Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  No doubt Phyllis and the caretaker’s wife were soon in the thick of it, leading injured and dazed strangers into waiting ambulances, and working alongside everyone else in that nightmare scene before locking themselves in the office for a tea break.

  Now early in the mornings, Phyllis walked from Golders Green to the deepest of all Tube stations, Hampstead, where she would take the Northern line south to Holborn and the Censorship Bureau.

  As she picked her way through the pot-holed streets, careful not to catch her shoes on glass or to disturb rubble, Phyllis kicked over and over in her mind why the government had assigned her to a tedious job in the clerical Civil Service, when Tony had become an official war artist, with the rank and uniform of a Captain. Off he would trek to the Normandy Landings, Burma and Egypt, while his sister was confined to faceless offices where she could hardly breathe for restlessness.

  Typing reports with two fingers on troop movements in the North of England was hardly a sage use of her skills. Phyllis longed to be outside, to be helping those made homeless by the Luftwaffe. The bureaucrats, she believed, cared nothing for the families with children, who settled down every night in the Tube stations, with their blankets, Thermos flasks of tea and bloater-paste sandwiches. They had not breathed in the stench of unwashed bodies, urine and disinfectant that hung in the dark tunnels, nor had they sat next to someone with scabies, who scratched incessantly.

  It was now that Phyllis began to form her own ideas of what good management should be. She could not conceive how the Civil Service could blunder on like this: it was so unproductive. Individuals were lost in the hierarchy of over-staffed departments, nobody seemed to take responsibility for their own actions, and the general public were deemed nothing more than a nuisance.

  ‘The Civil Service was so completely dead, even in war-time,’ she told Telegraph journalist Anthea Hall, in 1986. ‘We once received a note saying there had been a cloud-burst in the Peak District and men were freezing and starving. Take no action, a memo instructed. This concerns other departments. A colleague and I (you couldn’t act alone or they’d think you ambitious) had a plane taking up food and clothes within an hour. A memo came back, warning us: On your own head be it.’

  Phyllis did not fit in. If truth be known, her wilful ideas of how to go about things made her a dreadful employee, and she simply couldn’t fall in with the team. It took the Civil Service a whole two years to recognise this – even discipline took a roundabout route – and in 1944 Phyllis was transferred to the Ministry of Information, Home Intelligence section, under Lord Stephen Taylor.

  ‘What can you do?’ she was asked by a rounded man with receding hair, who rather than look at her was sketching on his blotter. ‘Can you write?’

  ‘Travel writing, yes, but as a map publisher I can draw. I mean I can draw and paint rather well.’

  The man looked up. ‘Very well. The Ministry of Labour needs illustrations for its leaflet on the conscription of women. I will see that you get access to the various munitions factories. I suggest you stick to sketching the women. We will do the words here. Make sure you check in with me every week or so – my name is Graham Greene.’ Then the man who would later become a best-selling author, stood up and produced a broad smile as he shook her hand.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Greene.’

  It was the perfect assignment for Phyllis. How easily she slipped in and out of factory floors with a pen and a sketch-pad. Mothers, sisters, daughters, wives – in their faces Phyllis recognised her own tenacity. For weeks on end, she would travel up and down the country, chatting to women in boiler suits, drawing them in their cumbersome Army and Air Force uniforms. They joked about how easy it was to snag a hairnet, how the tin hat ruined one’s waves – and how the muscles in their arms had grown quite firm from lifting weaponry; but never, ever did they complain about missing their loved ones.

  Inexplicably, the drawings were never used by the government. However, in 1985 and 1990, Phyllis published two books privately, entitled Women Drawn and Overhead and Women at War. They reveal witty, sensitive sketches of women who were determined to remain feminine-looking and still tackle a man’s job. These ordinary women were, like Phyllis herself, desperate not to be leading ordinary lives.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Was There an Alternative Route?

  KLM DAKOTA CRASHES IN LONDON FOG

  HOLBORN MAP PUBLISHER ON CRITICAL LIST

  New York Times, 6 November 1946

  The ancient words that soothed the throb of her bleeding head were whispered over and over in Hebrew. In her mind, Phyllis felt the presence of the small, Jewish man who had once sat opposite her on a late bus from Chalk Farm to King’s Cross. She saw again the Torah held inches from his nose, comforted by his continuous swaying back and forth, the sounds forming without him seeming to breathe. Sounds that echoed back through the centuries, the beginning and the end. Her eyes flickered into consciousness and she heard a woman scream.

