Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  At breakfast that morning, Miss Waldron had asked Phyllis twice, in front of all the other girls, if her father had sent her fare from Brighton to Victoria. There is a certain smugness that only teachers possess when they feel the need to exert extra special power over a pupil. Miss Waldron would have known that her pupil did not have a penny to her name, but she felt happier pricking her with the question just the same.

  The arrogance of the nouveau riche families such as the Grosses had sent shivers through Miss Waldron and other members of staff at the school. Still, one rotten apple was about to be thrown out.

  Her classmates no doubt hugged her goodbye. The teachers pretended not to see – but Phyllis did not record any of those moments. In a breathless version that took less than five minutes to tell, she gave Bella an explanation for her sudden appearance. She’d been dropped off at Brighton railway station, and a porter had heaved her trunk in after her. ‘Don’t worry about the money, miss,’ he’d said. ‘All aboard now.’

  A blank. No heartbeat. What of Tony?

  Sitting bolt upright, her throat tight, she’d spent the hour-long journey to Victoria drawing an imaginary map of London, which she superimposed on the fields and towns running by. Papa, she knew, would be north of the river and west of Oxford Street, and Mama a little further to the north.

  When her train pulled into Victoria she realised that no conductor would let her on a bus without a fare, so she waited for a taxi. The first stop was her father’s hotel. She ran inside, but was informed by reception that he had checked out a week before.

  ‘Straight on then,’ she told the taxi driver. ‘To my mother’s in Ridgemount Gardens off Gower Street in Bloomsbury.’

  Phyllis jumped out of the taxi and raced down the steps to the flat, but when she knocked on the door, a young man looked out quizzically. ‘Mr and Mrs Orr? They moved last week to a studio in World’s End, Chelsea.’ He disappeared behind net curtains and reappeared with a scrap of paper with their address scribbled on. Shouting a thank you behind her, she ran back up the steps and passed the note through to the taxi driver.

  ‘Please,’ she puffed, ‘can we go there?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Whatever happened to parents, eh? They’re not the same these days. Fancy letting a little thing like you get herself home from school.’

  As they headed down Shaftesbury Avenue, the heavens opened, as they always do when you are at your lowest ebb.

  ‘Here’s the street,’ said the taxi driver, half an hour later. The numbers were unmarked or obscured by trees. ‘You’ll have to get out, love, and have a look.’

  It was heavy rain, the sort that seeps through even a school blazer and shirt. Phyllis zig-zagged across the tiny street and hammered on the white door of the right number house, hoping desperately that it would open and reveal her mother.

  ‘How clever of you to find me!’ Bella turned her head and called back into the studio, ‘Alfred! Do you have a couple of pounds on you?’

  A huffing puffing noise approached and Alfred pushed past Bella to see who had arrived. The red-haired monster did not disappoint. With paint rubbed up his shirt-sleeves, his tummy bloated and his eyes blotched by drink, he scanned the little girl in uniform.

  ‘Hey, Fearless Phyllis,’ he grunted and turned on his heel.

  Bella shrugged. Then the Maharajah of Patiala appeared, in full royal costume. He nodded at Phyllis and smiled at Bella. ‘Allow me, Mrs Orr. Your husband is busy working on the background.’ And with that he proffered the taxi driver a new ten-pound note.

  ‘He is such a darling,’ Bella whispered when he had retreated into the studio. ‘You should see the ancient Egyptian scarab he gave me as a wedding gift. It had always brought him luck and he said, “May it do so even more abundantly for you”. Imagine!’ Bella started to laugh.

  Then she took another look at her daughter who was now sitting on the trunk that the taxi-driver had just unloaded. ‘Excuse me!’ Bella shouted at the man, before he could drive away. ‘Could you take my little girl to the nearest employment agency?’

  Years later, Phyllis would write a vivid description of how her mother turned her away: ‘Jump in, Phyllis. It’s been lovely seeing you, but you’ll understand that you can’t stay here. Poor Alfred could never put up with a child about the place. His artistic temperament has destroyed his stomach lining . . .’ Then, with a washing her hands of me farewell, advised, ‘Take a live-in job, Phyllis, I know you’ll enjoy it.’

