The lavender-polished corridors at Roedean leading to back stairs or smaller classrooms or to the dorms disorientated Phyllis – but rarely enough to deter her from tweaking the handles on the door to this or that cupboard, or wondering why the doors to the east wing next to Miss Waldron and Matron were bolted, or slipping along the top passage until she quivered on account of the sea storm sizzling under the window panes. As any Brighton resident will tell you, the sea on the Sussex coast is a placid stretch of dull oyster capable of twisting into a mood worthy of any adolescent.
For some the sea acts as a metronome by tempering their restlessness and lulling their subconscious, but even the dragging lure of the waves could not harness the troublesome teenaged girls cooped up at Roedean. Despite the hypnotic call of the sea, somewhere out in the blackness, Phyllis herself was the sort of child whose body twitched while the night passed, sometimes sleep-walking, her eyelashes rippling as her eyes stammered from left to right under the lids. Her legs would flicker too, as in her dreams she ran up and down the sodden streets of London shouting out for her parents.
Phyllis’s first day at Roedean was, coincidentally, the date of her tenth birthday. Wrought-iron gates were an ominous sign, she thought as her car sped up the drive edging the playing-fields. Even the seagulls were trying to warn her. Flee, flee, fleeeeeee. ‘How funny it would be to see a Keep In sign instead of Keep Out,’ Phyllis had joked nervously. ‘I am off to prison!’
Set back from the cliff edges, the magnificent buildings gave shelter to a ragbag assortment of girls who, in return for a large fee, had been deposited into the capable hands of one Miss Penelope Lawrence in the hope that they would turn out well.
‘We have a new pupil joining us today, and I hope everyone will make an effort to welcome her, please.’ That is what one would hope to hear. Phyllis did not. Instead, the woman told her briskly: ‘I am Miss Waldron, your house-mistress. Look, learn and listen and we shall both be doing very well. The unofficial motto here is “Girls should be seen and not heard.” Adhere to it and you will make no enemy of me.’
She smelt. Of disinfectant, of mothballs and of silky stale talcum powder. Of spinster. Mama would be so sad for you, reflected Phyllis, trying to peer at Miss Waldron’s turkey chins wobbling, while balancing a pile of pink exercise books, an atlas and a Bible in her arms. So sad, that you live in a grey suit and a grey blouse that have leaked upwards into your face, turning even that into a concrete hue.
‘Well, child?’
Phyllis gave her the fake smile reserved for Mama’s relatives. Fortunately, the house-mistress considered it an adequate response.
Everyone can recall their first six hours at a new school, and whether their future there turned out to be happy or not, that day is photographed and filed away in a mental folder marked Traumatic.
Years afterwards, at a dinner party, someone will relate how, on their first day at school, they went without lunch because they couldn’t find the refectory and were too scared to ask. Then someone else will confess how they stole another pupil’s pencil case because it was pine with a slide-off top and they preferred it to their fluffy orange pouch with a dodgy zip. And everyone joins in with their own story.
As an adult, Phyllis did not need any cajoling into releasing her past. She would spread before her with pride the dusty Roedean memories which she polished like precious stones before bequeathing them to the listener to be equally admired and revered. The relish and warmth with which they were handled allowed them a certain romance, a certain value. Smiling broadly, as she always did when describing any subject with any degree of pain attached, Phyllis never wavered from branding her schooldays as cruel misery. The truth was perhaps rather more mundane: Phyllis Gross was just another pupil who failed to erase the marks of institutionalism from her life’s report.
Although she rose to captain of Lacrosse (‘Fearless’ was the nickname given to the cannon-ball of terror who once smashed another girl’s teeth out as she criss-crossed the pitch, all in the name of Junior House), Phyllis was the antithesis of the team player. But in a photograph taken at Roedean that has now faded from monochrome to sepia brown, Phyllis is caught for an instant on a terrace, looking happy and relaxed. Her head is inclined to one side, her hair misbehaving, a smile keenly wide and her skinny legs turned inwards in their black tights. Her arm pulls tight around the shoulders of another pupil, also grinning. It is stuck into Tony Gross’s album, now kept by his daughter, Mary, and beneath the picture in his careful childhood hand the caption reads Phyllis and A. Batten.
