Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  ‘My parents left France,’ says Mary, ‘with one suitcase, that is all. And they never went back to live there again.’ They settled for a while in Flamstead, Hertfordshire, where Phyllis would chatter in French to her sister-in-law, whom Bella had dubbed ‘the fashionable semi-demi’. Mary remembers their aunt taking her and her brother for walks in the woods and playing games with them.

  In her father’s studio, Mary leafs through his childhood albums; a sepia world of memories bound for ever in leather. There are no wedding photographs of any of the family, but there, in matching sailor suits, Tony and Phyllis pose for a portrait, their three- and four-year-old heads together, their dark hair and eyes glistening. They pop up again and again, laughing, digging sand-castles on the beach at Ostend, Phyllis swamped by ringlets and in a tiny fur coat, holding a birdcage, Tony, watching, captivated by the canaries inside. In a white party frock, with white socks and white shoes, Phyllis stands by Elijah, her baby elephant, her face pulled into a smile of fear and excitement. There’s a snapshot of Bella, her head in profile so her pearl earrings catch the light, as does her glossy hair, exquisitely swept up on her head. An assortment of Surrey gentry are seated outside the conservatory during one of the celebrated garden parties at The Firs.

  Laughter in another shot, as General Livingstone, in his uniform, squeezes the waist of Bella and his wife, Wuffy, who would later become one of Sandor’s conquests. A portrait of Sandor, at thirty, looking defiantly past the camera. Smartly poised with the tight posture of a small man, his mouth hints at a sneer. Fifty years later, there is Sandor again, taken the night before he died, seated at a table in a restaurant of the Queen Mary. He is dining alone. His suit is immaculate, the remnants of his hair shining black on his walnut head. His hard skin has shrunken, his arrogance replaced by bitterness; his mouth is unrepentant.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  On We Go

  Isn’t it lovely to have behaved in life the same as in work. Whether starving or smoked salmoning, we ride on irrespective, should ups and downs bring us there again.

  Letter from Phyllis to Ellen Jameson

  ‘We always wanted to die in a plane crash,’ Esme insists. ‘We travelled a lot by plane and before take-off, we would shake hands and say, “Thank you – it’s been a nice life.” You see, we had no worries, everything was straight. I certainly never thought I could live by myself.’

  It would be nothing so easy. It would take Phyllis over seven months to succumb to melanoma cancer. The results from a biopsy on the mole on her upper arm had not been good. Further exploratory operations discovered the cancer had spread to her stomach and the rest of her body.

  ‘She always encouraged us in a deep faith,’ her friend Ellen Jameson says. ‘Phyllis embraced death as her next journey, and she believed totally in this glorious place called heaven which would be a better place than this. The disease quickly robbed her body of strength and she hated becoming confined to a wheelchair.’

  Phyllis went on a final outing on 14 May 1996, to Euro Disney in Paris, where she celebrated sixty years of the company, thirty years of the Trust, and her ninetieth year. There, before 250 members of staff, gathered in a suite festooned with red, white and blue A-Z balloons, she gave a last speech. Clutching the microphone that Nigel Syrett held to her mouth, her frail voice sounded thinner than ever. It was, according to Esme, Nigel and the staff, one of the most beautiful, unrehearsed speeches they had ever heard.

  ‘You see, Phyllis was so proud of them,’ says Ellen. ‘She groomed each one of them, to fulfil a potential that no one else had seen. It was a great talent of hers, to be able to nurture.’

  Her world, her company, was a tight little community. Outsiders were rarely employed; when they were, Phyllis preferred to take on new young people who could be trained in a supportive atmosphere. No one, she felt, should suffer or endure as much as she had done, simply to make a living. And despite being a single woman, she encouraged a family-friendly policy.

  Of course, Phyllis must have known that this would be her only opportunity to speak to them all together before her death. She had meant her words to inspire and she had meant them to truly understand how dear every individual had been to her. She was saying goodbye to her family.

