Turn it upside down, twist it to the west and then to the east, try to flatten it and ease out the creases. Do what you can to make it any the clearer, but a map will not provide any answers, it will only provide choices – for rarely will it reveal a single road or lone path to any one destination. Perhaps four or five are marked, some spindly, criss-crossing rivers, or entangling small villages and some are bolder, running smooth and broad like a confident smile. Once your eye has flicked back and forth from one road to the other, exploring the options, measuring the quickest way, you reach a decision and set off. What you do not yet know is whether your choice was, in fact, the right one.
The paths that beckoned Phyllis Pearsall on her life’s journey appeared to her as young as two years of age. It is true that the first of these might have guided her to a cosy role as a wife and mother, her days uncomplicated by business concerns. The second path beguiled Phyllis into the world of mapping. It was her parents’ world – a grand world of oceans and mountains, that encompassed the slipperiest of details, from the smallest speck of a house number in a tiny street terrace, to sizes and scales as big as the universe, charting battles in foreign lands and wars over foreign seas.
It was an unexplored world, and as a little girl she would try to piece it together as it flashed past sun-filled rail carriages as Mr and Mrs Gross bundled their children on last-minute trips across Europe to Austria, Hungary, Italy and France.
Every snapshot of experience, be it the bloated body of a little drowned body bobbing among the debris in a Venice canal, or the Polish count who shot himself dead on the beach in front of his fiancée after losing his fortune in Monte Carlo, Phyllis would see or perhaps learn to see through her mother’s compassionate eyes.
‘There’s always too much for my eyes to take in,’ Phyllis would declare as an older woman, and it was spoken with a sense of panic which seemed to increase, rather than decrease with age. Even on her regular trips from her home in Sussex to the National Portrait Gallery in London, she would concentrate on looking at only one or two portraits. ‘That is quite enough,’ she would say after an hour, as if her insight into those people she had focused on was as much a burden as a delight.
Her father’s eye had a harshness to it, a meanness which, despite an instinct for adventure, could not help but dissect a hotel or a dining cart or a theatre for opportunities, whether it be of the business or female kind.
Whether Phyllis ever regretted the influence her parents had on her life can only be guessed. She certainly never criticised them in that respect. As for role models, Phyllis could not have wished for stronger ones when it came to Sandor and Bella’s enlightened approach to work. Imagine that your father, pressed and polished from his black shoes to his winged collar and morning coat, stepped into the office with his umbrella neatly rolled and flipped open his gold pocket watch to check his punctuality – 8 a.m. – every morning without fail.
One hour later, your mother, having overseen your breakfast and instructed the nurse, swept into those same offices at 55 Fleet Street, Geographia, named after a shop your father had once passed in Berlin – Photographia. Your father’s desk was set square in the middle of his large office; in that same office, in an alcove, your mother was seated at a smaller desk. When they returned together from the City, they greeted you at 6 p.m. They were business partners. They were the new breed of middle class; aspirational and ambitious. But for a young woman and a mother at that, to have been in professional employment of her own volition and with the blessing of her husband was almost unheard of then.
Together Bella and Sandor oversaw their new map publishing firm which, until its expansion after five years, worked exclusively for the Daily Telegraph. The pair were, according to Lord Burnham, ‘making milestones in newspaper history’.
Sandor greedily anticipated that the rumblings in Eastern Europe would flare into bloodier conflicts and thus secure his fortune, according to his son Tony, who wrote in his diary:
In the end wars did him a world of good. Everybody wanted maps into which to stick little pin flags to mark the battle lines, defeats and victories. So you can see I was brought up more or less as a rich man’s son.
After three mapping scoops, Sandor signed a five-year contract with the Daily Telegraph. The first was his 1908 map of Bulgaria after Prince Ferdinand proclaimed himself Tsar and his country independent of Turkey; this was chased by his map of Bosnia-Herzogovina after Franz-Josef annexed it to his Austro-Hungarian Empire in celebration of his Diamond Jubilee; and finally Geographia produced a map of Crete when its Assembly voted for union with Greece.
The flurry of commissions brought in by Sandor ruffled Mr Duncan’s cartography department. The speed and demands of a newspaper had been a revelation to their time-sensitive work. They wilted under ‘the Guvnor’s’ new Stop Press mania and were pushed to cut, to mask, to join, to fudge, their professional training compromised, their reputations at risk.
‘Do not dare tell me you will not finish on time,’ Sandor railed.
‘Better get it out inaccurate than not get it out at all,’ Sandor was warned in turn by Sir John Le Sage, editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Sandor returned later to the office on most nights, having stopped off at an Embankment stall so that he might ply his men with ham rolls and tea and his own supply of cherry brandy.
The last touches and crucial final checks on the maps came sometimes as late as 5.30 a.m. Then the transfers were rolled and run through the early morning streets to the printer’s in Shepherdess Walk, off the City Road. Bribing the printer in order to gazump another print run was not uncommon. ‘Just the once,’ rang out as regularly as the damp-collar panic felt by Mr Duncan. Time and time again Geographia crashed into their deadlines with only luck as a back-up. With the first dawn chorus, elation and triumph rippled through the staff. But their contentment only lasted until the next map order – and often that was the same day.
In her memoirs, Phyllis recalled the first time that she, aged two, and Tony, aged three, were permitted into the Geographia offices. Not, of course, during the sweaty confusion of a deadline crisis – for that spectacle might have left a less pleasant impression on the little girl. It was on the occasion of the Lord Mayor’s show – and the floats and procession then, as they do today, headed west from St Paul’s Cathedral and up Fleet Street. Dressed smartly in a flowery frock, with black patent shoes and her hair neatly brushed, Phyllis stood on the balcony, flicking a Union Jack flag back and forth against the crowds below. In her mouth she sucked hard on a sugar cube covered in camphor oil, administered by her mother to stop the November air causing the sniffles. She, Phyllis and Tony were joined by Sandor to cheer on the parade. For Sandor, the happy picture they made sealed his great satisfaction.
To be flanked by my own handsome family, in my own office, with my own staff, above the throngs, I feel, he told himself, as patriotic as a true Londoner.
‘Why doesn’t little Phyllis have a go at a wee drawing of a map?’ suggested Mr Duncan afterwards, as a reward for her impeccable behaviour. Lifting her on to his high pine stool, he balanced a pen in her hand and guided it to the ink saucer on his bench. He dipped it once into the oily black liquid and then drifted it over to the tracing paper, where he gently steadied her awkward fingers. Phyllis held her breath as she began to mark an outline of a map. Bella watched her daughter’s tiny fist wobble and swerve. Several minutes passed. The lines on the paper were heavy with splotches as the pen dribbled, but her hand kept moving until her imaginary country was born. They applauded her fierce concentration.
‘That’s a fine map you’ve drawn, Phyllis,’ said Mr Duncan. ‘How I hope, Mrs Gross,’ he said to Bella, ‘that your daughter follows in your footsteps.’