Mrs P's Journey Read online

  Praise for Mrs P’s Journey

  ‘Crackingly presented’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Sarah Hartley . . . romps through the story of this heroine whose legacy is the essential tool of all London’s citizens and visitors . . . Hartley clearly relished digging out the dirt on her subject’s early childhood and it makes a good story’

  The Times

  ‘A sympathetic view of an extraordinary woman who deserves more acknowledgement not only for her contribution to making life easier, but because of her stoical drive in pursuit of a simple but brilliant idea’

  Observer

  ‘The book brings Phyllis to life in a wonderfully vivid way and gives a real flavour of her determination, shrewdness and originality’

  Lavender Patten

  ‘Engaging, vivid rollercoaster of a ride through the life of an extraordinary woman . . . Phyllis’s extraordinary and colourful life is done justice by writer Sarah Hartley, who fleshes out early memories into snapshots of immigrant life in Britain’

  Evening Leader

  ‘Sarah Hartley . . . offers welcome professional illumination’

  Design Week

  ‘A fascinating account of an extraordinary woman’

  Taxi Magazine

  ‘This reads far more like a novel and a rollicking good one’

  The Insight

  For Mark

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter One: Tracing the Source

  Chapter Two: Heading in a New Direction

  Chapter Three: A Heavy Burden to Carry

  Chapter Four: Geographia: Marking Out the Future

  Chapter Five: Charting the Changing Face of Europe

  Chapter Six: Detours and Dead Ends

  Chapter Seven: Parallel Lines

  Chapter Eight: Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag . . .

  Chapter Nine: Growing Without Direction

  Chapter Ten: Overtaking the Past

  Chapter Eleven: The Kishlany Trailing Behind

  Chapter Twelve: Homing Instinct

  Chapter Thirteen: On Your Own Two Feet

  Chapter Fourteen: Reaching Back

  Chapter Fifteen: Il n’y a que le provisoire qui dure . . .

  Chapter Sixteen: Nabokov’s First Nymphet

  Chapter Seventeen: ‘Met Him in France, Left Him in Venice’

  Chapter Eighteen: ‘Kiss It Goodbye’

  Chapter Nineteen: My Old Man Said, ‘Follow the Van . . .’

  Chapter Twenty: The Scribes and the Fallacies

  Chapter Twenty-One: A Lonely Journey

  Chapter Twenty-Two: From Abberley Mews to Zoffany Street

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Those Who Trespass Against Us

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Drawn to Make Maps: The Motives of Map-makers

  Chapter Twenty-Five: There’s More to Lose Than Getting Lost

  Chapter Twenty-Six: On the Warpath

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Was There an Alternative Route?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Stepping Back

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Lo! I Am With You Always, Even Unto the End of the World

  Chapter Thirty: A Path for My Family to Follow

  Chapter Thirty-One: In the End is the Beginning

  Chapter Thirty-Two: On We Go

  List of Illustrations

  Index

  Foreword

  I never had the privilege of meeting Phyllis Pearsall, so I will always wonder whether we would have liked each other. I know she would have scolded me at times for my slow writing – although I doubt she would have co-operated with a book in the first place. ‘Why write about me?’ she would have said. For my part, I would have probably found her inimitable chatter quite exhausting.

  One thing I do know we both had in common is a love of walking around London. Of getting up and going. Anywhere and everywhere, just as we please – the nuisance of public transport replaced by two good feet. Phyllis did not learn to drive until the age of fifty-nine – after two hundred and sixty lessons – while I have never even tried to learn. We are also linked by a wonderful gift – our ability to catnap, me on a bed, she on a bench or under a bridge. Indeed, on Sunday, 28 August 1996, I was half asleep in the afternoon when I heard about her death on the radio news. So, I remember thinking to myself, a woman put together the cabby’s bible, the book that lies on every Londoner’s bookshelf and in every desk drawer. Who says we can’t read maps?