  Afterwards, naturally, everyone wanted to hug her, to kiss their beloved Mrs P. Esme did her utmost to dissuade them, as even the slightest pressure on her skin left Phyllis in the most terrible pain. ‘None of the staff,’ she explained, ‘had realised the agony Phyllis had kept to herself, until a giant Mickey Mouse tried to give her a squeeze after her speech and she recoiled in pain. “Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me,” she whimpered.’

  The occasion had sapped the energy she had managed to muster up, and Esme remembers Phyllis whispering: ‘Get me out of here.’

  In her final two months, Phyllis found the boundaries of her life tightened again. This time it was to her small bed, which gave a panoramic view of Shoreham seafront. ‘To stop was a terrible shock. Everything,’ according to Esme, ‘had been work, work, work, in her life.’ The voracious letter-writer, the voracious reader, the voracious conversationalist was too weak to stir, and Esme remembers her as too far gone to care.

  The July and August heat weakened her further. For nearly the whole day, Esme would sit on a chair by her side and talk to her. On the pale pink walls of the bedroom hung over ten of her own tiny paintings – sunrises, sunsets, landscapes, seascapes. For hours, she would stare into their memory and then the following day ask Esme to swap them around.

  On Thursday, 28 August 1996, nearly a month before her ninetieth birthday, Phyllis died with Esme at her bedside. Those who could be spared from work at the A-Z offices attended her funeral service the following week at The Downs Cemetery, where friends and family paid their last respects to the little coffin covered in white lilies. In the following weeks and months, Nigel Syrett would miss her matter-of-fact phone calls, which had come at any time and sometimes as early as 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

  ‘Hello, darling, what’s happening, Nigel? How about Manchester?’

  He would miss his friend, rather than his boss, a woman who had treated him more like a son than an employee, and who respected his diligence.

  At the age of seventeen, Nigel had been working for two years on a wobbly old table; to make matters worse, it was on casters and used to slide about on the wooden floors.

  ‘You need a desk,’ Phyllis had said to him out of the blue. ‘If you can make £2,000 commission this month, I will buy you a new desk.’

  Nigel had his eye on one, in a shop along the Edgware Road. He met his target and Phyllis kept her word.

  The first Christmas without Phyllis must have been incredibly difficult for Esme. One of the cards she received was an official one, from the Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten and his wife, Lavender, and their three daughters. On the front of the card was one of Phyllis’s last paintings of Government House. The words written inside would be of great comfort to Esme and echoed all the feelings of those who had loved Phyllis:

  Esme dearest,

  We think of you and pray for you often. It is very hard for you, I know you were such wonderful friends, but you know she would want you to carry on with all your busy life. ‘On we go’ indeed.

  One of the first articles I read about Phyllis Pearsall in the Daily Mail described how she had always wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. Map-making, she explained, saved her from using her painting as a means of paying the rent. Her art, she believed, ought to be cherished and not crudely exploited to make money. The irony was that no matter how many paintings she sold or art exhibitions she organised, the business would always float at the top of her thoughts. In the article, she had posed expertly for the photographer behind her large easel on the Shoreham promenade, her tiny face crinkled by an enormous smile and haloed by a straw coolie hat. In her left hand, she balanced a wooden paint palette and a fistful of sable paint-brushes.

  They say that by a
certain age, you get the face you deserve. I stare for I don’t know how long at the photograph, trying to see if any marks have been left on her face from what life had thrown at her, in handfuls. Her flinty eyes, hint at an elderly lady who defies doctors, traffic wardens and Foreign Office officials. The sparrow tilt of her head, like her posture, is defiant. There are no frown lines. Staring out is the undiluted gaze of a woman who has not been distracted by bringing up a family. If she had ever taken time out to grieve over the children she never had, there was no trace of sorrow.

  One thing is for certain. Phyllis did not like interrupting a canvas to have a photograph taken. Portraits of her that hang in The Geographers’ A-Z Map Company offices are all promoting the A-Z, and the few framed snaps at home were mostly taken from behind as she, unawares, gazed at the canvas on her easel.