  From the details that Sandor scanned in his New York Times, Phyllis should not have survived the crash two nights earlier of a KLM Dakota flight from Schipol Airport in Holland to London. From a clear, cold path across the Channel, the plane had bucked and jolted in a sudden wrap of fog, which disorientated the pilot so much that they hit a steep bank on the edge of woods near Shere, in Surrey.

  Those who pulled her broken body from the wreckage saw a woman without a nose, blood streaming from her head into her eyes. In a biting wind, they wrapped her in a thick overcoat and laid her in the frozen grass until the ambulances arrived.

  ‘Help that poor woman,’ Phyllis whispered, for she could still hear that terrible scream, like the high-pitched cry of a vixen. It was months before she realised that the terrifying noise had been coming out of her own shocked body.

  There at the scene, without anaesthetic, they stitched her fractured skull and bandaged her crushed nose, cheekbones and strapped up her broken back.

  ‘I’ve got to get to my office,’ Phyllis had mumbled, but that was something she would not be able to do for three months.

  Like Bella after her riding accident, forty-year-old Phyllis would never be quite the same person again following this traumatic event. After plastic surgery to her face and a painful, slow recovery, traces of injury, such as a limp, would drag her energy down for the rest of her life. Shingles, two strokes, glandular fever, pneumonia, ulcers, septicaemia and black-outs would add to the dull persistent headaches. And like her mother before her, the heavenly barbiturates that numbed all pain would eventually become an addiction.

  Such was the frailty of her spine, that doctors warned her against a second marriage. Sex, they inferred, was out of the question, as of course, were children.

  ‘Endeavour to lead a quiet life, Mrs Pearsall,’ they said, smoothing her hand. ‘Try to ease up a little on your workload.’

  ‘How refreshing to shake off bureaucratic shackles for the stimulus of having to earn money one spent; of having to get things done by piercing brick walls, of never giving up, of producing something tangible and needed – to resurrect our A-Z maps.’

  It was 8 May 1946, six months before her accident, and her excitement was due to the fact that despite her tricky behaviour, the Board of Trade had offered Phyllis a permanent, well-paid senior Civil Service position – which she had great delight in turning down. Maps were her future. Her temporary future, of course, until she might wriggle in more and more days spent painting. The restrictions on the sale and purchase of maps had been lifted in January 1944, but Phyllis, like many other printers and paper manufacturers, had been wary of restarting production.

  As with every other Londoner, it was as if, for the duration of the war, her life had been suspended while she journeyed for six surreal years through a terrible dream. This had inevitably led to Phyllis’s enthusiasm chilling a little, and now it was time to warm her hands on the Geographers’ Map Company once more.

  Not everyone had fared so well. Joan Walker-Smith, with
whom Phyllis had lived throughout the war, had lost her husband in action and was keen to sell her Golders Green home, so Phyllis moved on.

  After the dark days of the Blitz, the idea of taking the Underground was so awful that Phyllis moved further into Town, within walking distance of the office. With few spare properties to rent, after a three-day hunt of Bloomsbury and Marylebone, Phyllis was lucky to find an attic flat at 9 Robert Adam Street, off Portman Square, for an exorbitant £5 a week.

  Londoners had scoured their mangled streets for souvenirs of war. The Dig for Victory banner that had hung across the colonnades of the Royal Exchange disappeared. London Underground posters declaring The Proud City, showing Chelsea power station lit up by searchlights, were carefully removed from stations and pasted into scrapbooks. For Phyllis the war already echoed as history, as a story of street heroes and unrecorded selflessness. Memories of her father’s financial tricks and dealings with money seemed obscene, his motives now more callous and futile than ever.

  Slowly at first, she and Gordon Lester unwrapped and removed from storage the massive stock of 1939 maps. As she revealed their pristine faces, the same sadness lay on her head as while sorting through Bella’s things after her cremation. The folded piles of petticoats. The square boxes of kid gloves. Of shoes, of hats. All waiting for someone who would never return to them.

