Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  Don’t you know? Stanfords of course.

  The staff at the OS counter at Stanfords had been suitably amused by the young lady who requested enough paper to stack twice as tall as she. ‘Seventy-two, you say, miss?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘What will you be using them for?’

  ‘Oh, just a map. A sort of street atlas. Of here – of London.’

  ‘Which poor soul is going to be doing that then, miss?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Goodness gracious. Now there’s a thing to keep you quiet.’

  Like a person with the extraordinary surname that needs to be spelt out each time they give their personal details, or the person whose sports car has a particularly thrusting engine – after a while, Phyllis stopped counting the number of people who either rolled their eyes or tut-tutted with scepticism after she had revealed her map intentions. Wait and see, she thought. Just wait and see.

  With the sheets carefully bound into taped rolls, Phyllis staggered on to the bus under the weight of her dangerous weapon. I am carrying the whole of London, she thought as she leant against the wall while she dragged the bundle up the stairs and through her front door.

  Next she tracked down her father’s top draughtsman, one Mr Fountain, to his top-floor flat in Maida Vale. Still heaving the seventy-two sheets about, she thought her two early morning bus-rides would end, as she would say, in triumph. With all her raw data collated, she had expected that as an experienced draughtsman, Mr Fountain could run up a map in next to no time. She would hand over the result of her 3000-mile journey: her twelve precious hardback notebooks, each one filled with small sketches of streets, their names and house numbers.

  But disappointment awaited her.

  When Mr Fountain finally opened the door to Phyllis, he turned out to be a tall man in his sixties, dressed in a smart brown suit, his face dour and his hair obviously dyed a flat ebony.

  ‘I understand from my father that you are still keen to do some mapping work,’ Phyllis said to Mr Fountain.

  When there was no response forthcoming from his stony features, she persevered, ‘I wondered if you would be at all interested in helping me. From what Papa tells me, you’re exactly who I need to talk to. I’m going to do a map, you see – of London. They’re so out of date now and I can’t quite understand why anyone hasn’t thought of it before. With the buses and trams and new streets and everything . . .’

  ‘I see what you’re getting at. So long as you understand I’m not used to dealing with amateurs. I’m a professional draughtsman. And I won’t be doing any favours. I’ll charge my normal rate.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m delighted you’ve agreed.’

  And with that, Phyllis grabbed and shook Mr Fountain’s heavy hand. His gruffness she hoped was not on account of her being a woman, although to be employed by a female half his age, she realised, might have made him feel a little piqued. Confidence did not escape her, though. Next to her own dear father, whose temper was legendary among every printer in London, Mr Fountain would be sweetness itself.

  As they stood there on the threshold, for he did not have the manners to invite her inside, he unrolled each sheet to check her purchase.

  ‘You will need stick ink and tracing paper. Run along to Hunter Penrose in Farringdon Road. Then you will need to go to Norton & Gregory in Castle Street.’

  Each map, he explained to Phyllis, needed to be reduced. The reduction bromides then had to be sun-copied and a dozen of each pulled on good white paper.

  One thing Phyllis had learnt as a little girl was that to admit to her father – or to any other man including Dick for that matter – that you had absolutely no idea what they were taking great pains to explain to you, simply enraged them.

  I can always ask somebody kind to help me, Phyllis thought as she wrote down his orders. I can’t even ask him any questions I’m so confused.

  At her first stop, Norton & Gregory, things began to slip into place as a junior assistant talked Phyllis through the process for sun-copies, which went something like this:

  ‘The tracing original is put on to sensitised paper and then fastened around a hollow glass tube with a strip of canvas clipped around them. Next, a high-powered light descends inside the glass tube, casting an image on the sensitised paper. When the light is turned off, the canvas is unclipped, and the original and paper image are removed; the sensitised paper is put face down on to a canvas-backed jelly bed and rubbed by hand. The paper is then peeled off, printing ink is rolled on to the jelly bed image and copies are pulled on cartridge paper, by hand.’