  The trickiest aspect of writing about someone who, by her own admission, would elaborate on the truth and indeed, came from a family who would do so liberally, was to record the truth. Many rumours have encircled Phyllis’s life, and inevitably in a few interviews she gave, she even contradicted herself. Her memoirs tripped themselves over with such extraordinary anecdotes that, without evidence to prove otherwise, I can only assume them to be true. My task, however, has not been one of detective. I did not set out to prove or disprove her legendary journey or her traumatic childhood. Where I have come across conflicting research, I have included both. I have written the truth according to Phyllis. For I am convinced that every story, every memory and every encounter that she described, she believed to be true. Of course, when starting with such a shaky foundation, I have not felt uncomfortable interweaving elements of fiction into fact. But if truth be known, my fiction turned out to be much more mundane than her ‘fact’. If there is a scene, or a word, or a character, you believe to be too fantastical, it is likely they are real.

  My admiration for her strength of character is enormous. Never mind that she lived through two world wars. Her triumph over so many personal tragedies and the tenacious willpower that pushed her to achieve so much are qualities that most of us are too lazy and half-hearted to aspire to today.

  And so to the thanks owed to all those people who have helped me on my journey. To my agent, Jo Frank, at A. P. Watt, for seeing the potential in my original feature for Frank magazine and, of course, to Tina Gaudoin, the former editor of Frank who let me write the piece. To Helen Gummer, my publisher at Simon & Schuster and Katharine Young, my editor, and Joan Deitch, the copy editor, for their care and attention. To my sister, Pippa, and to my parents, Steven and Maggie, for their love and encouragement, and to Suzanne Glass for her good ear.

  Special thanks must go to those lucky enough to have been a part of Phyllis’s extraordinary life and who happily gave up their time to share their recollections. To her best friend, Esme M. Wren, for her enthusiasm in keeping the memory of Phyllis alive; to her niece, Mary West, for her beautiful photographic collection; to Jean-Pierre and Karen Gross for their anecdotes and hospitality; to Barbara Trollip, Derek and Ellen Jameson and Lavender Patten.

  A big thank you also to Phyllis’s original team – her boys, the only men who remained loyal throughout her life: Nigel Syrett, Fred Bond and David Churchill. Thank you also to Peter Barber, Deputy Librarian of Maps at the British Library.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tracing the Source

  Studying the map of a city is like reading the palm of a hand. Once you have spread it out and laid it flat it is impossible, for the first few seconds, to take everything in. But the longer you gaze at the riddles of lines, the more there is to see. Patterns start to form; then blink and you will be able to note the bold grooves, the high areas, the dips, the contours and prominent markings. With a map, a topographical imprint of human history lies before you on a single sheet of paper. Plagues, fires, wars, health, poverty, revolutions, inventions and constructions – all have left their imprint on the land. No amount of demolition and rebuilding and modernising can alter the core structure of a city.

  So, too, will a hand portray and betray the past, whether it reveals soft skin and cosseted existence, or dark rivets chi
selled by humility and sensitivity. And like hardened calluses, experiences cannot be sloughed away to reveal a clean, youthful appearance, they simply accumulate and patiently wait to reflect the future.

  In the same way, the restless talents brought together in the personality of Phyllis Pearsall were not the result of creating a new soul, but of a fusion of fractious energy snatched from the generations before her. Destiny it seems, branded her with a complex blueprint, addled by peaks and dales already trodden by her parents.

  Few will recognise her name, which gives no hint of the fact that she was one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing entrepreneurs and self-made millionaires. ‘Phyllis Pearsall’ sounds so simple and straightforward, it would not be out of place on a Sunday school register.

  Yet who has not heard of, or bought or borrowed her greatest achievement – the world’s bestselling map of London – the A-Z? More than sixty million copies have been sold since publication in 1936. Since then, the expansion of the company she founded, the Geographers’ Map Company Limited, has seen the publication of over 250 titles, which include an A-Z map for all major cities in the UK.

  Some people may see maps as purely scientific things, methodical and mathematical. With their rigid grids and coordinates, which are minutely and devotionally drawn up, they may seem the antithesis of anything ‘creative’. The same people would expect the first female map publisher and founder of a cartographic empire to be as dull and dry as the tonnes of blank white paper shipped in for printing her maps.