  Never mind that later the same month, Alfred would agree to pay for Tony to go to the Slade. Without bitterness, Phyllis watched as her brother was encouraged to follow his passion and she was left to go her own way.

  Phyllis repeated the dramatic story of her departure from Roedean in interviews, in her books and to her friends. Yet Tony’s memoirs reveal quite another, more ordinary tale:

  While I was at the Slade my sister Phyllis had been removed from Roedean and after a couple of terms in a local high school, my mother found a school in France for her. My mother took her to Fécamp, where she was enrolled at the local Collège de Jeunes Filles, in Normandy, where she remained a year or two.

  During the Easter holidays, Phyllis found a room for me at a local locksmiths. Phyllis and I used to go sketching together. For lunch we used to buy bread and rabbit pâté. This was a delightful holiday. The locksmith’s wife used to make me soup in the evening and we drank cider. I did a number of pen and wash drawings in Fécamp and when I returned to London I enrolled in the evening class at the Central School.

  Whose tale is more accurate? It is hard to know which sibling to believe. But perhaps in Phyllis’s mind this is what truly happened. In her reality, she truly was abandoned, she was sent away and she was without a family.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On Your Own Two Feet

  As Phyllis turned around in the taxi, she moved her arm up, ready to wave goodbye. But as she rubbed her blazer sleeve to clear the patches of condensation on the back windscreen, she could see that no one was in the street. There was only a bread delivery boy on his bicycle, whistling in the rain.

  Ten minutes later, the taxi pulled up outside the employment agency on Warwick Way. Phyllis sat tight. The rain was not going to stop for her.

  ‘Come on, love. Out you get.’ The driver hauled her trunk out of the car boot for the last time and opened her door. He put his arm around the mute body and coaxed her around the puddles and on to the pavement. ‘On your own two feet now,’ he said gently.

  He put his hand out to shake hers. Phyllis automatically raised hers and as he shook it hard, a smile appeared on her face from nowhere.

  ‘Good luck, love, wherever those feet take you.’

  Inside the agency, a pair of pale reptilian eyes scrutinised the schoolgirl with the fuzzy plaits, whose bulging eyes, the woman believed, were the result of her throttlingly tight navy-blue tie.

  ‘So what can you do?’

  With the confidence of someone who knew she could do very little, Phyllis thrust out her answer. ‘I’m fluent in three languages – French, Spanish and German.’

  The woman turned to flick through a filing cabinet and pulled out a sheet of paper. ‘This vacancy should suit you perfectly. They need an English pupil-teacher at the Collège de Jeunes Filles in Fécamp. Fare paid. Bed and board included.’

  ‘Thank you, I’d like it very much.’

  ‘Report to the headmistress tomorrow morning – her name is Madame Brettain. From Le Havre take the bus to Fécamp. Rue des Galeries.’ The woman handed Phyllis a five-pound note.

  Still dragging her trunk, Phyllis found a bus that would take her to Waterloo station, where she caught a train to Southampton and then boarded the night ferry to Le Havre. Somehow Phyllis managed to purchase her tickets and sail, unattended, on the little ferry overrun with French families returning home, without raising anyone’s suspicions. Then at Le Havre, the French authorities simply waved her through.

  Breakfast had been the usual hu
rried affair of tea and porridge in the school refectory over sixteen hours ago, but like her father before her, it was willpower and not her stomach that kept Phyllis going. No one ever saw Phyllis steam greedily through a plateful of food and still manage to gobble up a pudding too. A fussy eater, they had called her at Roedean, as they watched her fork prod listlessly at her plate. It was an easy mistake to imagine that the owner of such a tiny body, who expended such energy, would have the appetite of a man. Yet, even as an adult, Phyllis pecked at whatever was put in front of her, for she was not a lady of the kitchen. What a fuss people made about cooking and what a lot of bother, she believed. For her, food was not a life source, it was a social necessity, and even then, it often had the audacity to interrupt a lively conversation.

  Water ran clear from the washstand taps in the ferry toilets, so Phyllis drank from those. To fritter the pennies she had left on a pie and a cup of tea, she considered would have been a ridiculous waste.

  None of her family knew of her whereabouts, and little did she care. The agency may have kept her details, but who would go looking for those? It did not occur to Phyllis to contact Bella. The reason she had been sent away was, she deduced, some sort of test.