  Phyllis could hardly bear to watch the minute-by-minute process happening over and over again. She could not imagine ever acquiring such a skill, since it required a laboured precision. Magical, but slow. As the whirring smell of chemicals clogged her throat, the only way to escape was to imagine herself out in the street, in fresh sunlight, painting a juicy green tree and a gorgeous white Georgian house. Where will I be? she wondered. Ladbroke Square, perhaps, or Chepstow Villas.

  After nearly an entire day, Phyllis lugged the sun-copies back to Maida Vale on the bus in the early evening rush-hour. Her spirits were high as she tap-tapped on Mr Fountain’s front door, but she found that even with her first few tasks successfully completed, his humour did not seem to improve.

  ‘Leave those with me and return in one hour,’ he snapped. And with that he shut the door.

  Sixty minutes later, Phyllis climbed the stairs again.

  ‘Now you need to index these.’

  ‘How?’

  He pulled out an example. On each of the seventy-two sheets he had marked up 39/10-inch squares. Across the top and bottom margins he had run the letters A-N, and numbers 1-17 down both side margins.

  ‘Off you go,’ he said. ‘And don’t come back until you’re done.’

  At home, in my amateur fashion, Phyllis wrote, I tried the impossible. Simultaneously to alphabetise the places (with their references) while listing them on writing paper. Until no longer able to squeeze new ones between each other, nor by littering the margins with arrows to where they belonged, I appealed for help.

  Help came in the form of her next-door neighbour. Too impatient and too proud to send a telegram to her father, she tentatively knocked on his door.

  He was, by all accounts, first and foremost a Communist, so Phyllis revealed little about him – apart from the fact he had a brilliant mind and once gained notoriety for taking a group of unemployed men to lunch at The Ritz. Later on, he spent time in prison where his punishment for a variety of subversive activities was sewing mail bags.

  ‘May I trouble you?’ Phyllis asked him. ‘I’m quite sure you must be wondering why I’ve been keeping such strange hours. Well, let me show you what I’ve been up to.’

  She ushered him into her room where the evidence covered every spare patch of table, parquet floor and bed.

  ‘My, what a pickle.’

  She handed him the indexing draft for inspection. He frowned at the pages with Phyllis’s writing scrawled like a rash over each one.

  ‘I know. It looks a fright.’

  ‘Before you even start on such an index, my dear child – I suppose you have checked all the new developments and plans, in case of any LCC changes?’

  ‘Er . . . no.’

  ‘Ah. Well, now you know what to do next.’

  Indeed she did.

  It was definitely her father’s strict influence that made Phyllis, despite all her independence, happy to take instructions from a man, whereas Bella would have lashed out at any helpful suggestions and resorted to her own plan.

  A few years before their marriage soured, when Sandor recognised that Bella had outgrown his admonishing phrases, he was lucky enough to have his own children to practise on:

  ‘Do as I say, children!’

  ‘No one is asking for your opinion.’

  ‘How dare you question whether I am correct!’

  Even now, Phyllis did not ch
allenge her neighbour’s thinking or even question if there was a better way of going about things. She just got on and did what he said.

  The very next day, Phyllis set off just before 9 a.m. to visit all the Borough and County Surveyors within the London County Council. She did the same the next morning – and the next – until she had trotted in and out of every LCC building. Seven days it took to pin down every relevant piece of information she needed.

  This was where her lifelong hatred of bureaucracy began. To gain access to what should have been quite straightforward, public information, she was forced to use her winning smile and lightest voice over and over again, to squeeze past minor pen-pushers, who looked at her askance when she requested access to any recent records of road developments for her new street atlas.

  ‘Why would you be wanting to draw up a new map, when there is a perfectly good one available?’

  ‘Does it not bother you that the map is over fifteen years old?’

  ‘My, you have bitten off more than you can chew.’

  Fortunately, most of them said, ‘Good luck with your map – a new one is certainly well overdue.’

  Ushered into their quiet offices, she was allowed to view the new Ordnance Survey maps, updated by hand. Developments, construction, new houses, road alterations, cropped up in every postcode.

