‘I … I can’t,’ she stammered.
Storm clouds seemed to gather on Miss Smith’s face. She uncrossed her arms and leaned forward, making her broad shoulders seem larger than ever. ‘Can’t?’ she demanded. ‘What do you mean, can’t?’
‘I can’t, because …’ Lilian panicked. What could she say that didn’t sound ridiculous? Then, from somewhere deep inside, came the courage to tell the truth. She cleared her throat and said, quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Smith, but I can’t take the job because I don’t want to lose my friends. Thank you for the offer, but I’ve got to turn it down.’
She knew if she stayed any longer her nerves would get the better of her, so as soon as she had finished speaking Lilian jumped up from her chair and walked as quickly as she could out of the office – leaving Miss Smith, for once, speechless.
On her way home, Lilian thought about how much her life had changed since joining Tate & Lyle. Not only did she have a proper social life now, but she had found a job she was actually good at and a boss who thought she was worth promoting.
She wondered what she should say to her parents about the job offer. Part of her wanted to let them know how well she had been doing at work, but she was afraid that her father would try to change her mind, and would probably succeed. She was an honest girl, though, and the thought of hiding it from them was uncomfortable.
When she got to Cranley Road, the decision was taken out of her hands: the rest of the family had been distracted by another, more pressing drama. Her sister Edie was waiting in the hall. ‘Oh Lil, Harry’s been demobbed from the Army – he’s coming to see me and baby Brian,’ she told her nervously, twisting the corner of her skirt between her hands. Lilian’s parents could be heard debating what Harry Snr should say to the married man who had impregnated his daughter.
The conversation came to an abrupt end with the sound of three heavy raps on the front door. ‘Oh my God, that’s him,’ Edie said, rushing over to answer it.
She threw the door open to reveal the man she had been longing to see all throughout her lonely pregnancy in the Salvation Army home in Hackney. ‘Harry!’ she said, joyfully, about to throw herself into his arms.
Behind her, Harry Snr appeared in the corridor, a look of cold hatred on his face. ‘Upstairs – now!’ he ordered the young man. Harry opened his mouth but said nothing, and with an apologetic look at Edie allowed himself to be marched up the stairs by her father.
As the muffled voices thrashed out Edie’s future upstairs, Lilian and her mum did their best to reassure her. Lilian knew Edie was praying that, now he knew he had fathered a child, Harry would leave his wife to be with her. But her own experience with men didn’t give her much reason to be hopeful.
Harry Tull, however, was an effective antidote to errant fathers, and by the time Edie’s young man was marched back down the stairs he had agreed to divorce his wife, marry Edie and recognise Brian as his own.
Edie was ecstatic, and before long plans were being made for her and the baby to join Harry in Suffolk to begin their new life. From growing up as an East End girl, Edie was to become a country wife – and her son would have wide open spaces to play in and fresh air to breathe.
With Edie and Brian gone, and Lilian and her brother Harry Jnr in work, there were now fewer mouths to feed and more money coming into the Tull household than ever before. Tentatively, Lilian wondered whether the Tulls had finally turned a corner and left the family curse behind them.
But now that the burden had lifted slightly, something in Lilian’s long-suffering mother seemed to give. One morning, as she was getting herself ready to go to the factory, Lilian noticed that Edith wasn’t up yet. ‘She’s just feeling a bit tired, that’s all,’ said her father, on his way out of the house.
Lilian ran up the stairs to see if her mother needed anything. Edith barely looked up when she entered the room. ‘Mum, are you all right?’ she asked, worried. ‘Dad said you were tired.’
‘I’ll be fine, love,’ said Edith, weakly. ‘Just can’t seem to get me old bones out of bed this morning. Don’t you let me make you late.’
Reluctantly, Lilian left to catch her bus. But that afternoon, when she came home, Edith had still not got out of bed.
Lilian ran up the stairs again. The curtains in the bedroom were still drawn and her mother looked as if she hadn’t moved since Lilian had left her, hours earlier.