  In reality, Bella could not spare an ounce of love or care for anyone else now but Alfred. For as a lover, he lavished on her the emotional sustenance Sandor had refused her for so many years. In return, the grateful recipient had, albeit unwittingly, near squeezed the emotional life out of him with her capricious demands. If only, Bella thought, Alfred could apply himself like Sandor. Yet when he did actually settle down to paint a portrait, he was lost for days in a haze of enthusiastic oil paints.

  Since the moment when her mother, still whisking a bowl of eggs, had turned her back on her, after a casual flick of a wave, before closing the front door, Phyllis’s confidence, which had never been all that buoyant even as a little girl, sank like a stone. What would have been the point of objecting? Ever since she had received her father’s telegram, two days earlier, she had diligently followed any and all instructions with blank acceptance. It is too easy for us to say, ‘That is just how things were back in the 1920s. One respected the wishes of one’s parents.’ Fortunately for Phyllis, her mind was in shock, while her body rummaged to find an extraordinary strength from somewhere to carry her through this crisis.

  On we go.

  At no point in her memoirs does Phyllis write of crying, feeling low, depressed or distressed or, even more surprisingly, hurt. Hurt by her beloved mother who could not even be bothered to mask the inconvenience her daughter had become. Did she not feel those emotions?

  In truth, her mother’s vulnerability was so painfully childlike to watch, that Phyllis did not trouble to explore, never mind wallow in, her own emotions. Five years later, at the age of nineteen, putting her mother’s needs first again, Phyllis gave up her cabin on the Flying Scotsman sleeper to King’s Cross for a seat in a second-class carriage, at Bella’s request. The pair had just spent a few days together in Oban. The trip had allowed Bella to ‘rest’ from her husband. The money saved from the cabin, she explained, could be wonderfully spent on a kilt and sporran for her beloved Alfred. There was no question from Phyllis as to why her mother could not give up her own cabin; she simply curled up under a tartan rug and slept, her head resting against the damp glass of the window.

  At 4 a.m., the night attendant shook her awake. Her mother was dying, he announced. The door to Bella’s cabin had already been broken down, and they had discovered her unconscious body.

  ‘A suicide – I can’t feel a pulse,’ the night attendant shouted.

  Phyllis dashed water on her mother’s face and prised the empty bottle of chloral from her grip. ‘She will be all right,’ Phyllis told the crowd that had gathered. ‘I know it.’ And so she did.

  Money passed hands quickly, as two porters lifted the slumped, moaning body into a taxi. Phyllis refused to see the disapproving stares of the other passengers at the fallen woman, her feet trailing, her head rolling. And then, when she’d struggled to heave her mother through the front door of her home at 13 Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, she would not listen to the gunfire abuse dribbling down the beard of the American, who had worn nothing but his white silk pyjamas for a week.

  ‘What you doin’ here, snotty? What you gawpin’ at me for? Think you know it all, huh? Go! Git! Scat! Scram!’

  It was Phyllis who, with no home to go to, after undressing and tucking her mother into bed, ended up checking into a dreary room at the Royal Court Hotel. Too tired, too cold, she dozed fully dressed until her mother telephoned shortly after midnight, screaming that Alfred was trying to kill her. There was a smash, a crash and the line went dead.

  After Phyllis had phoned the police to notify them of a murder, she ran up the King’s Road and into the house, where Alfred was trying to strangle Bella. When Phyllis raised a bottle of whisky over the drunk’s head, ready to bring it down and knock him out, Bella pleaded with her in a hoarse gasp, ‘Don’t hurt him, Phyllis. He doesn’t mean it.’

  It was Phyllis who let in the policemen and explained to them how dreadfully sorry they were to have called them out on such a trivial matter, as Alfred’s hands were pulled from Bella’s neck and he was led into the garden for questioning. And it was Phyllis to whom her mother clung, smoothing her hair and begging her daughter to take her away from this nightmare, anywhere – and why not back to Paris?