  But Phyllis had returned to her beloved maps. And how dated they looked! How clean and innocent. She flicked through the useless pages where the East End streets and docklands had been flattened and decimated.

  ‘Let’s start again, Lester. We’ll need to do a new atlas, with a brand new cover.’ Suddenly, Phyllis could not wait to get rid of the old A-Z copies.

  Within a few months, servicemen from all around the world, who were struggling to negotiate the war-damaged streets of London, happily parted with their money to have an ‘A to Zee’ as the GIs called it.

  Napier House suddenly felt too cramped and too despondent, Phyllis decided. Instead of saving some of the £10,000 sales profit to treat herself to badly-needed items of clothing such as stockings, underwear and an overcoat, she blew the whole lot on refurbishing the huge top floor of 21 Gray’s Inn Road, rented for £1 a week.

  Phyllis admired the way it stood alone, defiantly, while numbers 19 and 23 had been blasted to rubble. With Lester’s help, she scrubbed the dusty floors clean and laid linoleum. A stock and packing room was set up, and workbenches were run along the windows for Mr Fountain and his team.

  Mr Nolan was only too glad to return to his sales job, and a Mrs Ford was hired to cover book-keeping and correspondence, as well as an extra draughtsman, Wally Cooper. The war had trained all their minds to such a high pitch of concentration that they would work happily without a break, through the day and late into the night. When extravagant food parcels of turkey, game pie, pickles, caviar, fruit cake and cheeses arrived from her father, Phyllis would spread it all out for a staff picnic, atop a tablecloth on one of the desks.

  Mr Fountain and Wally Cooper tutted and shook their heads as they cut in the alterations to the original A-Z maps, highlighting the bomb damage around St Paul’s, the City and the East End. In the Blitz alone, 18,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on the capital. Irrespective of wealth, nearly every district was scarred and the second time around, Phyllis assessed that a daily schedule of careful indexing on foot, would take over eight months.

  In October 1945, she noted: The curiosity which entices me up every street, alley and road in the worst affected areas is different on this journey. As I approach a corner, or bend, I wonder what lies in wait for me. How my heart turns to witness the remnants of gracious homes and buildings that have withstood centuries, shamelessly demolished.

  They say that nearly 700,000 children were evacuated. Most, I see, are back, more shabbily dressed than before, with dark shadows under their eyes like me. My feet are not so light. I am nearly ten years older. I cannot wait for Zoffany Street . . .

  Yet as she walked, Phyllis could not help turning over the problem of paper shortages. By the time government restrictions on paper had been lifted her map might be out of date again. Print runs were limited to 5,000 but cost as much as a run of 250,000.

  Early one evening, when she arrived back at Gray’s Inn Road, Mrs Ford announced that two gentlemen were waiting to see her. One of them, Eliot, had suffered alongside Phyllis the monotony of report writing in the Ministry of Information. The other, an unsmiling Dutchman with a droopy moustache, was the British agent for an Amsterdam printers.

  ‘I’ve got a book that I would love you to print, Phyllis,’ Eliot said, opening pages to reveal texts from the New Testament on each right-hand page and an Old Master painting on the left.

  ‘Eliot, I’m afraid you really need a fine art publisher, not an old map one like me. And anyhow, no one can print anything for the time being. There’s no paper.’

  ‘Not so, madam,’ said the Dutchman. ‘By special arrangement with the British government, everything that we at Van Leer print, can be imported here.’

  ‘If that is so, gentlemen,’ said Phyllis, ‘we may have a deal on our hands.’

  The next morning, Phyllis arrived before nine o’clock at the Board of Trade, and her request was granted for an appointment with the official in charge of Imports.

  Leaning back in his leather chair, he dunked a ginger biscuit in his tea and listened to Phyllis. ‘Sorry I can’t offer you a biscuit,’ he interrupted, grinning through a mouthful. ‘I’ve only got two.’ Preoccupied with his munching, he did not begin a response until his tongue had greedily ensured that every last crumb had disappeared.