  In a world that had yet to experience the wonders of the photocopying machine, Phyllis scanned the lists; her eyes plucked out the new names and she adjusted her own landscape. By her own admission, she drew the scale, shapes and grids awry. Soon the scenery was filled in with the silent extras – the crucial but rarely acknowledged water and gas mains, fire hydrants and street lamps.

  For the next three months, a complete rectangle dangled in Phyllis’s head. Cut into tiny squares that made up a grid, it became a template for the real map, as the hundreds of streets she had jotted down swarmed around her consciousness in search of the right direction.

  Top pressure concentration, Phyllis wrote in her notes, lulled me into a false sense of security and a growing fascination with London’s history implicit in its many names.

  The distraction of her imagination wandering off into the history of Farmer’s Road, Hangman’s Acre, Houndsditch, Terrapin Road, Fossil Road, White Bear Place, Paternoster Row and Charterhouse Square, where Carthusian monks were burnt at the stake during Henry VIII’s prosecution, inevitably added days to an already gargantuan task.

  One by one she printed the letters according to their position in the reference squares. Using a fine black pen, she executed each tiny word, the size of a thumbnail, with exacting neatness. Phyllis hummed aloud the first letter of every name as she spelt it out. Santos Road, Cromford Road, Mexfield Road, Galveston Road, Schubert Road, Manfred Road, St Stephen’s Gardens, Cavalry Gardens, Kendal Place, Oakhill Road.

  Ten names in one hour. Hypnotised by the mindless concentration, it was two weeks before she calculated that going at such a miserable speed, the map would take twenty-seven weeks to complete.

  Let’s run a bit faster.

  Stepping up the pace, Phyllis took daily short-cuts and added up the figures in her head. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, bath and sleep = six hours. Mapping = eighteen hours. Laundry, correspondence and household chores became delegated to Unimportant For Now status. Windowsill geraniums grew listless. Unopened mail multiplied. Sundays turned into Mondays and weeks turned into months; shirts were swapped for sweaters, lightweight trousers swapped for corduroys. Who needs a hairbrush?

  The kitchen clock ticked for no one. Birdsong chased the light and fog chased the dark. The larder shelves, overcrowded at first with tins of corned beef, smoked chicken, peas, beans, tapioca, pâté, Earl Grey tea, Stilton and fruitcake, gradually emptied.

  Over the weeks that Phyllis took to separate the piles of streets into As, Bs, Cs . . . which she then subdivided into second, third, and fourth letter piles, the name A-Z flashed up in her brain. She could hear her mother sing the words. She could hear Tony asking for a copy in a shop. She could not quite hear her father asking for one. She pictured herself giving him a beautiful, first edition.

  ‘Why, the A-Z! My first choice for a name, you know, Phyllis.’ He smiles. He likes it.

  And thus, she wrote, did I become addicted to the A-Z.

  Phyllis gathered and shuffled a thousand blank postcards. Twenty-six shoe boxes donated by her neighbour became makeshift homes for each letter of the index. Paper-cuts crisscrossed her fingers, but just like the knots that spun together in her neck, she hardly noticed them as she spread the giant game of Patience that kept her mind locked until her eyes swam in darkness. Like a swimmer deep underwater, Phyllis became oblivious to every sound except the chatter of her own mind. She lost the strains of the accordion at the St Patrick’s Day party held in the flat upstairs, the daily trundle of traffic in the streets outside and the scraping of chairs next door. When black spots darted into the skirting boards – that was the signal for her to stretch and yawn and tiptoe through the giant piles and crumple into bed. Sometimes she would dream that the wind had stolen into her room, had lifted the cards into a gentle whirlwind and tossed them up into the sky, never to be seen again.

  Then, as quickly as it began, it was all over. Or so Phyllis thought.

  Carefully packing up the sheets, she delivered them to Mr Fountain, who remained unimpressed by her marathon compilation.

  ‘I’ve finished,’ she announced, and handed him her index list.

  He flicked through it and sniffed, ‘Come back when you’ve written it out legibly. I cannot possibly read your scrawl. Look at the mistakes: D for O, C for G, P for R. Use serifs, too.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Look it up.’ And with that he shut the door on Phyllis.