  But Phyllis Pearsall was nothing so conventional. How, you might think, could a stiflingly slow profession allow for a livewire, hyperactive genius to disrupt their monastic hush? Enter one half-Irish/Italian, half-Jewish/Hungarian thirty-year-old divorced artist whose naiveté endeared her to them and whose tenacity terrified them.

  The life which will unfold before you never knew the comfort of gentle plateaux, nor did it ascend steadily into adulthood. Normality, for Phyllis, was always a series of extremes: mountains one week and canyons the next. Remarkably, throughout all her achievements and failures, richness and poverty, happiness and tragedy, she kept walking, her eyes fixed on the horizon. Who amongst us does not turn and look back, to take a peek at what they have left behind, whether it was loved or loathed? Phyllis Pearsall never allowed herself to do so.

  Bolstered by huge resources of energy, she possessed strength and courage not only to start a super-human project such as single-handedly mapping the 23,000 streets and house numbers of London – but to actually complete it.

  But the mind can lift and carry the body only so far. On her journey, Phyllis’s health would fail her many times – as would her family – and both in the most devastating way. Yet over and over again, the mysterious streak of perseverance in her nature dragged her onwards.

  A shadow over five foot tall, her personality was vast. As a grown woman, it was said that she had the presence of a prima ballerina. Sensitive, gentle and artistic she may have been, but Phyllis was able to create this external impression of lightness solely because she was underpinned by a shatterproof steel infrastructure, which pulled her nerves as taut as metal wire.

  Phyllis knew whether the routes she was forced to take or the directions she chose freely had been the best ones for her. As it was, even if she had turned back, it is hard to believe she could have been confronted by a steeper path or a more rugged terrain than the one she took.

  Those who cite her surreal story as a Chinese whisper of exaggeration and self-publicity should now step forwards, and take a glimpse inside the curious world where Phyllis Isobella Gross, the little girl known as ‘PIG’, was born.

  It was his gypsy blood that led Alexander (or Sandor as his mother called him) Grosz to wander through Europe, staying a little time in each country, sniffing out any quick money business and stacking up influential friends like calling cards before disappearing overnight. A loner, Sandor refused to share the limelight with anyone other than himself. Beware, it is said, of men who do not have close friends. He was the sort of person who could not countenance taking orders or being beholden to any other; in truth he had all the prerequisites of a despot. ‘Oleaginous’ was how many described his behaviour, while others refused to be taken in by his shameless self-promotion. As any hostess who tentatively penned his name into the guest list for a dinner or ball would reveal, Sandor Grosz was high-maintenance, and the genuine amusement he promised to deliver only marginally outweighed his irritation factor.

  Whether he was well educated, no one could truly be sure. ‘I am,’ he told dinner-party guests, ‘the first boy from Csurog, a tiny village outside Budapest, to win a high-school scholarship. I have been,’ he would add, unaware that his gloating was tainting the deliciousness of the soup, ‘inseparable from my textbooks since I was six years old.’

  If we are to believe his own account, just before the turn of the twentieth century, Sandor Grosz graduated from Budapest University, where he had found himself drawn to the acting profession. To the ladies and gentlemen present, he spun a colourful tale of the day when, as a thirteen-year-old boy, he had squandered his money on a ticket to see a travelling circus that had stopped in Csurog.

  ‘I was mesmerised by the gleaming bodies of the gold-robed acrobats and sequinned tight-rope walker, and from that evening on, I lusted after the glamour of performing.’

  Indeed, Sandor had convinced himself that the stage was a single bubble of fantasy in an otherwise tawdry world. How much better, he thought, to become an actor and resist a mundane municipal job, perhaps as a town clerk or civil servant. As for performing in front of an audience, Sandor never questioned his talent. He was a natural.

  Yet in reality, life on tour harboured few prospects. Damp nights spent in tatty theatres scented by stale backstage costumes and beer, in exchange for a few tiny coins, left his belly sore and his young skin flexed across his cheekbones.