Her teachers considered Phyllis to be an indulged, muddle-dressed girl (her people are refugees turned millionaires, you know), a natural loner and a natural target. Bored bullies picked her over with the ferocity of a wild pack of wolves. Victim. If Phyllis ever screamed, punched, kicked, bit or retaliated against her aggressors is not known. It had been a different story when she and Tony had attended the same school, Phyllis aged four and her brother five. Although he was the elder, according to her memoirs, and no doubt she was a tiny scrap of a thing, she would fight with all her might to try and pull the bullies off her brother.
A bell tolled and Miss Waldron plucked Phyllis from the classroom after her second lesson – History. Phyllis was deciding whether she would have rather been a Tudor or a Stuart when she was interrupted. ‘Ordinarily you would now make your way to the dining room for cocoa break. Then we have French, Tennis and Mathematics, followed by luncheon. This afternoon we have Poetry, Needlework and Physics. You haven’t lost your timetable, have you, Phyllis?’
‘No, Miss Waldron.’
In fact, the school secretary, Miss Young, had failed to give one to the new girl, but even aged ten she had sense enough to recognise the futility of such an admission. In her memoirs, Phyllis Pearsall records her next encounter so vividly that it is best seen through her eyes. Tear-blinded, I trotted behind Miss Waldron up the carpeted stairs of her private quarters and along dingy corridors, towards frightening shrill voices emanating from a room, which we entered. All talk ceased abruptly. The big girls cramming it alarmed me even more. In the menacing silence, Miss Waldron introduced me: ‘This is Phyllis. She is ten years old today,’ and left me to their mercy. They closed in on me. Cicely, the largest – daughter, I learnt later, of renowned Polar explorer Ernest Shackleton – poked her face within an inch of mine, grimacing: ‘So you’re the birthday girl! Show us your presents then.’
The other slouching girls must have edged forward with Cicely. Buried deep in her coffin-sized silver trunk, wrapped beneath the soft piles of cotton vests and slips, Phyllis fumbled for three china dolls. Precious, thought Phyllis, as she uncovered their porcelain cheeks, their blue eyes rattling. It does not matter which of the girls sprang at Phyllis first. The others soon muscled in and snatched at the blonde, ash and russet horse-hair tresses of Belinda, Elizabeth and Hatty. Sniggering, they ripped at the velvet and the linen and the frills, tearing at the white cotton undergarments. With a strength that the games mistress could only dream of witnessing in the gymnasium they jumped and stamped on the dolls’ heads. Shards of china sprayed their ankles. When broken arms and severed heads lay dismembered at Phyllis’s feet, the girls, shocked at their own spent aggression, slunk out.
A lifelong suspicion of strangers might have arisen from this hateful incident, but years later, one of her original members of staff at the Geographers’ Map Company, Nigel Syrett, would explain one of Phyllis’s greatest attributes – which had also been her greatest weakness:
‘She was a rotten judge of character, we all knew that. She trusted everyone until they proved themselves otherwise. “Hello, darling, how are you?” she would say to someone she was introduced to and embrace them in her warmth, whether she had met them before or not. And of course they would respond likewise, until sometimes their true character revealed itself.’
From then on Phyllis knew that her time at Roedean would be a troubled one. Letting oneself be overcome by grief, she had
learnt from observing her mother, was a sign of weakness to be reserved for extreme occasions. Once, from under the velvet drapes of the dining-room table cloth, Phyllis had spied her mother hurl down her silk-trussed body prostrate at the feet of her father (who was lighting a cigar) when her request for, ‘A little – oh, just a little!’ increase in her clothing allowance was categorically rejected.
‘And that, my good lady Bella, is my first and final answer.’
‘But . . . but . . .’ cut in the distraught woman, ‘how can I ever be seen in Town in the same—’
Here Phyllis remembered a particularly spectacular combination of her mother spluttering, clutching a wrung-out handkerchief to her pulsating bosom and stealing gulps of air.
‘– the same, the-the s-s-same tired, shabby, d-d-dresses . . .’