  In the Daily Mail photo, she appears quite chic, with a crisp white shirt beneath a cocky-angled collar. Staff at her company remember that Mrs P, as they would call her, often turned up at the offices looking as if she had just stepped out of Harrods – in later years, Yves Saint Laurent took up much of her wardrobe – and at other times she would pitch up in tatty mustard-coloured cords, held up by string, her short, snow-bobbed hair in disarray.

  Ellen Jameson was always fascinated by the bright and fashionable clothes Phyllis wore, even in her eighties: ‘For one party Derek and I held, she arrived looking gorgeous in trousers tucked into brown leather cowboy boots, and I remember thinking, I wish I’d thought of wearing that.’

  On the canvas she has interrupted, a few flickers of shoreline are visible; whether water colours or line drawings, there is a quirky, free-hand wobble to her work, like the twitch of a lie-detector needle. Her impatience to capture a scene before the light flitted gave rise to her characteristic quick, light strokes, in brilliant colour, usually in Caribbean shades of creamy pinks, yellows and blue. Whereas some might see a thunderous grey shadow hanging over the sea, Phyllis would pick up on the slightest shaft of light and let it illuminate her entire painting.

  Her final exhibition, entitled Alive with Joy, was held at The Little Gallery in Arundel, where it ran from 21 May until the last week of June 1995. There, 136 paintings were on show, from Bonfire on Henfield Common (1960) to House and Chickens of the Goure Sons, Brehement (1992) and Victoria Harbour, Kowloon, Hong Kong (1993).

  It nearly didn’t happen. The gallery owner had committed suicide before the exhibition opened on 21 May, but left instructions in a note, found with his body, that Phyllis was to go ahead with the show. Alive with Joy then seemed a horribly ironic name and an evangelical-sounding title to those who had not met Phyllis. But here was a woman whose enthusiasm for every day’s new adventure could not be thwarted. Even in her late eighties, she used exclamation marks as if they were going out of fashion and gave media interviews full of remarks like, ‘I fall in love with everything I lay my eyes on!’

  By coincidence, I arrive at The Geographers’ A-Z Map Company two years to the day that Phyllis Pearsall died. The forty-minute train journey out of Victoria to Borough Green in Kent slides from the confusion of urban knottiness to parachute-soft fields. The company is a two-minute walk from the station, housed on a small business estate. It is a modern, square, biscuit-coloured building. Inside, the air is static and the silence is airtight. The boardroom carpet, a sage colour, is trimmed with an A-Z logo. Huge, antique oak desks are kept in pride of place from the old office.

  In the corridors, the walls are decorated by dozens of drawings and sketches by Phyllis Pearsall. The suffocating concentration of draughtsmen is everywhere, their eyes fixed on their computer screens, their work seeming every bit as painstaking as the old methods. Phyllis, they say, could be heard in the drawing office as she scuttled into the building, her powerful high voice drifting up the stairs and heralding an inspection. Here, forty draughtsmen and one hundred and ten employees work on over two hundred and fifty publications. People do not come and go here. Most of the old-timers, as they are known, have been with Phyllis for over forty years, inching their way up from apprentices to directors of the company.

  Surprisingly, Phyllis did not request that her ashes be scattered in the strong wind that pulls along the Shoreham seafront, although this would have set her free to dance in the air for ever. In the end, she chose her adopted family before her freedom. Mrs P’s journey was to end beneath a rowan tree, planted in her memory, outside the A-Z offices. It is a quiet spot, which her former employees pass every day on their way into work.

  Programme notes for the Memorial Exhibition and Open Day at The Geographers’ A-Z Map Company Limited.

  ‘Mrs P’, as she liked to be known, saw no barriers between one aspect of her talent and another. She would paint, write, read accounts, plan new cartographic projects wherever she happened to be – and it was not unknown for her to try several activities at the same time!

  Whilst we all did our best to keep up with her seemingly boundless energy and sharp probing mind, she embraced us all equally, as friends and colleagues – part of her larger family.

  Mrs P has given us the opportunity to develop our individual talents and work in an environment based on trust, respect for the individual and with a level of security only made possible by her selfless consideration in creating The Geographers’ Map Trust. She also gave us a motto – On We Go – and as a team we can, and will, do just that.

