Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  Even then, printing had spread its talents; maps were no longer sent out to one firm only. Some specialised in monotone printing, others preferred their presses to use the four- or six-way colour process, when each one would be printed over the next – yellow, red, blue, green, brown, black. Up to four hours could be spent for ‘make-ready’ when the ink was put into the print ducts, matching the colour to the copy and getting the register as good as possible. Wash-up was even more crucial. Each press had to be spotlessly cleaned for at least another two hours, or else a run could be ruined if, say, traces of yellow were left in the press when red was printed.

  The estimates given to Phyllis varied from firm to firm. According to Phyllis, some, such as Gordon & Kerensky, or Greycaines & Weiners, nudged costs higher and higher, knowing that a woman – and an inexperienced businesswoman at that – was less likely to challenge their expertise.

  When they pulled out their printers’ rule and claimed there were too many windows or columns to a page, Phyllis was made to see how an area would have to spill over on to a new page. More pages increased the size of the print-run dramatically, and immediately elevated the cost. However, gentlemen were still in abundance in North Acton, at Lowe & Brydone, where Mr Williams considered Phyllis a long-term customer, teaching her rather than trying to blind her with science and fiddle her bill. Pin binding, he advised her, was cheaper than stitched binding; what’s more, she should ignore litho printing and instead stick with the Letterpress method, which The Geographers’ A-Z Map Company still use today. Now, because there are over 250 titles, ranging from sheet maps and atlases in black and white or full colour, to large-scale street plans of towns and cities, and small-scale road maps of the whole country, several private contractors are used, each specialising in different types of print such as sheet-fed, small-format black and white, large-format four colour, web-fed black and white, and web-fed four colour.

  At Lowe & Brydone, they hinted to Phyllis that it would be prudent if stereos of each page were kept. A stereo is a papier-mâché mould taken of each page when it is clamped by ‘furniture’ – pieces of wood or metal that are fitted around the type and into blank spaces to keep the page firm. A charge, they told Phyllis, would be made for leaving the metal standing, but then if future alterations on the map were needed, the reprint would not look uneven, as the presses would not have been repeatedly used.

  Paper provided by the printers had an extra handling charge, as Phyllis discovered to her cost. With 15,000 sheets to a run, tonnes rather than reams of paper were required. But she would only ever make an expensive mistake once. Was it cheaper to buy direct from a supplier? Who was the best in the business? Mr Brown of John Dickinson. Croxley white, from Croxley Mills, would be Mr Brown’s choice of paper, and a finer, more expensive thin-scrim (loose woven cotton, with forty threads to the inch) for the cloth-lined editions. He delivered promptly to the printers, allowing the paper sufficient time to be stacked, hung and acclimatised to the temperature and humidity. The printer’s nightmare was paper that shrank, or stretched before the job was done, as they would need to repeat the order – free of charge.

  After the phone call from Lowe & Brydone telling her that the galley proofs were ready, Phyllis followed her usual routine; she took the Central Line to their offices in Acton, where she would sit for hours and hours, correcting the proofs. That is where the professional proofreader had queried the ‘T’ index.

  ‘Is Trafalgar Square left out deliberately?’

  As with all trades, each area of speciality reserved a healthy disrespect for the other. The draughtsmen sniffed at the sometimes shoddy efforts of the printers and only gave them a sun-copy to test out the accuracy of their presses, the printers bemoaned the quality of the paper after the client had sifted through estimates for each one and selected the cheapest and most efficient contractor.

  In the early days of the A-Z, after World War Two, Phyllis took on seven good draughtsmen: Wally Cooper, Dan O’Shea, Jimmy Mayo, Ernie Sheed, Cliff Brown, Den Walker and Ron Davey.

