A FILM should be made of the life of artist and writer Phyllis Pearsall – or Aunty Pig as she is called by Chris Patten, Governor of Hong Kong. An astute, mischievous and spritely 87-year-old, she was born into poverty, once tried to hit her mother’s boyfriend over the head with a bottle, walked 3,000 miles and has advised Prince Edward on his love life.

She has also endured the violent murder of friends in the Spanish Civil War, survived an air crash in a Dakota, had a Damascene conversion, starved, went blind and regained her sight, learned to drive at the age of 59 with 259 lessons, and met the Queen.

We’re sitting in her unprepossessing flat in Shoreham-by-Sea. She is tiny with silver hair, navy slacks and flowery shirt. She’s the founder and managing director of the A-Z Map Company and drives, sometimes daily, to its Sevenoaks offices. ‘I go to see what the darlings are up to,’ says Phyllis. Her company grew out of her inspired belief in the need for a comprehensive map of London streets.

In 1935, maps hadn’t been updated since 1918, so she stalked 3,000 miles of London streets, rising at 5am, walking daily for 18 hours and listing 23,000 roads. After an unfortunate accident with a shoe box of ‘Tr’ street names, she omitted Trafalgar Square from the original proof for her street map; luckily a beady compositor spotted the mistake.

Initially nobody was interested in her maps. ‘They hadn’t seen women reps and just asked, starting to fondle one, whether I was beddable,’ says Phyllis, with wonderfully old-fashioned enunciation. ‘I said I was too busy doing the maps to be beddable.’ WH Smith gave her her first order and received its initial delivery in a borrowed wheelbarrow. More than 12 million maps have now been sold.

IN 1986, she went to Buckingham Palace for her MBE: ‘The Queen put the medal on one and then one curtsied, which I couldn’t do very well. So I toppled over but somebody saved me.’ She was invited to ‘luncheon’ in 1990. ‘Prince Edward and I discussed his girlfriends. I told him he should look for kindness.’

The Prince and Phyllis discussed sincerity. ‘He said, ‘I’ll find a girl fascinating, charming and fall for her, then just one sentence can finish it. Just one remark will suddenly end one’s interest in her if it’s not sincere’. Yes, he was talking entirely about girls.’

Phyllis’s charming tract, An Artist’s Pilgrimage in Business, is published this week. She turned her business into a trust in 1966; and the book, illustrated with her line drawings, describes her Utopian philosophy. Art is her ‘passion’. She’s painted for Sir Richard Luce and a commission for the former Speaker, Lord Weatherill. ‘Dear ‘Jack’, bless his heart (he has a twin sister, ‘Jill’), is coming to the exhibition.’ (The Little Gallery, Arundel, 25 October.) In December she’s going to Hong Kong to paint, staying with Chris and Lavender Patten. ‘I’ve known Lavender since before she was born,’ says Phyllis, who helped Lavender’s mother, the late Joan Walker-Smith, through the traumatic birth after the death of her husband. Last year Phyllis stayed in Government House painting a commission for the Pattens. ‘Chris is the most huggable of men with a tremendously affectionate nature,’ she says. ‘He calls me Pig because those were my initials before I was married.’ Phyllis was educated at Rodean, which was ‘awful’. In 1919 her family struggled across war-torn Europe, seeking her grandmother, and arriving in Budapest after the communist rebellion. ‘People were starving and being crucified. Jews were being thrown into the Danube with weights on them. When I returned to Rodean and mentioned I’d been in a revolution, they said, ‘What do you mean by coming back in the autumn in your winter hat?” Her father was a Hungarian emigre and her mother Irish Italian. Once they pitched up together at the school, loudly accusing each other of adultery. ‘I hid in the airing cupboard,’ says Phyllis. Later, scandalously, her mother turned up on horseback, wearing men’s clothes and with her lover, the portrait painter Alfred Orr.

WHEN Phyllis was 14, her father, a map maker, wrote saying she should get a winter coat on credit, because he was bankrupt. He fled to America and Phyllis left school and took a taxi home with no money. The Maharaja of Patiala (being painted by Alfred) opened the door in full regalia and paid. ‘Then Mother said, ‘Alfred has an artistic temperament and couldn’t possibly have a little girl in the house. Get a live-in job’.’ How did Phyllis feel being abandoned and rejected? ‘But my mother was infatuated, dear,’ she replies, surprised at the question. ‘I’ve always accepted whatever happens.’

Phyllis went to Paris and slept under bridges, under newspapers. Was she pestered sexually? ‘Not in the way girls are these days. There was a feeling of camaraderie.’ She also starved, frequently for three days and once for 10. ‘So did Vladimir Nabokov. And we used to watch James Joyce sitting blind and miserable in a cafe.’ She taught English then studied philosophy and Byzantine art at the Sorbonne, supporting herself by selling pictures and articles.

Back in London, aged 21, she married a struggling artist 17 years her senior. ‘I’d just rescued Mother from being murdered by her husband. I was bringing an empty whisky bottle down on his head because he was strangling her. That’s how they lived,’ she laughs. Phyllis was thrown out for ‘interfering’, and took up with the Irish artist she bumped into on the way out.

They went to live in Spain but her husband, Richard, was ‘always angry and frightened’ and she found life impossible. ‘I walked out after eight years, without saying a word. That’s the worst thing you can do to anybody. I wouldn’t do it now. I’d tell him first.’ They didn’t have children. ‘It just didn’t happen. When I was young I wanted 12.’

In 1946, she was getting her maps reprinted in Holland when her plane crashed off course in dense fog on a wooded hill. She suffered a stroke, fractured skull and spine. ‘I longed to be dead.’ Instead of resting, she soon carried on working. Her disabilities, she writes charitably, led to diminished self-interest and the discarding of any fear of death. In 1948, she returned to Spain to visit friends. ‘Many had been murdered. It made me completely apolitical.’ She then begged a passage on an orange freighter from Seville and was painting on the bridge when two stowaways appeared, ‘out of the oranges, still vomiting from the fumes. They said if they were taken back, they’d be shot by Franco’. She looks distressed. The Captain shopped them.

On a happier note, the officers’ sexual advances were not unwelcome. ‘I think I was fairly free with myself if I fell for somebody,’ she says, brightly. ‘I was susceptible. That was part of bohemian life.’ Suddenly in 1950, she went completely blind for three months. Did she just lie in bed? Of course not! She wrote, sightlessly, about a Japanese artist, Itiro Takeda, for the New Yorker.

She writes of her Damascus Road conversion in her book – in 1954 when she was reading Schopenhauer’s analysis of Evil Man. ‘Suddenly whoof, an ethereal light flooded me.’ A few days later she had a Fra Angelico vision of Christ on the Cross. Bang, she says, she was faced with the Herculean task of discarding self-justification, white lies and pride. Phyllis describes herself as an old fool, but a happy one. Her life may sound batty, but she is terribly sane.