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 chiselled 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 for 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.
The year was 1900 when Sandor Grosz landed by ferry at Dover and made tracks to London, the largest city in the Western world, where one in three of its 5.5 million citizens lived below the poverty line and 250,000 existed in workhouses. Unaware of his own miniscule but significant role in Britain’s future, Sandor was confident that here was the place to build his fortune. He was determined to become one of the 41.5 million citizens residing in Britain and a member of the British Empire, the biggest and the richest the world had ever known. An empire that covered 11.5 million square miles or one-fifth of the land mass of the globe; one in every four human beings lived within its boundaries and nearly one billion spoke the English language.
Why twenty-year-old Sandor chose to head for London at that point remains a mystery. Perhaps he had sucked dry his sources of hospitality overseas, for all he carried was one small pigskin valise and a few farthings in the pockets of his damson tweed suit. But it was more than likely that he was side-stepping enlistment for military service with the Austro-Hungarian Army by fleeing from his native Budapest. In exchange for freedom, and not for the first time in his life, he would succumb to the dragging ache of loneliness and the shame of being a penniless immigrant.
As with many men before him and many today, his priority was to secure himself a pretty young girl for a wife. Attaining respectability was, he decided, of paramount importance before setting himself up in business. What business? Well, that would come to him. He would think of something.
In those days, the Elephant and Castle area of South London was not dominated by a shocking pink shopping centre, and the pavements were not pock-marked by chewing gum or littered with McDonald’s fast-food wrappings. Flanked by parkland, the creamery was a respectable meeting place for courting couples and it was here that fifteen-year-old Bella Crowley earned pocket-money as a part-time waitress, after school and at weekends. As Sandor Grosz plotted his next move, he decided to spend his last few coins on a glass of milk. He had not eaten for two days but that would not, he thought, stop him from smiling as he breezed into the creamery one Sunday afternoon.
As this gesture did little to prompt a reaction from the other customers, he flipped character and acted self-consciously alone, nursing his tall glass and toying with the white paper straws. And then Sandor allowed his eyes to feast on the young ladies present. His waitress, he concluded, was plain. If there was one thing that he would later drum into the heads of his children, it was that both members of a couple should be good-looking.
Scanning her body, he saw that her fitted white blouse and long charcoal skirt suited her very well, and her glossy waist-length dark braids revealed fine health. Her large eyes – a hazelnut brown – were unremarkable. But she would do.
‘One more apple, one more ginger, one stewed pears and cream,’ Bella was singing in her head as she scooped out ice cream into lily-shaped glasses for three gentlemen seated under the candy-striped awning outside. The girl had found that the combination of it being a Sunday and the first sunshine of the new century, helped her to forget a pile of Latin homework that lay in wait for her return. She sighed and asked Our Lady very politely if she might be spared this ominous task.
Looking up from behind the oak serving counter her eye swerved to a small, nutmeg-coloured man who seemed ill-at-ease in his gaudy, foreign suit. He beckoned Bella over, and as she inclined her inquisitive head, he whispered very charmingly into her ear.
A proposal.
My first, she thought.
‘To marry you, I want,’ he murmured seductively.
This was the first time that Bella Crowley encountered her future husband. Like the many other women who came to know and love and later revile him, Bella Crowley often regretted the day Sandor Grosz disrupted her quiet, unsophisticated life and turned it into a Victorian high melodrama.