And with that, Bella Gross unleashed her sobs, beating red fists on to Sandor’s patent shoes, her torrents of wailing rising higher and higher until she battered her husband into submission.
I am not sure, thought Phyllis with all the practicality of a girl who never cared a fig about clothes, that it was worth all that bother.
Crying now, she decided as she scooped up the doll parts and hurled them out of the open window, would make me look a baby. At least they have noticed me.
That morning at home, which would, as it turned out, be her last ever living at home, had not been so triumphant.
‘There’ll be no molly-coddling where you’re going, my girl,’ Sandor had offered as his parting advice, probably as a fatherly-take-it-on-the-chin sort of thing. Unfortunately, Phyllis’s usual strength had abandoned her that day and Miss Seidel had to be summoned to assist Mr Gross in unclasping his daughter’s hands from around the waist of Mrs Gross. Frizzy plaits, a velour hat and angry screams were blotted out by soft, perfumed furs.
‘My darling, you are fairly squeezing the very life from me,’ were Bella’s last words to Phyllis, and once set free by the governess, she remarked tritely to her husband that she so preferred to dress her baby in Viennese frocks.
It was a forlorn and crumpled Phyllis who clambered into the automobile. Did she entreat her parents not to make her go as they waved her smaller and smaller out of the drive? No.
‘Big school will be good for you,’ Nanny had promised, nodding at the driver who then made little agreement noises and nods too.
‘Please do not send me away.’ She tried to say the words but her lips wobbled and let her down.
Nanny yanked out a handkerchief from her sleeve and crunched Phyllis’s nose. ‘Now blow.’
That had seemed centuries ago. Whatever was she doing here? ‘Birthdays do not get much sorrier than this. This is a really sorry day,’ sighed Phyllis as she perched on the window seat to survey the doll bone pattern on the lawn below. A sea gust flicked at her cheeks and Phyllis sank down on to the seat to think back to her ninth birthday.
‘That was in nineteen hundred and fifteen,’ she declared. ‘At home,’ she huffed. ‘At home in Claygate. That’s Surrey, you know,’ she told the blank rose petal walls and stern iron beds.
‘Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, Birthday Girl!’ Sandor Gross had boomed as he ascended the nursery stairs.
‘Am I here? Have I made it? Number Nine at laaaaaaaaast!’ Phyllis had screamed, and presumed that jumping up and down on her bed would be excused today.
Tony hooted. ‘Wait for me. Wait for me!’ He wheeled into the nursery clutching a red balloon and a fat parcel.
‘Where is Mama? Where is she?’ Phyllis cried.
‘Darling girl, she is waiting outside for you.’
‘Mama? Why outside?’
‘Well, some surprises are too big to be left alone by themselves.’
Shrieks.
More shrieks.
Sandor covered his ears. ‘Children!’
Silence.
‘Phyllis, we must ask you please to do us the great honour of following us on to the lawn. But I must insist that you first . . .’ And with that Sandor had whipped out from his breast-pocket a yellow blindfold.
‘Miss Seidel, Erik and Else!’ bellowed Sandor. ‘Come and see, come and see. A treat for all our eyes.’
Now, huddled in the window-seat corner, Phyllis let herself feel again the light cotton of her nightgown turn stiff in the cold as she stumbled out into the smoky autumn air. Bare feet, wet feet and iced grass.
‘Mama, Mama, they are bringing me. Are you there?’
‘Here I am, darling. With the one gift for our birthday girl we could not wrap.’
A gasp.
‘Have you ever wanted a present from Africa?’
Once again Phyllis heard her mother’s stifled giggles and recalled her knees growing weaker beneath her.
Tony had then let loose a strange snorting noise that boys of his age do when they are embarrassed or over-excited. ‘Come oooon,’ he had managed before becoming engulfed by snorts.
Sandor had enfolded his daughter’s head. Softly, he kissed her hair and yanked off the blindfold.
And there, shivering on the grass, was a baby elephant. Elijah.
‘When he gets too big,’ her father had declared, ‘we shall give him to the zoo.’
