‘If you do not understand the forms and you do not understand the rules, then we suggest, Mrs Pearsall, that you make use of a good accountant.’
‘How does one go about that, sir?’
‘How does one conduct a business, madam?’
His rudeness prompted the memory of one of her wealthier, Hyde Park clients, Amy Binder, who had talked about her husband, BH, as she sat for her portrait. He was a self-made man, she had proudly declared, rising from a Nottingham railway booking clerk, to a partner of the chartered accountants Binder Hamlyn & Co. in the City.
There was her accountant. But even an accountant could not save her from the ignorance that a copy of the A-Z had to be donated to the British Museum and other libraries, or that the Ordnance Survey were owed substantial royalties.
I am not taking a salary, she wrote in her next letter to her father, until I am certain that every aspect of the finances has been taken into account.
As her appetite for money was poor, the financial burden that she single-handedly carried did not stop her from sleeping at night. But the human burden did. In an interview with Anthea Hall for the Sunday Telegraph in September 1986, she recalled: ‘Very early on, and I had been responsible for the index, a doctor wrote to me saying that one of his patients had died because of a mistake in our London A-Z. I hadn’t the courage to look it up for ten whole days. When I did, I found it was his error, not mine. There were several streets with the same name and different postal districts. We make it clear to everyone who works in the company that lives depend on us.’
Before the end of 1936, Phyllis was called to task again, with a serious warning from her father: ‘Have you seen King Edward with his fancy woman? Magazines here have photographed them on a cruise, in the Adriatic. I know that look. He is not giving up this woman for anyone, crown or no crown. Stand by with a Coronation route.’
When on 11 December 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated, the map for the Coronation of his brother, George VI, had been in preparation for over a month and required a further three months to complete. Two print-runs of 20,000 maps were delivered to newsagents and stationers all over London in May 1937. At 6d each, the maps sold out in two days and the profit was quickly spent on the salary of the first A-Z sales representative, an ex-vicar by the name of Mr Norton.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
On the Warpath
War is inevitable. What are you going to do about it? Have you prepared a map of Europe for the Daily Telegraph? Why do I always have to explain the self-evident? Too much painting, I presume.
The short letter from her father in July 1939 had been opened and read, then left face down on the kitchen table. The anger in his five-day-old words could not seep into Phyllis’s mind and twist themselves into a worry. It was a Saturday after all, she thought to herself, and anyway, Lady Ilchester was expecting her early that morning, to begin a painting of Holland House, in Holland Park. The war could wait.
Now that business matters were running more smoothly, Phyllis treated herself to a lengthy painting session every weekend. It was the perfect antidote to her other life. Anxieties accumulated during the week were rubbed away by two whole days devoted to painting whatever she fancied. The Saturday before, she had travelled to Tenby Bay in Wales and painted the lifeboat slip; the one before that, she had spent working on a water-colour commission of the Ministry of Transport in Whitehall.
Now in the cool morning light, as she became absorbed in mixing a russet colour for the red-bricked Tudor façade, a feeling of foreboding wove its way into her head. The war, it seemed, would not wait.
Stocks of the A-Z had recently run quite low and once, while up in Pembrokeshire, where she was painting a view of Saundersfoot bay, Phyllis had felt so uneasy about supplies that she had sent a telegram to Miss Hemelryk (who had taken on the additional position of part-time Major with the Terriers – the British Army’s Territorial and Volunteer Reserve): A-Z LOW. REPRINT TEN THOUSAND.
The jitters had shaken Phyllis quite late on. For the past year, ever since Neville Chamberlain had delivered his nervous ‘Peace in our Time’ speech, the government had criss-crossed the capital with air-defence plans and built air-raid shelters.
What a shame, Phyllis had brooded, after an unproductive meeting with a Ministry of Defence official, that they think my air-raid shelter map of London too risky. It had been her own idea, to distribute thousands of them as a free public service to offices and homes. Instead, after a cup of weak tea and an hour kept waiting, she was informed that despite being a map publisher, she would not be party to any classified information.
