ‘Anna Pavlova blows kis
ses to my children from her garden – imagine that!’
One Lily Seidel, a Swiss governess, was employed to instruct the young Phyllis and Tony in German and French.
My governess, Phyllis noted in her memoirs, had rather thick ankles. Which was just as well, for had Lily’s fragile beauty extended to her legs, Bella would almost certainly have dismissed her, for her husband’s restlessness had stirred. His wife was the tormented witness to his lazily disguised infidelities. At night, the countless other women she knew had slept with Sandor stalked her dreams, as did the shadowy, laughing forms of those she would never discover.
Perhaps their openness was a European trait, but neither parent considered discretion an essential part of their marriage, and Tony and Phyllis were forced to watch helplessly as their mother’s unhappiness settled around them and their father’s eyes widened lustfully in the company of women.
Unlike most mothers of her day, Bella threw scorn on the perfect family. Why try to pretend that this game was a happy one? To conceal her humiliation and her anger at their father would serve no purpose, and so her gentle face darkened and her tiny waist shrank further.
Yet what Sandor had never bargained for was that Bella would fight off the opposition. Take the woman whose body twinkled with emeralds and rubies at the Royalty Theatre. No matter the play – Arnold Bennett’s Milestones. When the lights came up at the interval, Sandor’s arm was caressing the stranger’s chair, his head cocked towards hers. Swiftly, he redirected his attention back towards his wife, but like every adulterous man, his reactions were seconds behind the female observing him.
The next morning, her composure swinging between hysterical and an unnerving calm, Bella rifled through her husband’s dinner jacket and found, as she knew she would, the woman’s name and address scribbled on a programme.
Hatless, coatless, she stormed into the offices of Geographia, slapped the programme on her husband’s desk and flung a pot of black ink over his face and shirt.
Like black blood, the liquid ran down his cheeks. Sandor snorted as he reached for his breast-pocket handkerchief. ‘Can I help it if the woman liked me?’ he complained, putting her in the wrong immediately. ‘Don’t you trust me, Bella?’
‘You use me,’ she replied passionately. ‘You use me for your business. I’m not coming in this week!’
‘What about the Birmingham index proofs?’
His speedy acceptance into British society meant that Sandor had to dissociate himself from his past. It cannot have been easy for him to let go of the thoughts of how he might have been called up to fight for his country and for his family. But his mother – well, she was never far from his mind.
In the winter of 1913, Sandor caught the scent of war again. Without a second opinion he instructed Mr Duncan to hire more men.
‘We need another map of Europe,’ he decided. ‘This time, we shift the focus. Let’s take a good look at potential battle areas in Austria, then France, Germany and Western Russia. Give me a hundred thousand copies as soon as possible.’
This time, his initiative did not receive the hoped for endorsement. Shouted down in an editorial meeting at the Daily Telegraph, and accused of scaremongering, Sandor did not even get as far as explaining the mock-up he had unrolled for them to examine.
‘You English do not anticipate trouble until it hits you between the eyes,’ he fumed.
Two days later, the threat of war with Germany became apparent after the heir to the Austrian and Hungarian thrones, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo.
‘About that map, Gross,’ said his editor. ‘How soon could you get it to me?’
‘I have a hundred thousand copies all ready to go. With the Daily Telegraph title, of course.’
The death of Sir Joseph Chamberlain and the rise of Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer fuelled Sandor’s deepest fears, especially for the safety of his mother in Csurog, which stretched across the vulnerable Slav-Magyar border in south-west Hungary.
MOTHER COMING TO GET YOU.
NO. NO. NO. I WILL NOT LEAVE MY HOME. WHATEVER.
Somehow the safety of his own wife and children neither entered his head nor his heart, as he informed them over dinner that night that it was their duty to go and save his mother.
‘Will it be dangerous?’ Phyllis asked.
‘As dangerous as you want to make it.’
Like little foreign correspondents, Phyllis and Tony packed their tiny suitcases for what Sandor always called the journey of a lifetime, which turned out to be a trip lasting from June until August. It would be the first time the children saw their paternal grandmother – and the last.
As they crossed the Channel and drove across France, through Switzerland and Austria into Hungary, Phyllis drew a map in her mind of the shapes of faces, houses, and fields in each country. But there could be no stranger contrast, she believed, than in Hungary, between the smell of the buttercup-soft leather upholstery inside their chauffeur-driven car and the dusty barren landscape outside, scattered with peasants who stopped to stare, their bundles of wood balanced on their heads. Phyllis stared just as hard at trundling carts carrying barefoot urchins swaying home after a day at school, or so she presumed; Sandor told her they had been out goatherding.