Extreme moments of elation such as this might have turned Phyllis into a spoilt brat, but the similarities between Bella and her daughter only went so far. Within a year of Elijah the elephant, reality had shoved Mr and Mrs Gross and their fantastical lives off to one side.
Four years at boarding school proved the academic making of Phyllis. She became the geography whizz and the winner of the essay competition. For any good teacher, curiosity, charm and intelligence in a pupil are fine attributes that bring with them the additional benefit of popularity, with both staff and peers. However, like her father before her, Phyllis was a step out of syncopation with everyone she encountered. Her speech ran a little too fast, her wit was just a little too clever, her innocence a little too unbelievable.
Loneliness drove Phyllis to hoard and to read books obsessively as if, like her dolls, they too might be wrenched from her at any minute. She wrote fanatically but her hours of thought would be pushed firmly to the bottom of the waste-paper basket, such was her fear of Miss Waldron reading her letters home aloud.
Dear Mama and Papa, With love, Phyllis read the tightly looped words enclosed in little manilla envelopes every week.
Her memory tuned into a high frequency, she photographed great chunks of text that would be regurgitated effortlessly in class. By the end of her life, Phyllis had learnt much of the Scriptures by heart and never forgot a name. Indeed, she may not have realised as much at the time, but she possessed the same restless ambition, the precocious confidence and unassailable charm of Sandor Gross, entrepreneur and millionaire.
CHAPTER TEN
Overtaking the Past
November, 1919
After a night of snowfall, a freezing morning had cast a blue hush over The Firs. As the story goes, Bella had taken her horse out alone, before dawn, one Friday morning, ‘for quietude and solitude’ into the bristling green of Oxshott Woods. She would have been breathing in the pine air, her eyes closed and listening to find out if the brook’s babble had been muffled by ice. Nobody knows why, but for the first time in many years she rode sidesaddle, so when her horse slipped, stumbled and then fell, she found herself unable to dismount and was crushed beneath the animal. Nobody knows either, why Sandor did not raise the alarm when his wife did not return several hours before he left for London. The children, who were at their respective schools, would only hear about their mother’s accident in a letter from Sandor, three days later:
Could it be Nemesis? Your mother has been seriously injured. In a riding accident. Crushed under her horse. Fractured skull and spine, the doctors say. You know her courage. She dragged herself to the road. How, nobody knows. There she was found hours later, unconscious.
The Nemesis that Sandor referred to concerned a trick he had played on ‘the ghastly Miss Waldron’ as he
called her, only the week before. Miss Waldron, now accustomed to breaking tragic news of fathers and brothers killed in action to her girls, had summoned Phyllis to her study after breakfast. Her rarely seen tenderness as she sat beside Phyllis on her sofa alarmed her pupil a great deal.
‘I’m so very sorry, Phyllis. I’m afraid it’s your mother. She is seriously ill and has asked to see you. We have arranged for you to be put on the next train to Victoria and your father will meet you there.’ She squeezed her pupil’s hand, which unfortunately only served to prompt a stream of tears.
Wretched, is how Phyllis recalled that train journey. Her blazer pockets bulging with handkerchiefs, she climbed into an empty carriage and let her tears flow freely as she pictured her darling mother call out her name as she writhed in pain. To her surprise, her father appeared uncrumpled by worry as he paced the platform, and even less so when he caught sight of his daughter, running towards him, snivelling.
‘Is Mama dead? What has happened? Tell me, Papa!’
‘Dry your tears. I cannot stand that nonsense. Your mother is waiting for us at King’s Cross Station, with a new dance frock for you and, she informs me, buttercup-yellow patent shoes. We are off to Derby, for Tony’s Speech Day celebrations.’
‘But Miss Waldron . . .’
‘I say damn that Miss Waldron, and her rules.’
The relief of being reunited with her family and able to catch her own dear mother around the waist, transformed Phyllis’s grief into pure happiness during what turned out to be three memorable days. Unfortunately, the grand deception, as she thought of it, would turn out to be not so grand after all. When Phyllis returned to Roedean, no one asked after her mother or even spoke to her. Silence fell in the common room when Phyllis walked in.
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