  List of Illustrations

  1. Sandor Gross, Phyllis Pearsall’s father.

  2. Bella Gross, Phyllis’s mother.

  3. Phyllis, aged six months, with her brother Tony, aged two.

  4. The young Phyllis with her pet elephant Elijah.

  5. Phyllis, aged six, and her brother Tony, setting free some birds in the grounds of The Firs, their home in Surrey.

  6. The war years: Phyllis’s sketches of Wrens at work from her book Women at War.

  7. A portrait of Phyllis taken in 1940 by the late Sir Henry Turner.

  8. After her plane crash: Phyllis, aged forty-five, shows the strain of her ill-health.

  9. In 1936, Phyllis began her A-Z odyssey, overcoming endless obstacles in her bid to give London an up-to-date street atlas. Her first order was from WH Smith’s and delivered in a borrowed wheelbarrow.

  10. A-Z London is now the market leader and one of many A-Z Street Atlases.

  11. Phyllis was determined to conquer the rest of Britain with her maps.

  12. Phyllis with her best friend Esme Wren.

  13. Phyllis with Esme at the Berkeley Hotel flanking the portrait of Bella by Alfred.

  14. Before Bedlam: The portrait of Bella painted by Alfred, two years before her death.

  15. Phyllis spent her life recording London and its changes. This drawing from the late thirties shows Waterloo Bridge being rebuilt.

  16. Trafalgar Square from Drummonds Bank.

  17. Claridges: This is Phyllis’s last painting, undertaken as a commission for Claridges in 1996.

  18. Government House, Hong Kong: This was painted by Phyllis during one of her visits to Chris and Lavender Patten.

  19. Phyllis painting in France.

  20. Phyllis outside the company she founded in Borough Green, Kent.

  Index

  A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.

  A-Z see under maps

  Académie Julian (Paris) 120

  Arundel, Little Gallery 321

  Ashfield, Lord and Lady 216–17, 232

  Asquith, Herbert 30

  Backsettown (Sussex) 303–4

  Bacon, G.W. 212

  Balloon View of London 212

  Balthus, Count 122

  Bannier, Monsieur and Madame 115–18

  Bannier, Jacqueline 114,
115, 116, 120

  Barber, Peter 215

  Barker’s shop 250

  Bartholomew’s maps 214

  Batten, A. (Roedean pupil) 66–7

  Baxter, Freddie 230

  Bec de Mortagne 115, 120

  Beck, Harry 210

  Beckett, Samuel 160

  Bedlam (Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem) 187, 194

  Belgium 62

  Bibliothèque Saint Geniève (Paris) 278

  Binder, Amy 270

  Binder Hamlyn & Co. 270

  Bliss & Son 290

  Board of Trade 285

  Bond, Fred 262, 295

  Booth, Charles 213

  Bosnia-Herzogovina 40

  Bowman, Mr (bank manager) 293

  Brecknock, Lady 126

  Brettain, Madame 110–11, 115, 126

  Brettain, Léonie 111–12, 115

  Brighton 45

  Brown, Mr (paper supplier) 260

  Brown, Cliff 261

  Browne, Willy 218–19

  Bulgaria 40, 57

  Bumpus 250

  Burnham, Lord 36–7

  cartography 210–15, 223, 262–3

  see also maps

  Chamberlain, Sir Joseph 60

  Chanel, Coco 145–6

  Charles II, King 211

  Château Chenanceaux 311

  Chelsea Old Church 233

  Civil Service 281–2

  Claridges 46–7

  Claygate (Surrey) 51

  Colette 146

  computer technology 258–9

  Cooper, Mary 296

  Cooper, Wally 261, 287, 288, 296

  Couperin, Claudine 150, 152

  Crete 40

  Crowley, Arthur (grandfather) 10, 12, 15, 17, 131–4, 136

  Crowley, Charlie (uncle) 13, 17

  Crowley, Frank (uncle) 13, 17, 30, 34, 35–6, 107

  Crowley, Maria (grandmother) 10, 12, 17, 23, 76, 131–4, 136, 195