‘I suggest you keep your eyes above ground,’ she was told. ‘What is more, Mrs Pearsall, in the event of war, a defence regulation would prohibit the sale of maps on or over one inch to a mile which is, I understand, the exact scale of your A-Z.’
Her painting of Holland House had somehow built itself on the canvas, while Phyllis had been deep in thought. She was interrupted by the sound of Lady Ilchester’s voice.
‘My dear, you have not eaten all day,’ said her hostess, suddenly walking into her vision, carrying a plate of cheese and biscuits. ‘Do you realise it is late afternoon? Please, dear, don’t feel you have to finish today.’
Time, from then on sprang in distorted leaps and bounds. No one could have foreseen that over the next six years, Phyllis would produce eight perfectly timed war maps that sold out each time. Of course, there was competition from other publishers, such as Sandor’s former firm Geographia, which had been bought for less than half a crown by his competitors, but like a blinkered race horse, Phyllis did not see anything except the finishing line.
The newspapers had not yet printed reports that Germans were massing on the Polish frontiers, and it was not until 3 September that Britain declared war on Germany. However, as Phyllis walked home to Horseferry Road via Kensington High Street, Sloane Street and down past Victoria, a strange sort of anticipation fizzed through everyone she passed, as if something as destructive as a war might actually spark up their daily routine.
The minute Phyllis shut the door of the flat behind her, she telephoned Mr Fountain. ‘I’m going to buy a Stiehelers’ Hand Atlas and send you the relevant pages,’ she announced. ‘We urgently need to do a map of Europe. On it we must include the autobahns, the railways, and both the civil and Luftwaffe aerodromes.’
His melancholy voice could not even raise itself in a time of crisis. ‘You’d better get the information to me fast. You are just like your father, Mrs Pearsall – thinking I can do this in no time. Well, I can’t. So you will have to wait.’
What Phyllis did not know was that Mr Fountain too had a very bad feeling. So bad, that he worked until dawn for several weeks, in order to draw up an additional map, that of the Western Front, highlighting the Maginot and Siegfried Lines, with semi-underground forts and anti-tank defences.
Sandor was right. The then Daily Telegraph editor, one Mr Pulvermacher, invited Phyllis to his Fleet Street office as soon as she had asked his secretary for an appointment.
‘Let me see your map of Europe, Mrs Pearsall. Unroll it, if you will.’
A tall man in a black suit, Pulvermacher held the map up to the sunlight at his window and scanned the lines back and forth.
‘Let me know when you’re ready with a dummy – paper, cover paper, map folded and tipped in. Give me a quote for runs of 100,000, 250,000, 500,000 and 1,000,000. Now you must excuse me . . .’
As Phyllis took the usual route home past Whitehall, her feet trod a little quicker when her eye caught the sickening additions of sandbags, barbed wire and sentries.
To occupy her mind as the dummy for Europe was put together, Phyllis spent hours sewing black serge linings into curtains for the office and her bedsitter. I’m too near the river, she thought as she hung the heavy drapes in her bedsitter. I must move. Then she saw to it that every window and glass door was stuck with strips of brown tape to prevent glass splinters, should bombs go off.
Exactly one wee
k later, Phyllis was shown back into Mr Pulvermacher’s office, holding the new map.
‘As you will see,’ said Mr Pulvermacher, his face unsmiling, ‘I already have a map in front of me. It has been drawn by Geographia, your father’s old firm. It was already under way, you see. We could not let you cream off the market, nor could we publish without your additional information. I’m terribly sorry. I’m afraid this map will be on sale tomorrow.’
‘No, no,’ said Phyllis, smiling as she always did at painful moments. ‘It’s my fault, I’m the sucker.’
Without pausing to waste her time on anger or disappointment, she moved on, her next stop The Times, who turned her away, followed by the Daily Express. Here she was told: ‘We don’t believe it will come to war, Mrs Pearsall.’
Finally dispirited, Phyllis trailed over to Mr Fountain. ‘All your hard work has gone to waste,’ she reported miserably. ‘Nobody wants it. I’ve been a terrible fool.’
For the first time ever, the morose fellow actually smiled at his employer. ‘I’ve done my job,’ he said. ‘Now you do yours. Go and sell them this.’