  This was the era when an apprenticeship was not a half-hearted stab at keeping school-leavers off the streets. Five hard years the apprenticeship lasted, so those boys who had left school at fifteen and stuck to the daily practice of lettering had already proved themselves steady workers by the age of twenty-one. They would be able to letter ten street-names in an hour, in any style, drawn with a 290-gillets nib. Did they work too slowly for mistakes? No. If the wrong letter was drawn, it was carefully scratched out with a sharp scalpel knife, so as not to tear the paper.

  Many found their hands were not steady enough, that their eyes ached too much or, having been demobbed, felt confined by a deskbound job so they dropped out. By then, the drawing office was kept busy with updating the London A-Z, while finishing work on the Leeds and Birmingham ones too. Those who succeeded, according to Fred Bond, a draughtsman who joined the firm in 1950 at the age of eighteen, knew they were like gold-dust, and were rather pleased with their wage of sixty-two pence a week.

  It took a special sort of brain to scrunch up the top half of the body day in, day out, to focus a beacon of energy into a pinpoint of concentration and depict an inch of a city or town, on a window-pane-sized drawing board. Draughtsmen are a breed who live in their heads. Unlike Phyllis, those who produced the A-Z maps were not fuelled by words or speech, but were content to perch like empty, angular carcasses on high pine stools, until lunch, or a friend persuaded them to join in with a tea-break game of whist in the club room.

  Many say it is a science, but old-fashioned cartography has the feel of an ancient craft. You can tell this from the dry workshop smell of fine crisp script and the rustle of tracing paper. A blind person would derive as much sensual pleasure from the map-maker’s surroundings as a sighted one. Reams and reams of woody-smelling parchment, stacked without a breath of room between them, slightly rougher to touch, and more matt on one side than the other. How heavy and stable a ream feels, compared to a single, fragile sheet with its sharp edges that can slice into thick-skinned fingers. In the air, a blind person could trace the distinctive iron scent of pencils, sharp and slatey, and the vinegary smell of inks.

  To the right of the drawing board, lined up neatly in their place as the draughtsman would expect to find them – for draughtsmen, like surgeons, rely on the ordered precision of their instruments – are compasses, pin-thin black ink pens, brushes, erasers, rulers and set squares. The severe edges and blades of the tools are sharp, and bring back the memories of geometry lessons. That is until the chubby pots appear, gobbling up coloured pencils, paint-brushes and pens, which thankfully take the map-makers from the coldness of the technical world into the reassuring domain of artists and craftsmen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  There’s More to Lose than Getting Lost

  Through a crowded street, Phyllis chased a man. Sometimes he looked back and she caught sight of her father shouting, and sometimes he would stop and slowly twist his face towards her, revealing the dry features of Mr Cruise. Just before waking up, Phyllis would feel a rise of panic as the man ran ahead, dropping copies of the A-Z, one at a time, and as she bent down to pick them up, she found their pages blank and the cover muddied and ruined.

  In her sleep, Phyllis could never catch up with the man, and when she awoke, was confused as to whether her legs ached from running in her sleep or from the strain of the day before. Fortunately, the anxiety that tried to smother her at night was kept at bay during the day by constant activity. At speed, Phyllis navigated every twist and turn that each hour, day and week would bring to her new enterprise. The smart navy suit and corporate smile were swapped for a rough pair of cotton trousers and a light shirt. She did not need a watch to know that it took exactly twenty-one minutes to wheel the barrow, fully-loaded with copies of the A-Z, from Paddington to Euston, and another eighteen to King’s Cross.

  In the same day that stockpiles of A-Zs grew up the walls of her bedsitter, so too would they shr
ink within hours. Selfridges and Harrods had heard about the atlas, and told their buyers to sign her up. Sales of the A-Z soared in such a way that it made Phyllis laugh with astonishment, but what was not funny was the challenge of actually getting the maps out there to the customer. Money could not stretch to a delivery boy, so from morning to night, unbeknown to them, the stores relied on Phyllis, wheeling copies around London on foot.

  Efficiency did not extend to the drudgery of paperwork. The concentration that Phyllis had poured on to the indexing had now all leaked away, and she dreaded facing up to the monotony of form-filling. Stacks of order forms lay in a huddle under the tea pot, and on the kitchen table, until the secretary at Woolworths summoned Phyllis for a meeting.