  And then he snapped. Just like that. One day, in the provinces, stepping out onto the small dusty stage for a matinée performance of The Merchant of Venice, he was thrown by the sight of the portly Mayor in the front row, his pickled body trying to burst through his made-to-measure pinstriped suit, his fleshy hands trembling on the stockinged knees of his young mistress. Why this repelled Sandor so much, no one knows. Perhaps the gluttonous pleasures money and power could bring had taunted his own stirring physical desires. No matter – he had tasted that it was time for a change of scene and of character.

  The walking away cannot have been easy. Was he a hard man? Yes. The secret thought to his own survival would be this unnerving habit of dropping his friends, family, and his business – everything, in fact, except for the clothes he was wearing – to disappear and reinvent himself elsewhere. With no past to acknowledge, how can a fresh start not be successful?

  A few years before, his younger brother Gyula had died of consumption at the age of seventeen and so Sandor had found himself relied upon by his crippled, widowed mother. He knew that she prayed that one day, he would take over her general store. How could he tell her he was leaving, he fretted. The news would devastate her.

  Even as a boy, Sandor had stashed away plans to run as far from his scrape-by rural hamlet of Csurog as he could, and head for a country where he would be granted the extravagant life he truly believed he deserved.

  Sandor finally made up for his early privations twenty years later, when he became a father, first to a boy, Tony, and then to a daughter, Phyllis. The urgency with which he would snaffle up toys and gifts for them seemed obscene. It never entered his head that his greed for treats might spoil them. Teddy bears, gollywogs, Parisian dolls with blinky eyes, dappled rocking horses, wooden hoops and paints and brushes were frittered out like sweets. ‘How I used to envy the boy in my village who had toys,’ Sandor would crow, ‘but not any more!’

  But back to that moment onstage, as Sandor bent for his final bow, his face slack with disappointment at the weak applause . . . He removed his make-up fo
r the last time, deliberately and slowly, shed his actor’s skin but cannily kept the round and rich tones he had acquired in the profession. Yes, it was time to leave Hungary. My journey must begin, he thought, where my life began.

  As the last light crept out that night, his mother watched Sandor planting a row of tiny saplings beside the house and understood the trees were a parting gift. My boy, she thought to herself, will never live in his homeland again.

  ‘These,’ Sandor said, pulling his mother close and dabbing her rheumy eyes, ‘these will grow strong and protect you from the August sun.’

  And with that Sandor Grosz simply walked out on his mother, his job and his past.

  Had Sandor stumbled across the Latin phrase carpe diem, he would have clasped it to his chest and repeated it over and over and flourished it in front of anyone who sneered at his reckless bravado. Neither he, nor later his daughter Phyllis, recognised the notion of hesitation. They always ‘seized the day’, whatever it may have cost them.

  As he travelled across Europe, Sandor’s slippery tongue would trick its way in and out and around every social class and their debutante daughters. Potential mothers-in-law would describe him to their husbands as a well-connected bachelor from Hungary, a sophisticated gentleman with cornflower-blue eyes. With their daughters they would coo over his handsome profile and short but perfect physique. Somehow, Sandor’s smooth chestnut skin was always plump and clean as if he had just paid a visit to the barber. Even in a crowded salon du thé, his face never shone, so he never had to fumble for his pocket handkerchief and dab at his brow. Flamboyant hand movements were interpreted as aristocratic, and his walking cane as the stamp of good breeding. With that well-oiled voice as his only tool, he would, a good few years later, talk his way into a wealthy lifestyle in Hampstead, North London. That same voice would also lose him a wife, two children, his fortune and his company.

  English spoken with a Hungarian accent was a novelty – quite enchanting – and this doll-dressed little man knew how to silence a room as he acted out a true tale of adventure and heroism (the ladies liked that best) from his homeland. His short arms would flap the air as he came to the punch line, his body seemingly electrified by his own enthusiasm. ‘Where did you say he came from?’ women would ask one another. ‘What did you say he did?’ their husbands would enquire amongst themselves.