Stubbing out his cigarette, he unrolled on his drawing board a magnificent, detailed map of the Western Front.
This time, the editor of the Daily Telegraph could not print her map fast enough, and gave it a half back page in the Saturday edition.
The Daily Express agreed to see Phyllis on the afternoon of Friday, 1 September. Out of the whole of Fleet Street, their building was the only one not to be bolstered by sandbags and tape. ‘We’re not jitterbugs here,’ the editor said, showing Phyllis to a chair. No sooner had he put on his spectacles to examine the Western Front map than voices gathered in the corridor outside. A news editor burst in without knocking.
‘Hitler’s invaded Poland!’
‘Sandbags!’ shrieked the editor. ‘Get me rolls of sticky tape. Our policy’s changed to war! War, everybody! War!’
Phyllis did not warm to his business style. How could she under such conditions?
Apparently unnoticed, she slipped away.
On Sunday, 3 September, the afternoon was bright and sunny. The day before, Phyllis had removed the invaluable map originals and the A-Z index stereos from their safe-deposit box in the Holborn branch of the Midland Bank. This was a timely act, since in the winter of 1941, the bank took a direct hit from a bomb, and the A-Z originals would have smouldered in the rubble.
As Britain declared war on Germany, Phyllis was being driven in an open-top sports car to a friend’s house in Peasmarsh, Sussex. There she carefully packed her precious cargo into a steel-lined safe built under the garage before returning to London.
‘I do wish you would move out of the centre, Phyllis,’ another friend, Joan Walker-Smith, had said to her on the telephone that morning. The two had been at Roedean together. ‘Why don’t you come and stay with me here, while my husband is away with his regiment? You know how I would love the company.’
Lonely air-raid sirens wailed as if they would never stop, when Phyllis arrived back in Town. It was past midnight, and the empty black streets seemed to shut her out. Suddenly the thought of staying with Joan in Golders Green seemed the most comforting prospect imaginable. Like so many others during the war, Phyllis made instant decisions, for there was no time to analyse things and mull them over, although like everyone else she realised that one wrong move, in any direction, could cost her her life. Without stopping for a break, by candlelight, she packed the furniture from her bedsitter into a taxi and then unloaded it in her office, before heading off to Golders Green, carrying one small suitcase and a paper bag stuffed with tea, potted ham and flour.
In her diary, on 27 September she wrote: Today Poland’s resistance collapsed. A sorry day. My stomach turns with guilt, knowing that our map sales of the Western Front have run away with themselves. I am making money out of slaughter.
Pandemonium, from six o’clock in the morning until midnight, by wire, by telephone and by mail, the orders and re-orders flood in. Time is playing tricks again. I need more hours. My hands know the routine of invoice, pack and label. I’m a factory girl! Lester delivers from dawn until dusk, never without a cheery whistle. His mother makes us both corned beef sandwiches and once the sirens start, we listen to big band music on my wireless, as we sort out the deliveries for the next day. Did I ever ballroom dance? No, but somehow such a frivolous thing now seems the most beautiful thing in the world. My atlas is still bedtime reading by candlelight. Painting could not be further from my thoughts. I dream of maps. I dream of Hitler’s armies marching on and on. But I cannot bring myself to order a map of Great Britain, for fear that it will bring Hitler closer to an invasion.
On dark winter nights as a student in Paris, Phyllis revealed in her memoirs that she had often huddled against the radiators in the Bibliothèque Saint Geneviève and read the German High Command apologias for losing the First World War. Now she retrieved the information; the fault did not lie with the Schlieffen Plan, but the Germans believed their circle of attack began too far south and ought to have begun in the countries north of Belgium.
Could Hitler’s moves be anticipated? Using the sharp instinct inherited from her father, plus her own historical knowledge, Phyllis instructed Mr Fountain to produce large-scale maps of Scandinavia, The Low Countries and Northern France. However fast he worked, though, Mr Fountain could not keep up with the next burst of developments, as Italy almost immediately declared war against the Western Allies, and twelve days later on 22 June, France signed an armistice with Hitler. Then came a telephone call from Mr Prescott of Woolworths.