Her father, she realised, felt no shame at having been born in a village where the children ran to touch her skirts, where the beetroot soup was considered lunch and dinner, and teeth were optional. Then there was her beautiful, walnut-faced grandmama, stout, in her one black and white polka-dot dress, sighing, ‘Oh, well,’ after everything and not quite understanding exactly what Phyllis was saying. Yet her smile ran broadly across her worn-out cheeks at the sight of family gathered around her.
I want that, thought Phyllis. I want that happiness, when I grow up.
It was not an overnight transformation, but gradually, the tiny things that Phyllis noted during her stay – the singing boy next door with a stump for a leg, the blind woman who walked four miles to fetch her ox each day, and the roaming skinny dogs – made her realise that all the jewellery boxes, all the dolls, all the prize cups that every girl at school dreamed of weren’t half as important as freedom.
Grandmama would not leave her home. As Sandor and Bella began their farewells, Phyllis wanted to say goodbye, she told them, to the village geese. Off she went, with every intention of setting the birds free. She hated watching them twist around in their tiny pens and see them force fed until they were nearly sick.
Within minutes, Phyllis was running back to her parents, followed by a honking, squawking flock of geese.
Bella yelled out: ‘I’m proud of you, darling, fighting cruelty to animals in foreign countries. Up the Union Jack!’ before diving into their waiting car.
Sandor shooed his mother inside. ‘Do not look at what that naughty girl has done,’ he instructed her. ‘Remember Phyllis as good.’
During the war, many of the families in Csurog were decimated; sons, brothers and fathers were taken and shot on their knees in muddy ditches. Sandor’s mother went on to live another two years, before she died a slow, painful death from gangrene that spread from her leg to the rest of her body.
On their return journey, according to Phyllis, her brother had tried, and failed, to take a photograph from the Hotel Adlon in Berlin of Kaiser Wilhelm on horseback riding ahead of his foot guards.
‘This is not good,’ said Bella. ‘Sandor, we must leave immediately.’
On 4 August 1914, German troops entered Belgium at Gemmerich and that same morning, the Gross family set foot back in England.
CHAPTER NINE
Growing Without Direction
A maze. That is how Phyllis thought of Roedean. A whitewashed maze haunted by echoes of distant footsteps, distressed violins, death knells and Latin chanting. Upstairs and down, and into the warren of passages, Phyllis, a little changeling in navy-blue serge and black woollen stockings, fled, flushed with panic. ‘Over hill, over dale, I do wander everywhere, s
wifter than the moon’s sphere,’ she huffed Puck’s lines as she scurried, her hands deliberately fluttering like fairy wings.
Just remember, Phyllis would remind herself, that the front of the building slopes downward towards the sea and the back of school is always warmer. Picking up the pace to a near run, she would unfurl her fingers to detect any change in temperature. Cooler. A draught near her ears. And she was late, late, late again, for lessons.
‘What exactly is it that you are doing, Phyllis Gross? What in goodness name are you doing out of the classroom?’ The teachers never caught her, but that did not stop Phyllis from constantly hearing their voices during her wanderings. Yet the fear of being found, of being lost, or of falling down a hole like Alice, did little to persuade Phyllis that the company of her peers, and hours locked in a classroom were a more sage use of the day. And anyway, if it hadn’t been for the discovery of the linen cupboard, she might well have found herself summoned to greet her parents who would arrive, time after time, unannounced and arguing. As Phyllis reached twelve or thirteen, her shame was expelled in deep breaths as she descended into the main hall to intervene.
But for now, she curled in safety and silence, dozing for hours in the starchy heat. Make no mistake, Phyllis was not a lazy pupil. When pinned behind her wooden desk in the front row of the classroom, her pencils sharpened and sitting soldier straight, the girl’s eyes would never leave the mistress. As a grown woman, her management style was much the same: her attention to events was absolute, her practicality extreme – she boasted that she used every pencil in the Geographers’ Map Company until it was worn down to a stub. But like her father, if Phyllis’s imagination was not coaxed out immediately and patted on the head then her spirit, closely followed by her body, was apt to drift off.
Mrs P's Journey Page 6
