Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  Phyllis had never stood face to face with a Mosleyite before. The hair on her arms had prickled, some months earlier, when she had witnessed the Blackshirts march in formation through Whitechapel towards her crowd of anti-fascists. In their eyes flared blind hatred of such intensity that she knew it to be wrong. She remembered squeezing tighter and tighter the hands that were linked to hers, and shouting louder and louder the words that her neighbour, the day before, had invited her to chant: ‘They shall not pass. They shall not pass. They shall not pass.’

  The mounted police had charged at both sides. With the rest of the anti-fascist mob, Phyllis had fled, running until the sound of horses’ hooves disappeared.

  I was there as an anti-fascist, she thought. Not as a Jew. How naive. So now I must defend my heritage too – even if it is not my faith.

  Before the stairs encounter, and before most Londoners had thought about eating breakfast, Phyllis had wedged twelve copies of the A-Z into her satchel and set off to sell, sell, sell, quite convinced that buyers of the large department stores would praise her ingenuity.

  It wasn’t smugness exactly, that allowed a smile to cross her face as she walked up Park Lane towards Selfridges, but the belief that London had been deprived of an up-to-date street map for far too long.

  Fortunately, the personal hostility that Phyllis would come across, the simple rejection and ejection from most stores, did not so much as scratch at her heart. Her skin gleamed with the thickness of a rhinoceros hide. Thanks to Roedean and years of belittling from her father, she simply smiled and said, ‘Thank you very much for your time.’

  If anyone had challenged Phyllis and told her, ‘My dear, that is not how one goes about business,’ she would have laughed at them and asked, ‘How else are you supposed to do it?’

  Unbeknown to her, it was how Sandor and Bella had first sold their world maps. Like her mother before her, Phyllis assumed that her happy, winning self alone would persuade the buyers to purchase her wares. What did they see? Her accent was smart all right. Her raincoat and scarf were not new, but well-pressed. Shoes, polished but old-fashioned. Smile, handshake, gaze – firm. However, her innocent type of assertiveness disconcerted or irritated many of the male buyers. New to the trade and a lot to learn, most concluded. And who buys maps from a skinny young woman carrying her samples in a school satchel?

  At Selfridges, on Oxford Street, one needed an appointment to see a buyer.

  ‘Who are you from anyway?’ she had been asked.

  ‘I’m not. I’m Phyllis Pearsall. My father used to own Geographia.’

  ‘We only deal with large companies.’

  Hatchard’s were more concerned with dispersing the crowds gathered to see Queen Mary.

  ‘Not today,’ she was told irritably. ‘The Queen is here. One glance says it looks terribly amateur, miss. Did you draw it yourself?’

  Phyllis turned her back on the sneer and made her way to Foyle’s.

  After half an hour of waiting, she was shown through to Mr Foyle’s office.

  ‘Please, Miss Pearsall, do sit down.’

  Like an examiner studying a candidate’s paper, he slowly thumbed his way through the pages in silence. Phyllis kept perfectly still. He sighed. He frowned. Finally, he passed judgement.

  ‘May I give you a word of advice? The map trade does not like change. It has been undisturbed for years. We – or should I say they – will not let someone, an outsider like yourself, or anyone else for that matter, upset it.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Foyle, for your help.’

  From Charing Cross Road, Phyllis walked east to Mr Larby’s warehouse in the Old Bailey. It had been a tip-off from Mr Duncan, one of her father’s former draughtsmen who had passed the advice to Mr Fountain.

  ‘I’ve only got five minutes, gel.’ He ran a grubby finger down the index and the ink smudged. ‘Bleeding ink! And look at this, the last letter in the third column of the index, guillotined off. Get it right next time, gel, and we’ll have a think about it. And don’t go bothering me with your business, speak to my assistant Nancy.’

  That night, as she soaked her bruises in the bath, Phyllis did not reflect on the spite she had run into without warning. From the most important sales directors, to the commissionaire at Bumpus on Oxford Street, who had confronted her with, ‘Trade round the back, missy,’ they had not seen her as anything more than a nuisance. Such was her belief in her map, that Phyllis could not even whistle up any scorn for the buyers’ secretaries, who had not even opened the map or bothered to show it to their boss in the next office, because their stocky little calves, in their cheap little heels, were too tired to shift themselves.