‘OK, now tell me that you have already thought about this one. What we need right now is a War Map of the World.’
‘Give me two days, Mr Prescott,’ Phyllis said calmly. ‘I have three thousand flat sheets on standby in the office. I need to fold them down and tip them into covers. What price are you looking at?’
‘I can do sixpence. But we’ll process the branches, Mrs Pearsall.’
An experienced professional would have taken the originals and printed a trade edition on cheap paper. But to her cost, Phyllis put speed above profit. Telegrams of orders flew in: REPRINT 10,000. Such was the demand, that although profit eluded her, so did losses. ‘Next time,’ Phyllis told herself, ‘we use the cheap paper.’
Next time would be a mere two weeks later, when she realised from the wireless news bulletins that the Mediterranean was shifting into focus but had not been charted effectively.
‘Mr Fountain, I’m sorry to do this to you, but with everything moving south, I’m thinking of Italy and Egypt. Can you do me a War Map of the Mediterranean?’
On 4 July 1940, a statutory order arrived in a brown On His Majesty’s Service envelope at Napier House, prohibiting the sale of the A-Z atlas. Phyllis had always known that one day soon, her favourite map would need to be withdrawn for security reasons. During a mad week of trips by tram, bus, Underground, train and on foot, Phyllis and Lester retrieved 20,000 copies from every wholesaler and retailer. As they wrapped the bundles in flood-proof plastic, before locking them in a rented Clapham warehouse, the strange sadness of leaving behind her atlases, that held between the covers years of her effort and strength, overwhelmed Phyllis.
‘On we go,’ she told herself shakily. ‘On we go, Lester.’
‘Wilco, Mrs Pearsall.’
The public binged on titbits of information and were greedy for more, which Phyllis hastened to provide. The War Map of the Mediterranean reached the stores, but the War Map of Russia never did. The sinking by German submarines of merchant ships carrying timber, meant that paper was severely rationed and prices became too exorbitant.
Phyllis sent telegrams to her father, who had happily reproduced each of the maps so far that his daughter had forwarded to him, and thereby made a tidy sum, to see if the war had strangled America yet.
NO PAPER HERE. HOW ABOUT YOU?
GOOD HERE. KEEP GOING. DON’T STOP MAPS.
Sandor did n
ot understand. His imagination, caught up in the sparkle of profit, had for once lost track of the reality of life in London.
Darling Papa,
You must understand me when I say that I cannot carry on the business here. One takes an order from a shop; and say by the evening or next morning when I might deliver it, the place is more than likely just a heap of suffocating rubble in a partly demolished street. Jagged ruins of windowless houses, with a bath or a fireplace hanging out of an open floor. London is a macabre parody of a stage set. One has to step through the chaos of hose-pipes and broken debris. Ambulance crews, firemen and neighbours dig out the dying and injured buried alive.
Anyhow, I have been called up for Government Service but cannot reveal any more to you than that.
Your loving daughter, Phyllis.
For three nights a week, Phyllis enrolled for Civil Defence duty and undertook fire-watching from the Napier House roof. As she watched the blips and bursts of lights and flames that shrieked above the city, Phyllis could not bear to think of her streets being wiped out. Like most Londoners, she wished there was something she could do to protect the capital.
On the first four nights of the Blitz, the systematic night-time bombing of London by the German Luftwaffe, between one and two thousand Londoners lost their lives.
Phyllis had long since been able to function on a minimum amount of sleep, but she found the real strain came from the deafening noise – the incessant rap of anti-aircraft gunning, the drawn-out drone of aeroplanes and the sneering whistle of bombs.
There was one particular incident on which Phyllis would not be drawn. She and the caretaker’s wife had been crouched on the roof for fire-duty when a bomb dropped on High Holborn. Both women were blown down the stairs by the blast, but their tin hats stopped them from getting more than bruised legs. A silence crushed them before they heard screams out on the street. A direct hit on a packed evening bus heading to Islington had scattered limbs, heads, shoes, torsos and hats, among shards of glass and metal, for a few hundred yards.
Mrs P's Journey Page 26