The Journey's End

Phyllis Gross Pearsall
Creator of London A-Z map
September 25, 1906-August 28, 1996

Mrs. P's Journey has come to an end.

The poorly written book drove me nuts as I have already expressed in previous posts. Putting that aside, I was impressed with Phyllis Pearsall's life as a businesswoman and a painter. She loved painting. Watercolors and oils. She and her husband of eight years (a very unsatisfactory marriage that ended quite suddenly when Phyllis left him in Venice) traveled and painted in Spain, France, and Italy. She eventually wrote a book about that time. In her later years, after she turned her map-making company over to her employees (it is still going) she would spend hours painting and at the drop of a hat would fly off to Paris, her brushes and paints just about the only things she would pack.

As for her A-Z map of London, it is said that she worked 18-hour days in the early 1930s walking the 23,000 streets of London and making note of house numbers, buildings, museums, bus and tram routes and the backest of alleys. Then came the indexing and alphabetizing of each street, avenue, mews, courtyard, alley, and lane. She accomplished this all before computers of course. In 1936, once W.H. Smith booksellers gave the map a try, Londoners flocked to buy her A-Z.  She carted the orders herself through the city. She was a hard worker and even after she was very seriously injured in a plane wreck in the late 1940s, she carried on.

She was a spry and spirited woman. Her motto: On we go.

Mrs. P's Journey is wearing me down

Phyllis Gross's life just gets worse and worse. It is like reading mis lit...you know, misery lit...tales of family dysfunction, madness, alcoholism, mental, physical, and emotional abuse.

I find myself so irritated at the way the parents treated their children and each other. The fact that Phyllis turns out to be a spirited, artistic entrepreneur astounds me. She paints. She writes. She begins her own map publishing company. And yet she spent three to five weeks in Paris sleeping under a bridge because her parents couldn't be bothered to care for her. She marries a man, a mediocre artist, who is almost twenty years older than she is and who is jealous of her talent. That marriage lasts for eight years. And Phyllis - now Mrs. Pearsall - leaves her husband one morning while they are visiting Venice. Not a word of goodbye. Nothing like the many angry, tearful and dramatic goodbyes that she witnessed between her parents growing up.

Her leaving only opens her up to be ensnared by her mother's madness and incarceration in Bedlam, London's infamous mental hospital. There her mother, married to an alcholic American portrait painter, is subjected to tranquilizers, shock treatments, and solitary confinement.

Why does the abused, abandoned, and ignored Phyllis continue to return to her abusers for comfort? She is independent and was living and working on her own in France by the time she was 14. Continually deserted and then pulled back into her parents' chaos by a single telegram or plea for assistance.

I just keep thinking "If only her crazy parents would die, maybe she could get on with mapping the streets of London."
 

Mrs. P's Journey

Now that I have toured England, Scotland and a bit of Wales with Bill Bryson, I am setting off on another journey. This one is with Phyllis Pearsall, the woman who created the A to Z map of London.

Phyllis was born in September 1906 to a Hungarian father and Irish mother. Her father was a self-absorbed, philandering bully. Her mother was a bit of a drama queen, had an artistic spirit, and stood up to her husband. He didn't like that at all. There were many domestic scenes with tears, shouting and slamming doors, and recriminations.

Not a happy childhood for Phyllis and her brother Tony who was a year older.

But there were other compensations as Sandor Gross, her father, was driven to make a success of himself and he did -- by starting a map-making business, The Geographica Company. Soon came wealth and privilege - travel, public schools (private in England), and fantastic gifts such as the baby elephant Phyllis received for her ninth birthday.

I am about 85 pages into the book. I must say that the author, Sarah Hartley, uses colorful language and a clever turn of phrase to bring Phyllis and her crazy family to life. But she also skips about in time and is a bit heavy on the foreshadowing. One minute I am with Phyllis as a ten-year-old in school and the next I am being told that 'such-and-such happened to her mother and would happen to Phyllis twenty-five years later.'

I am having a difficult time staying with the timeline of Phyllis's life.  I am ready to move on from her childhood and the stories of her parents' quarrels and infidelities. I will persevere because I adore maps and I feel that soon, when Phyllis takes over her father's company, I will learn just how she happened to draw up all of the 23,000 streets of London.

Oh, To Be In England

Queen Elizabeth II

I have hoisted the book London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd back onto its place on the shelf. I am afraid that I will have to postpone starting such a tome until I can purchase a reading stand. It is much too heavy to hold.

But, I am still going to celebrate, in my own way, the Queen's Jubilee during September. I have quite a royal To Be Read list going.

My neighbor lent me a copy of Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island. As a longtime Anglophile, I look forward to chuckling over his observations of what makes Britain so very British.

I also have Mrs. P's Journey by Sarah Hartley that I bought in Stanford's in London a decade ago and have never read.  It is the story of Phyllis Pearsall who created the A-Zed map of London's streets.

I plan to linger in the gardens of Merry Hall by Beverley Nichols. This book is the first in a trilogy (I have them all) about his efforts to restore a Georgian house and its gardens after WWII. I have read this one before and can hardly wait to accompany Mr. Nichols down the garden path.

Of course, there are also all those lovely mysteries by Agatha Christie. I am reading one now on my Nook - A Pocket Full of Rye.

I envision many a lovely September afternoon sipping tea and reading about The Emerald Isle.

Long live the Queen.