  Known names might have been too high an aim, she wrote later. Yet faith in my wares intact, I combed the suburbs. Only to be perpetually turned down. Or even shooed out, as pitilessly as a gypsy.

  The second day would be better, Phyllis told herself. Her tactics were to move south. She dunked her head under the sudsy water and held her breath. But the second day was not better. Nor was her third. Or her fourth.

  At Barker’s on High Street Kensington, the woman buyer peered over her reading glasses to scan the cover. ‘What does WC stand for in your address?’

  ‘West City?’

  ‘West Central. You appear not to know your own map. Why would I want to buy any? Good day to you, madam.’

  At Simpkin Marshall’s the buyer smirked at the light cover of the A-Z. ‘Handled once, they will be soiled. It needs a redesign.’

  Mr Toler of Toler Bros laughed at Phyllis and slapped the table. ‘Well, I don’t know. Whatever next? I will make you a promise. When the Great British public asks for a map of London, I will buy your A-Z.’

  By now, Phyllis sensed the trail go cold north of the Thames, but even as the air began to chill, she had walked across Battersea Bridge, headed down Latchmere Road and across The Avenue on Clapham Common. Small bookstores and newsagents were her new targets.

  The first person ever to buy an A-Z map would be one Mrs Naylor, a most unlikely candidate. A naval widow, she ran a newsagents on the corner of Clapham Common South and Cavendish Road.

  Mrs Naylor was standing, arms folded, behind her counter, sucking hard on a liquorice sweet that had blackened her already frightening teeth. ‘Can’t you read?’ She pushed her glasses up on her nose and pointed to a scruffy cardboard sign in the window that read NO HAWKERS NO CIRCULARS. ‘And don’t try to preach to me neither. My husband was lost at sea, so I know all about God.’

  To her surprise, the young woman did not make a move to leave, but was clutching a book that she had pulled out of a satchel. That smile, Mrs Naylor thought afterwards, that smile of hers was ever so sad. I’m glad I helped her. She won’t last a minute.

  ‘I am so sorry to trouble you,’ Phyllis said brightly. ‘Would you be interested in purchasing an up-to-date street atlas of London?’

  Mrs Naylor popped another sweet in her mouth, and sucked noisily. As if the heavens had revealed a wounded saint, she let out a long, sympathetic noise.

  ‘Ahhhhhhh now. You can’t read, can you? Ahhhhh. Never mind, ducks.’ She thumped the cash-register drawer and raised the counter flap.

  ‘Here you go, love, take a bob for one of your street atlases. Won’t be able to sell it myself, but customers get all sorts of lost around the Common. Come out the back and have a spot of dinner and I’ll set you wise about retailers.’

  In the tight squeezed kitchen, Phyllis sat at a rickety table, while Mrs Naylor worked miracles with chump chops. The Players Capstan advert that hung above the mantelpiece picturing a smiling, white-bearded sailor; apparently it was the spitting image of her late husband.

  Phyllis hardly touched her meat, potatoes or cabbage and did little better with the junket and cream pudding, as Mrs Naylor relayed the tragic tale of her heroic submariner who was lost in November 1917.

  ‘Keep the white ensign flying without me, old girl,’ he told me. The handkerchief she had been petting her nose with
, disappeared up the sleeve of her blouse. ‘Right. That’s enough of that!’ she said bracingly. ‘Us ladies do all right, don’t we? You are a clever miss – cleverer than I thought. But remember this. Never interrupt a man busy on a job, and never expect an order to be placed at the first call. Keep at it. Go back again and again. Why not have a go at wholesalers?’

  The following day was a Friday. Not a good day for new business, but that would not have stopped Phyllis from putting on her navy-blue suit and walking along the Strand and behind the Aldwych to Portugal Street, towards the head office of W.H. Smith & Son.

  Determined not to get a short, sharp shrift from the tradesman’s entrance, her plan was to make her way undetected through the main door, and then ask to be shown straight in to Mr Smith.

  Inside was a microcosm of the world, and staring up into the dissected three floors, her eyes blinked at the hundreds of employees, carrying files, books and briefcases, all walking and discussing what seemed to be urgent matters.

  ‘My name is Phyllis Pearsall,’ she told the porters. ‘I have an important street atlas I’d like to offer Mr Smith.’