  ‘We are, Mrs Pearsall, helping the Netherlands recover some of their economy, but only by permitting our paper dealers to export to them. Now, about maps . . . I think I am correct in saying there is an import exemption and open licence for, let me see . . .’ He unfolded a leaflet on his desk and ran his finger down the page: ‘Yes – winkles, gold nuggets and maps. So if you choose, madam, you may import maps of London by the hundreds of thousands.’

  ‘I love life. And I love luck,’ Phyllis hummed to herself as she walked back to the office. Under her instruction, Mrs Ford stopped her ledger-writing and brewed an especially large pot of tea, before cutting the angel cake Phyllis had bought to celebrate.

  ‘I have some very exciting news, everyone,’ Phyllis announced. ‘Van Leer will be our new printers in Schipol, Holland. I propose that we boost our pre-war order of 10,000 per run to 250,000. It is a gamble but I think the Geographers’ Map Company can do it.’

  ‘Will we have to write Printed in Holland on them?’ asked Mr Fountain.

  ‘Yes. Yes, we will.’

  The gloomy cartographer rolled his eyes.

  There was no partner or deputy with whom Phyllis could talk through her doubts. There never would be, for Phyllis was not that sort of person. Although she was conscientious and hardworking, her need for absolute control would, in the aftermath of her plane crash, nearly bankrupt the company. Everyone knew their own job, but no one knew, like Phyllis, each single detail.

  As much as it pained her to contact her father for reassurance, that night she sent him a telegram.

  PLACED ORDER FOR HALF A MILLION A-ZS. WHAT DO YOU THINK?

  DON’T EXPECT ME TO BAIL YOU OUT.

  DOING FINE. ON WE GO.

  At night, her sleep was sound. In the mornings, her eyes smiled back at her confidently. Like Sandor before her, when it came to making decisions, Phyllis despised procrastination.

  Within seven days, Bliss & Son, in Cursitor Street just off Chancery Lane, were hired to tackle the expanding accounts, and six more draughtsmen joined the team.

  Delegation, however, could only go so far with Phyllis, who insisted on personally accompanying the original A-Z stereo plates and the tons of paper transported from Liverpool Street station to Harwich, then into the ship’s hold and on to customs at Hook. After a few trips, Phyllis knew which customs officials to smile at, an
d when to raise her eyebrows at others. There was no question on the Export and Import papers she could not answer, but still they took delight in holding up the tons of Mechanical Newsprint paper for the A-Z for hours.

  For the return collection of six 35×45 bundles that arrived in East London Wharf in Bow, Phyllis hired one Mr Noakes of the Rapid Van Service, who helped her stack, pack and deliver orders all over London. He handled large zinc plates from Lowe & Brydone, and black plate and transfers made by Van Leer.

  ‘Mr Noakes, how do you fancy coming on board? If you do, I will buy you a white van with our insignia on it after a year’s service.’

  ‘Count me in.’

  In the autumn of 1946, Phyllis had begun flying to Schipol and back twice a week, for meetings with Mr Van Leer, in war-time Dakotas still unadapted to civilian flights. In her diary she wrote: My greengrocer in Chancery Lane had kindly supplied me with used wicker boxes and wrapping paper for the increasingly large orders I had to pack. First reports from accountants show a margin of profit. New coat for me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Stepping Back

  The pretty sprays of roses, tulips and snowdrops that friends and colleagues had fussed into vases for her bedside at home, went unnoticed. Daylight even in the low points of winter made her eyes weep with soreness and the darkness of the black-out curtains was a blessing. Walking was reduced to a dizzy shuffle and her muscles had wasted away to skin. ‘A simple journey today,’ Phyllis would say to herself, as she talked her way to the bathroom and into a hot bath. ‘On we go.’

  Sometimes, if the heat swelled her head, she would crawl, wrapped in her towel, straight back into bed. On other days she would harness all her energy to pull a brush through her runaway hair. In the mirror, her eyes swam, her nose looked borrowed and her cheeks bitten.

  Sandor, despite boasting to his friends of his daughter’s miraculous survival, did not think her state serious enough to merit a visit. He even sent her a typically brusque telegram, which was tinged with self-pity: HURRY UP OUT OF HOSPITAL, YOU CANNOT RUN A BUSINESS FROM BED. WHY MUST MY DAUGHTER ALWAYS BE SICK?