  Most of us would have sloped off at that point, spluttering with curses as months of hard work had been shredded before us in seconds. Yet there is never any mention in her writing of Phyllis actually getting cross. Of breaking down in tears of frustration out of sheer exhaustion.

  ‘Never mind. What’s the use in worrying? Don’t fret, don’t fret, don’t fret,’ she said aloud to herself as she went down the stairs, trying to calm her runaway heart.

  All the tears in the Gross family had been allotted to Bella and all the shouting to Sandor. None had been left over for either Phyllis or Tony, and neither were inclined to ask for their share.

  Instead of sulking, Phyllis found the nearest Post Office and sat in a corner for over five hours, rewriting each page of her index on a new A4 notepad with tiny, square letters, her right hand cramped with the pain of her efforts. Her second visit that day to Mr Fountain brought scarcely more joy, however.

  ‘I need the index printed in 10 point and on good white paper.’

  ‘Who will do that?’

  ‘The City twenty-four-hour Service Trade Compositor.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Off Fleet Street, of course.’

  It was ten o’clock at night before Phyllis had the new index ready.

  ‘Please, please, please,’ she chanted aloud on her final ascent to Mr Fountain’s home.

  ‘That’s more like it, young lady,’ he said approvingly.

  Her project off-loaded, her head lighter than a fairy bubble, Phyllis hadn’t realised she had walked home, taking the Edgware Road, then Park Lane, Grosvenor Place, Victoria Street and finally Artillery Row. She couldn’t feel her feet and all she wanted to do was breathe and breathe and breathe in the fresh air she had deprived herself of for so long.

  Once inside, she opened the sash windows and watered the geraniums. She pushed the French net curtains to one side and took in one last heave of breath before climbing, exhausted into bed.

  That night, the wind did steal into her room and it lifted and twirled the cards into a gentle twister. Phyllis felt the breeze on her hair as the sounds of early morning traffic roused her. There was another sound, too – of rain pattering on cardboard.

  NO!
r />   Phyllis sat up and saw her raw data – the ‘T’ box – tip and spin and empty out of the window. She rushed over and looked out to see white cards free-falling in the rain. Some landed on car bonnets, some landed on the pavement (face down) or in the gutter, and one slipped on to the top of a bus.

  Phyllis raced down two flights of stairs. Stop at the lights. Stop at the lights. Please, bus, stop at the lights!

  Phyllis darted in front of the bus, paused at the traffic-lights. But it surged forward with the other vehicles and she found herself forced back on to the pavement. Like a refugee gathering rice bundles from a helicopter, she swept up armfuls of cards.

  Breathlessly, she counted and recounted from Tasso, Taunton and Templar through to Tower Hill and Tyler Close. She could not sense that any had actually gone astray, except the one that escaped on the top of the bus. But she was determined to spot the mistake in time, before Mr Fountain’s proof went to the printers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Those Who Trespass Against Us

  ‘A dirty Jew polluting our country. Every one of you with a drop of that iniquitous blood should be exterminated. What’s more, I’ll start the great purge now!’

  This diatribe had been unleashed from a certain Mr Namier, a fat-bellied pig of a man, who was also a shop buyer, as he prodded the object of his fury – Phyllis who, at half his size, could only hold up a copy of her A-Z as protection.

  A series of almighty crashes could be heard around the building as he gave one final shove, so her body bumped and thumped its way down the flight of stairs leading from his office to the door on to the street. He had snatched up her satchel and hurled a copy of the A-Z after her. Thud. Thud. Another copy of the A-Z bounced off her back.

  ‘Get out!’

  Burning with shock, Phyllis lay motionless and hunched at the bottom of the stairs, before her leather satchel was thrown on top of her with a final slap.

  ‘Don’t ever dare set foot in any of my shops again.’

  After she had collected up the A-Z copies and disappeared into the street, Phyllis caught a flash of herself in the glass of a shop window. He could tell, she thought dazedly. He could tell by the hook of my nose, by the blackness of my hair, by the olive tone of my skin.