  ‘Order forms!’ she barked. ‘You must get the hang of these, Mrs Pearsall, or else you will go broke. First, get our printer to do labels for each of our London stores. You may send us invoices for his work. Then you will send us a written receipt for each order as soon as you get it. If you do not follow the rules, we can no longer buy from you. Good day, Mrs Pearsall!’

  As the rest of her building lay asleep in their beds, Phyllis drank endless cups of tea to fuel her battle with basic accounting that would drag on until two or three in the morning. While pencilling columns in a sixpenny cash book from Woolworths that read MONEY IN and MONEY OUT, figures and pounds, shillings and pence were pushing her beloved painting further out of reach.

  ‘Be patient,’ she told herself.

  Profit and Loss, Mrs Naylor had warned her, were the two most crucial elements to keep a watch on. ‘Do not let your Loss overtake your Profit. Do not borrow a penny, not from anyone.’ Phyllis had paid for the printing, publishing, packing and expenses out of her own savings. Personal spending had dwindled to a meagre diet of bread, milk, jam, fresh salmon and potatoes. But to take a salary? It had honestly never occurred to her.

  The humming background noise that had spurred her on as she heaved packed bundles downstairs, into filthy goods lifts, dusty warehouses and newsagents, was the urgent reminder that her father would be arriving in London in less than two weeks’ time.

  If she was expecting praise from Sandor, then Phyllis was a fool. In New York, his own newly established mapping company was expanding to nourish his greed. Why, wondered Sandor, could his own daughter not work for him in America? As with his wife, he would have had no intention of paying her. How much harder it was, he had discovered, to keep an eye on his daughter at this great distance. No one knew the trade like he did, and for all he could tell, Phyllis could be bringing his name into disrepute, although the name of Gross had long been forgotten by the mapping fraternity.

  Whether he was loath to admit to her talent, or was blind to it, as Sandor set sail on the Mauretania from New York, he already had plans to buy her business. The memory of his bankruptcy would not be shaken off, and no matter how much the Americans warmed to his quick buck success, Britain was where he longed to be accepted back into the business world.

  On his arrival, the warm hugs and proud cries of, ‘Let me look at you!’ – greetings from a father who had been absent for seven years, never happened. Seeing his tousle-haired daughter waving, smiling and holding out her offering of what he sensed would be a disaster of a map, such niceties became irrelevant, as his temper slid out from beneath him.

  The A-Z Street Atlas of London. Produced under the direction of Alexander Gross FRGS.

  ‘Look at these pages, bled!’ he ranted, outraged. ‘Look at these outlays! You will be the ruin of me. How dare you conduct business from a tawdry bedsitter. I’m a member of the Royal Geographical Society – what are you trying to do to my reputation?’

  Whether Phyllis was being sincere when she agreed with him is unlikely, but agree she did.

  ‘I am so sorry, Papa. You are right. It’s been fun, but I am no good at business. Back to painting for me.’

  Year after year of doing wrong (according to her father) and saying the wrong thing (according to her father) had inoculated Phyllis against the rejection and scorn conveyed in Sandor’s wrath. Was she hurt? No. As she saw it, her best effort was simply not good enough. But her sweet calm voice caught Sandor out. Frightened him. Who else would secure his name in London? Who else would follow his advice, orders and care so little for financial reward?

  ‘Wait,’ he said hastily. ‘You must rent an office. I will found the company for you. The Geographer’s Map Company – how about I give you half? You are too airy-fairy to run it on your own. It needs a man – I’ll bring Tony in. Let’s see if you can put all your mischief right.’