  Weeding out tradespeople was obviously a speciality of the smart uniformed gentlemen on the reception desk. As if they were speaking to the Queen herself, they gently guided the young woman into a dark passageway and ran off a list of directions that quite evidently would take her in the direction of the trade and packing rooms. ‘The Subscription Office, ma’am, is what you require.’

  ‘Why, thank you so much, sir,’ said Phyllis sweetly, as she allowed herself to be ushered into an echoing corridor, the dark door slamming behind her.

  Past lifts, staircases, magazine binding rooms, hurrying men directed and redirected her. ‘Keep going, keep going,’ Phyllis muttered, trying to sense the direction she was coming from and going to – and then, as it always did, the door she had been searching for appeared.

  She knocked. The door was locked. She read the faded sign: REPRESENTATIVES SEEN 9 AM TO 12 NOON.

  It was a minute after midday. Just missed it. Better luck next time, Phyllis promised herself.

  At 8 a.m. on the Monday morning, she had arrived too early, but by 8.30 a.m. the tiny, stuffy waiting room had filled up with sales representatives, gossipy-looking men who all seemed slick to the routine. They offered one another cigarettes, they winked, they laughed and they ignored the woman – a secretary, they had decided – standing in the corner.

  ‘Mr Cruise will see the first of you!’ a young office boy shouted out from behind a counter, and he ushered through a tall man with a bulging suitcase, who handed back his cigarette to a ginger-haired man.

  ‘Next!’

  ‘Next!’

  By a quarter to twelve, Mr Cruise had seen nearly everyone. Phyllis realised that democracy was not in working order outside the Subscription Office.

  She approached the office boy. ‘Excuse me,’ she ventured.

  He whistled loudly, ignoring her. Then after he had checked the clock on the wall, he smiled and yanked down the blind. ‘Beats me,’ he shouted, ‘what a woman is doing here anyway.’

  For seven more days, Phyllis truly believed that if she arrived early and waited patiently in the queue, eventually Mr Cruise would see her. It is curious what will happen if a woman is squeezed into a packed room of men. Her skirts were far from short, her suit did not hint at cleavage and her flat lace-up shoes were hardly a come on, but still Phyllis found herself pestered, patted, and chatted up by men, some just passing time and some looking for a quick fix. Women with less experience might have run out, distressed by the pub saloon smoke and suggestive banter, but Phyllis was inured to her father salivating over young women and she had watched Dick’s eyes slowly work up and down a girl before. There was no anger. This was what men do.

  Resistance was easy for Phyllis, but her smart rebuttals left a nasty taste in their mouths. Groping might not have occurred had Phyllis worn her wedding ring, but groped she apparently was: They hadn’t seen women reps and just asked, starting to fondle one, whether I was beddable. I said I was too busy doing maps to be beddable.

  ‘I hear a woman is haunting the place.’ A head had poked around the corner of the office door. A tall man, with a tall man’s voice, spoke directly at Phyllis.

  The smoky waiting room, empty of reps as the clock once again had forged on to midday, had only one visitor left. Memorising the index had seemed an efficient way of diverting another day’s disappointment, and off she had travelled as far as Blackbird Yard, Black Boy Lane and Blackburne’s Mews. Surprised by the recognition, she rushed forward to shake the hand of Mr Cruise.

  ‘What can we do for you? Whose secretary are you?’

  Phyllis pulled out a copy of the A-Z. ‘These, all of these,’ she held open her satchel, ‘they are by me. I know nothing about publishing. I know it’s bled. I have done my best to be accurate. I compiled the information myself. I walked every street to do the house numbers too, and you won’t find that on any other map.’

  Luckily, her keen outburst did not fluster Mr Cruise. ‘Come into my office. A lady representative? Most unusual, I must say.’

  With genuine interest, he scanned page after page of the A-Z. He turned it upside down. He closed it shut, with a snap. Slowly, he opened his Subscription Order book, and carefully penned what seemed to Phyllis to be a gargantuan order and then presented it to her.

  1250 A-Z Atlas @ 1/-

  500 Standard Guides @ 6d

  250 Printed on Premier paper @ 2/6d

  50 Printed on Premier cloth @ 5/-

  ‘Thank you, thank you, Mr Cruise!’ If her head was light from excitement at her first major success, it was also light with panic.