Alarmed, Lilian asked, ‘Mum, what’s wrong? Do you feel ill? Should I get a doctor?’
‘No love, there’s nothing wrong. I’m just … tired.’
There was a strange, hollow look in Edith’s eyes, and Lilian reckoned she knew where it came from. Giving birth to nine babies and burying three of them. Devoting more than twenty years of her life to her family, cleaning for them, cooking for them, scrubbing their dirty laundry. Dragging their shopping from Rathbone Market up all those flights of stairs in the flats. All of it had taken a toll on her fragile health.
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ said Lilian, ‘I’ll sort out the tea tonight.’
‘Thank you, love,’ said her mother, closing her eyes.
While Edith was ill, the running of the household fell to Lilian, as the eldest daughter. Each morning she made breakfast for her father, her brothers Harry Jnr, Vic and Leslie, and her sister Sylvie. She worked her eight hours at the factory, then hurried home and made their dinners. On the weekends she shopped, cleaned the house from top to bottom and did the laundry for seven people. She took meals up to her mother, helped wash her, and tried to cheer her up. But as one week followed another, Edith didn’t seem to be getting any better.
Little Lil and Old Fat Nell noticed dark rings forming under Lilian’s eyes, and were disappointed that she could no longer accompany them on their trips to the pictures or the pie and mash shop. Lilian missed her friends, but she knew that, even if she could have gone out with them, she wouldn’t have wanted to. All her energy was taken up with caring for her mother, and her entire focus was on making her well again. Edith Tull had sacrificed her whole life for her children, and Lilian was determined to look after her now in return. Though she didn’t admit it to herself, she was also desperate not to lose yet another person she loved.
At work, Lilian’s newly acquired confidence and vitality seemed to have drained out of her, and she reverted to the quiet, melancholy girl she had been when she first joined Tate & Lyle. It had all been too good to be true, she thought. Of course it had. The Tull curse was back with a vengeance.
Lilian’s fear of the dark intensified, and if she ever found herself having to go out late it was with a trembling heart. Something about the gloom seemed to call to her, as if she belonged to it, and she felt as claustrophobic as she had that day under the rubble at West Ham station.
Finally, Edith Tull seemed to be improving. She began sitting up in bed and talking more, then even found the energy to come downstairs. After a few days she tried to help Lilian with the chores, but her daughter wouldn’t let her. ‘No, Mum,’ she insisted, ‘you mustn’t make yourself ill again.’
But as Edith’s vitality began to return, the toll on her daughter’s health was showing. The burden of physical labour and mental worry that the mother had carried all these years trying to keep her family from the brink had now been transferred to the daughter, and Lilian was struggling to cope. She found it hard to get out of bed in the mornings, and ugly red boils began to break out all over her skin. Horrified, Lilian did her best to cover them up, but at work she could sense people staring.
‘You’re not well, love,’ said her mother one morning. ‘You should take the day off.’
‘No, Mum, I’m fine. Promise you won’t worry about me,’ Lilian said. She had never missed a day at Tate & Lyle, and the thought of jeopardising the family income after so many years of poverty was unthinkable to her. She struggled on.
But Lilian’s poor health had not gone unnoticed at the factory, and soon she found herself called into the Personnel Office for a second time.
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‘Lilian,’ said Miss Smith, her normally booming voice uncharacteristically soft. ‘I understand you haven’t been feeling well. I want you to know that we can help you.’
Lilian nodded, vaguely. She was thinking about the shopping that needed to be done, the meal she had to prepare that evening. She felt anxious about the time she was wasting just sitting there.
‘I’d like you to take some time off,’ continued Miss Smith. ‘The company will pay. There’s a lovely little place in Weston-super-Mare for people who … need some rest and recuperation. A few weeks by the seaside will do you good.’
Lilian was horrified. How could she possibly leave her mother and the rest of the family? ‘I can’t –’ she began, but Miss Smith interrupted her.
‘No can’ts this time,’ she said, kindly but firmly. ‘I’ll make the arrangements.’