  True to his word, within two days Sandor had secured two offices for £1 a week, above a café in Napier House, 24–27 High Holborn. It had, Sandor revealed to his daughter, all the modern conveniences: central heating, telephones, a caretaker, a lift and lavatories. He hired the voluptuous Miss Hemelryk as secretary, the equally beguiling Miss Fox as filing clerk, purchased two desks, four chairs, a Remington typewriter and a filing cabinet. The most useful addition to the A-Z team was one seventeen-year-old delivery boy, Gordon Lester, whose gangly frame contained enough energy to distribute packs of A-Z maps all over London from morning to night.

  ‘You are here at the beginning,’ Sandor declared to them on their first day, his arms wafting across the newly painted office, ‘at the start of something great. Work hard, for your reward will be employment with the most excellent map publishers in the world.’

  The staff looked at their feet. How, they wondered, could a two-room amateur outfit go anywhere? They were small fry in a city of big fishes. All the enthusiasm in the world could not make up for a thin pay packet every Friday, and within a year, Miss Fox would tire of the cramped office and be lured away to the more frivolous world of lingerie at the department store, Gamages.

  ‘Who is paying for this, Papa?’

  ‘You are. Efficiency is bound to increase turnover.’

  Of course, Sandor could never actually be gracious enough to tell his daughter that he was abandoning his half-share of the company and that she could do with it now as she pleased, but Phyllis knew that restoring his pride rested on her coaxing the business into life. Only truly dedicated hard work, she believed, could bring success and without panicking about the enormous task ahead of her, Phyllis plunged her heart, soul, time and money into the uncharted territory of A-Z mapping.

  Secretly, she must have felt pleased that once again, her mind, always quick to turn away from emotional confrontation, had been genuinely diverted.

  Within another twenty-four hours, Sandor had left for New York, his mission completed. What really irked him was that his son could barely raise a smile at the offer of running a family business.

  ‘I’m an artist – what has this got to do with me? Count me out, Papa.’

  Instead, Sandor had left his silly daughter in charge. Keen but incompetent, albeit solvent at the moment, he believed it would only be a matter of weeks before she disgraced herself and he would have to step in.

  The disgrace never came. In sole charge of four members of staff, including a draughtsman, Phyllis no longer needed to steam through the streets with deliveries. Instead, she used the time to manage the office, to get to grips with the accounting, the selling and updating the index.

  A more experienced entrepreneur would have fretted about the state of finances, which ran (as Sandor had done once too often) close to the edge. As far as Phyllis was concerned, there was either Solvent or Bankrupt, and every weekday she would arrive long before the café below the office had opened its doors for the first fry-up, and would stay at her desk until ten or eleven o’clock at night, to ensure her company remained the former.

  Was she lonely? Walking away from her friends the year before had not proved as painful as she’d expected. Side-lined and side-tracked, their presence became irrelevant. A man, or a relationship with a man had become unthinkable, unworkable. Whatever would I want one for? she thought. She would never make the mistake again of r
elying on another person for happiness – especially not a man.

  In a strange way, Phyllis found flirting with the world of business quite exciting. The challenge of being a single woman trying to be taken seriously by difficult men had not dissuaded her from moving onwards. After all, some men were charming and had given her more than her money’s worth of free advice. The initial test of mapping London in her memory had gone like a dream, printing disasters had been averted and now her little A-Z hobby had stepped up a gear into a genuine full-time occupation.

  Her beloved painting was still squashed away at the back of her mind. Creative release would burst free at weekends, when rather than catch up on sleep, Phyllis would take the first train to the Borders of Scotland to paint in solitude, or stay in London, painting the river, or go down to Hove to paint the sea. Holidays she considered an unaffordable luxury until ten years later, when she would be forced to take a long physical and mental break.

  Diligence can only make up for so much, and with no one to advise her, mistakes were inevitable. ‘Meet your problems head on,’ Bella had always declared, before hurling herself into an argument with her husband. The first serious mistake to touch her collar was the Inland Revenue waving a red, Final Demand.

  For months, Phyllis had persuaded herself that the long, tedious forms might wait, so she went, in person, as Bella would have also chosen to do, to plead for assistance.