  ‘Before you thank me, do you know our terms? The discount for wholesale is 33.3 per cent. The order is on sale or return. Payment will be assessed at the end of the year. Our managers pay thirty days from invoice. Here is a list of WHS wholesalers, shops and bookstalls for you to call on.’

  ‘Do you think they will sell?’

  ‘If anybody thinks he knows what will sell, he doesn’t know the trade.’

  As Phyllis stepped out into the street, her mind had already run ahead with a plan. A hand barrow from her local pub, Henekey’s, could be wheeled through the streets, carrying the copies, direct to Strand House. Time did not allow for celebration. The first 10,000 copies had cost £250 to publish and she calculated that even if they were sold at five pence each, it might take months to break even.

  In the following weeks, Phyllis pushed herself physically hard, as it had never crossed her mind that anyone other than she might manoeuvre the heavy loads back and forth. She woke up earlier and earlier, sometimes four o’clock in the morning, to keep up with invoicing, packing and delivering in bundles of ten, as many copies as she could to the mainline stations of Paddington, King’s Cross, Marylebone, Euston, Waterloo.

  Panic never swirled around Phyllis, as she blocked it with action. Not even when stations telephoned with same-day repeat orders. Within seven days of receiving their initial batch of A-Z copies, Victoria station requested a delivery from Phyllis three times a week. ‘Young lady, you have got a map on your hands. These are selling faster than I can put them on the shelves.’

  Her coolness was quite unnerving. In later years, she would accept very little praise for her extraordinary effort. ‘It was the map, dear’, she would say. ‘It sells itself. I had no control over it.’

  It was still too soon to contact her father. Phyllis restrained herself from telling him until her next mission had been secured.

  Mr Prestcott, an energised American with rolled-up shirtsleeves, met her at F.W. Wool worth & Co Ltd in Bond Street House.

  ‘They say this A-Z is already out there. Now I’m not keen, honey,’ he told Phyllis, as he flicked the map to make a whizzing noise over and over again, ‘I’m not at all keen. But Muriel, my secretary, tells me she can find her mews in it – what’s it now, Muriel? St George’s?’

  Mur
iel appeared from behind a filing cabinet. ‘Yes, Mr Prestcott.’ She smiled at Phyllis, snatched the book from her boss and with the tip of a very red-nailed finger, she pointed out her house in Primrose Hill. ‘You see. There it is!’

  ‘So there you go. Muriel’s happy, so I guess I should be happy. I’m giving you our usual trial order of six dozen for each of our three main stores, which will turn into all our London stores if the public go crazy over them, but I’m not holding my breath, little lady.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Drawn to Make Maps: The Motives of Map-makers

  Make no mistake, Phyllis Pearsall was no Luddite who hung on to the old-fashioned tracing paper and ink rituals of a bygone era. To keep their hard-fought place as one of the largest independent map-publishing companies in the UK, Phyllis realised during the 1980s that heavy investment in technology was essential. Computers would not be allowed to disrupt the sociable office atmosphere, but nevertheless she embraced the introduction of expensive software systems and was impressed by the speed at which they reorganised her company.

  The greatest thrill for Phyllis was to see how computers removed the chore of alphabetising hundreds and thousands of streets. Until 1991, each street name or village required a record card, describing its exact location on the map, the county and postcode. These would then be alphabetised by hand, before being input on a page format for inclusion in either a book or on the reverse of the sheet map. In 1996, The Geographers’ A-Z Map Company Limited produced its first electronic street map of London and the M25 on CD-ROM.

  The not so bright local girls, who had spent twenty-six years flapping and folding the hard map covers and concertina boxing the map sheets, would eventually be replaced by a £40,000 machine. Today, 95 per cent of company production is undertaken digitally, and revisions to existing maps are no longer done by hand, but scanned and manipulated in Raster format. This is astonishing, when you remember that the glory days of mapping were less than sixty years ago. Back then, the mapping process could take weeks, as several technical staff worked on a drawing, before the sheets were stuck together with cow gum, sent to the printers and bound with traditional stitching. It was a time when a task that took hundreds of hours to complete was appreciated for its skilled perfection, whereas now we scoff at such laborious methods which prevent instant availability.