  ‘Please don’t cry, Mama,’ Phyllis said. ‘Yes, do come with me to Paris. I should love it. Please understand though that my bedsit is not at all what you are used to.’ Her voice did not change in tone, nor sound anxious. Phyllis had seen too much to feel anything. What is more, her character was formed by a different age – one that would march through two world wars and the emancipation of women. Her generation would not understand the constant need for turning over, the unravelling and scraping away of past emotions that afflicts us these days and from which psycho-therapy grows rich and prospers.

  Yet as a grown woman, Phyllis used to smile as she relayed the suffering she had stoically endured, delighting in the shock of the listener. Criticism of her mother or her father was not allowed, however, for that would have served only to underline the Gross family dysfunction and weaknesses, rather than to illuminate her own great strengths.

  ‘But my mother was infatuated, dear. I’ve always accepted whatever happens,’ she told Caroline Phillips in the Evening Standard a few years before her death.

  Psychiatrists today might suggest that by showing no reaction to her sudden and unprovoked abandonment, Phyllis was storing up her anguish which would surely surface at some point as post-traumatic stress disorder. Her will was stronger than most, however, and if her serenity was a pretence then she kept it up until her death. Phyllis never allowed herself to pick through the misery of her circumstances, knowing that it might lead to the same dark mania from which her mother suffered. Instead, she stepped over the bad times and made herself walk in the opposite direction to depression.

  On the ferry to Le Havre, the agency fee had not stretched to include a cabin so Phyllis circled the decks until she decided on a spot where she could spend the six-hour crossing. Fortunately, she never felt queasy on boats, but although she would go on to paint bobbing sailboats in so many of her canvases, to stand steadily on dry land was preferable. In the bow of the boat, she knelt up on the hard glossed wooden benches, staring out to sea. Through the briny rain she strained to make out the last of England, and was mesmerised by the waves undulating and beckoning her to lean further and further towards them.

  Her stubborn resolve did not falter. Her mouth would have been numb from her teeth chattering. Any tears that did scurry down her cheeks were due solely to the cold south-easterly wind smarting her eyes. Like a hostage kept captive in solitary confinement, her view was monotone. Black sea, night sky. To pass the time, she dredged through her past and selected memories to play back in glorious colour.

  1912. Nearly six
years old. A Gross family holiday. ‘Pig’s ear pink’, was how Bella had described their hotel on the seafront at Ventnor, on the southernmost tip of the Isle of Wight. They had taken a ferry from Portsmouth and out into the Solent. Running around on deck, Phyllis chased Tony, and Bella chased her. She heard the laughter. She counted her family. Everyone was there, including her grandparents and handsome Uncle Frank, her mother’s favourite brother, whose relationship with his sister and her husband had not yet soured over ‘differences in business practices’ as Bella put it.

  A quick jump to a few days later, to the promenade, where the warm day had teased everyone outside to take a stroll. Deck-chairs. Waves. Sea gulls. A laughing policeman. An accordion. And there was Uncle Frank waving from the sands where he paraded his champion cyclist’s physique in a stripy bathing costume. She was holding someone’s hand, she couldn’t tell whose – probably Sandor’s – and as she squeezed it lightly, she felt a squeeze back. The smell of sunshine in the breeze was edged with the sticky scent of the ha’penny barley-sugar canes that she had sucked on until her tongue was orange and sore.

  Suddenly she was looking up at Uncle Frank. With one hand shielding his eyes and with one hand clasping his wriggling niece, he nodded into the haze. ‘That’s France out there,’ he told her. ‘Home to all things French.’

  ‘I want to go there when I am grown up.’ Grown-up to Phyllis meant when she was old enough to dress her hair down, order her own breakfast, or when she was tall enough to tug on a tram-bell cord.

  Even then, on the boat to Le Havre, Phyllis could not tell at what age one became an adult. Roedean could have kept her a girl for at least another four years. As for after school, she had not even been given a week’s warning of her departure and so had missed out on setting aside dreamtime to explore what might come next. Art, she supposed, would come into her future somewhere. While her schoolfriends would see their expensive education push on until they were eighteen, they would leave it behind at the school gates. University was considered a bizarre option, fit only for the brilliant, or for the clever, quirky girl, whose deficiency in beauty might just be rescued by her intellect. The blonde girls, the pearl girls, the debutantes, would chase light pastimes – tennis, riding, cookery, gardening and perhaps a little charity work, and more importantly, rich young men whose strong genes promised robust babies.