6
Gladys
After her ride in the telpher, Gladys had been given her biggest dressing-down yet by Miss Smith. From then on, the labour manageress had the redheaded tomboy marked down as a troublemaker, and she kept a closer watch on her than ever.
In the months that followed, Gladys had become an increasingly regular visitor to the Personnel Office. The routine was by now a familiar one: the two Betties would greet her with a chorus of ‘Hello again Gladys,’ before Miss Smith began her ritual scolding.
One day Gladys was about to enter the office as usual, when she heard an unfamiliar girl’s voice coming from inside. ‘Well, she was rude to me, so I answered her back,’ it announced defiantly. ‘And if she’d said any more I’d have hit her!’
Gladys strained her ears to hear how Miss Smith would respond to such an outburst. To her astonishment, she heard what sounded like a chuckle. ‘Well, don’t hit her too hard, will you?’ said Miss Smith.
Gladys pushed the door open a crack to have a peek at the extraordinary girl who had not only stood up to The Dragon but elicited a laugh from her. In the room was a slim, blonde young woman who couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than herself.
Miss Smith was shuffling some papers. ‘I’ll have to transfer you,’ she told the blonde girl. ‘How does the Hesser Floor sound? I think you’ll find it keeps you busy after the canteen.’
‘Oh please, Miss, not the Hesser Floor,’ said the girl, suddenly sounding less sure of herself. ‘I’m terrible with heights. I’d never make it up all them stairs.’
‘Very well then, I’ll send you to the Blue Room. I’m sure Julie will keep you in check. Gladys Taylor! Whatever you’re doing skulking behind that door, you can come out now and escort Betty Brightmore up to your department.’
Gladys was more than happy to forsake her usual telling-off. She had already warmed to Betty – the only other person she had encountered in the factory who had the nerve to stand up to Miss Smith. Betty had also, it transpired, taken on another of the refinery’s most formidable women – Vera, the manageress of the staff canteen – which was the cause of her transfer. ‘Well, some people get a bit of power and they think they’re God Almighty,’ she explained to Gladys, with a giggle.
If Betty Brightmore was immune to authority figures, it was perhaps because in her own home there were none. Like Gladys’s family, hers had survived the South Hallsville School disaster by the skin of their teeth, leaving the building because they thought it was too crowded, hours before it was bombed. But just a few years later Betty’s mother had died in childbirth, followed 18 months later by her heartbroken father.
With her older brother Jack off in the Navy, it was left to Betty and her sister Mary to bring up their younger siblings, supporting the family by going out to work at Tate & Lyle. Mary had a job in the can-making department, while their Uncle Charlie, a manager in the lorry bay, did his best to keep an eye on the two girls.
Gladys soon discovered Betty to be a giggler, a scatterbrain and, most importantly, a willing accomplice in whatever mischief she was cooking up. Finally, she had found a true friend among the glamour girls of the Blue Room – even if Betty drew the line at kickabouts in the yard.
Betty’s presence inevitably made the temptation to evade work stronger than ever, and over time she and Gladys developed a whole repertoire of excuses to get away from their machines. First they made the most of their ten-minute toilet breaks, spending them smoking and nattering in the loos before returning, with a telltale nicotine smell, to their work stations. Such interruptions were frustratingly short, however, and after a while a new strategy was clearly needed.
The two things that they knew for certain would stop the machines were a lack of ink and a lack of paper. Failing to get the paper replenished in time might get the reel boys into trouble, so their only option was to let the ink run dry, a dangerous tactic since keeping an eye on the ink duct was supposed to be one of their main duties. This method had the advantage of requiring the head engineer, a big man named Wally Evans, to come and reset the machines, which could take some time. The plan worked a treat, and the girls were soon skipping off for extended breaks while professing their surprise that the ink could have drained away so quickly.
Julie McTaggart did not take kindly to the girls’ apparent carelessness. To have her staff slacking off was difficult enough at the best of times, and right now she was under the cosh. Tate & Lyle had begun a massive propaganda campaign against the Labour government, who in February 1949 had set their sights on nationalising sugar – and the Blue Room had become the front line of the battle. Realising that sugar bags were a better means of getting their message across to ordinary people than any newspaper or billboard, the company’s top brass had announced a new scheme for employees: anyone who came up with an anti-nationalisation slogan that was printed on a bag would receive a £10 reward. They got over 500 suggestions.
In addition, one of a number of enterprising new subcommittees had come up with a mascot for the fight: Mr Cube. This little chap, a sugar cube with the arms and legs of a man, appeared in a series of satirical cartoons on the sugar packets, and soon became a national icon. The beleaguered government, facing the prospect of a drubbing at the polls, accused Tate & Lyle of illegal electioneering, and some left-wing shopkeepers refused to stock the ‘Tory propaganda’.
The latest bag designs always raised a titter when they arrived in the Blue Room for printing: slogans such as ‘Tate not State’ and ‘Hands off Sugar’, or cartoons of Mr Cube with a club in his hands bravely bashing a snake that made up the S of the word ‘State’. For Julie McTaggart and the forelady Peggy Burrows, however, the campaign was primarily a personal headache, since it meant that more eyes than usual were on the Blue Room. Such was the success of the propaganda operation that PR specialists, and even the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, were soon touring the factory to find out how it had been accomplished. Miss Smith would bring the parties of visitors to the department, and it was the worst possible time for Julie and Peggy to have to cope with girls slacking off or misbehaving.
Julie was a shrewd woman, and it was obvious to her that Gladys and Betty were chancing their luck, so she decided to teach them a lesson. If they refused to pull their weight in the Blue Room, she would send them somewhere else instead. They were dispatched temporarily to join Betty’s sister Mary in the can-making department.
Imagining a jolly time spent with Mary, and the prospect of a fresh set of young men to mess about with, the pair arrived on the floor with grins on their faces. These soon turned to frowns, however, when the girls were asked to carry around great sheets of tin, ready for printing with the Lyle’s Golden Syrup logo before they were cut and shaped into cans. After the Blue Room it was heavy, hot work, and the sides of the tin were so sharp that Betty cut her hand and had to be taken to the factory’s surgery. There, Dr Akawalla, a small fat man with a moustache, bandaged her up, tutting as he did so.
Visiting the surgery, however, highlighted for the girls the possibilities it offered for skiving. The factory’s medical facilities were open 24 hours a day and were
surprisingly well equipped, with a dentist, eye doctor and chiropodist. Staff were vaccinated against polio, X-rayed every year and given annual check-ups if they were under 18. The surgery dealt with 3,400 cases a month and was one reason that Tate & Lyle was considered such a good employer. For the company, it meant that any minor injuries could be attended to quickly and staff sent back to work as soon as possible.
The surgery also had its own ambulance, since the nature of work at the refinery meant that much more serious accidents sometimes occurred. Stories abounded of girls losing fingers, and on occasion entire arms, to the machines, of young boys being knocked over in the warehouse by forklift trucks skidding on the sugary floor – even of a man who fell into the raw sugar silo and drowned, and another who was roasted alive in the charhouse. It was no surprise that rumours of ghosts were rife – over at the Thames Refinery workers talked in hushed tones of a man in an old-fashioned foreman’s uniform who stalked around with an umbrella and walking stick.
As well as Dr Akawalla, a kindly nurse called Hester worked in the surgery, and was known for her sweet tea and sympathy. Any girl who claimed to be suffering period pain could rely on Hester to give her an aspirin, a hot water bottle and an hour tucked up in bed on full pay, something Gladys and her friends made sure to use to their advantage.
But the best get-out of all came when notices went up calling for blood donors. Some girls were horrified at the idea of voluntarily going near a needle – but not a tomboy like Gladys. She was determined to profit from her lack of squeamishness and, as ever, convinced Betty to join her. Officially the girls were under the legal age to give blood, but Miss Smith seemed willing to turn a blind eye when a noble act of duty was involved. Julie McTaggart had no choice but to reluctantly wave them off to the surgery, where they lingered far longer than was necessary, enjoying the tea and biscuits.
The Sugar Girls Page 9