The Sugar Girls

by Duncan Barrett

  Lilian also discovered that Alec’s sister and her husband, who lived upstairs, were fond of having a drink and then a row with each other. Their arguments would evaporate the next day and they would be seen walking up the road arm in arm as if nothing had happened. Lilian was beginning to see why Alec might have preferred to take her to Romford, but he needn’t have worried. He had passed Old Fat Nell’s test with flying colours – he was certainly a mummy’s boy.

  One day Alec turned up at Cranley Road with a gift as usual, but this time, instead of chocolates, the box he carried contained a sapphire engagement ring. Lilian stared at it, feeling his hopeful eyes on her.

  Alec was good to her, she knew – too good. Everyone said what a lovely man he was, and it was true. He was the kindest person she had ever known, and he had even won over her father. In the months since they had met she had genuinely come to love him, but in her heart of hearts she knew that she was not in love with him, and never would be. He didn’t stir in her the kind of all-consuming passion that Reggie had done.

  Perhaps, she thought, you only get to fall in love once.

  But you can love again, in a different way.

  She held out her hand and let Alec slip the ring on.

  Lilian’s friends were thrilled when they heard the news, and Little Lil squealed in delight at the sight of the ring. ‘So where are you two going to live when you get married?’ she asked. ‘Say you’ll stay nearby.’

  The question prompted a pang of guilt for Lilian. The Tulls had always had a hard life, but they had stuck together. Getting married would mean leaving the family home – and leaving her poor old mum to run it on her own. What would happen if she got sick again?

  ‘Well, you and Alec can live with us,’ her father had said matter-of-factly when the engagement was announced, and Lilian immediately felt overcome with a sense of suffocation. Though Harry Tull was beginning to mellow a little as he got older, he was still the strictest dad she knew. The thought of being unable to get away from him, and of Alec having to live under his roof too, was unbearable.

  ‘Alec,’ she said, ‘we need to start saving. Fast.’

  Over the coming months, Lilian and Alec scrimped and saved like mad to get a deposit together, and soon a flat came up for rent in Cecil Road, Plaistow, three doors down from one of his brothers. It was about half an hour’s walk from Cranley Road, a safe distance away from Lilian’s father but not so far that she wouldn’t be able to visit her mother if she needed help.

  The flat was small, and just about within their price range. ‘We’ll take it!’ said Lilian, ecstatic.

  Edith Tull offered to go round a few days later to help her daughter clean the place, in preparation for the move. ‘What this needs is a good swill of bleach,’ she said, rubbing her hands together at the prospect of thoroughly disinfecting and scrubbing the toilet.

  Lilian smiled. ‘You always kept the cleanest house in the street, Mum,’ she said. ‘No one ever had a whiter step than you.’

  ‘Too right,’ said her mother, proudly.

  ‘Will you be all right without me, Mum?’ asked Lilian, blinking back tears.

  ‘Course I will, love,’ her mother replied, rolling up her sleeves. ‘Don’t you worry about me.’

  Although the flat had been sorted out, Lilian and Alec had yet to furnish it, and one day he surprised her with a trip to Olympia to see the Ideal Home Exhibition.

  ‘We won’t be able to afford anything here!’ Lilian protested.

  ‘My future wife deserves the best,’ Alec replied, stroking her hair fondly. ‘Anyway, it can’t hurt to have a look, can it?’

  They wandered through a show village of shiny new houses and marvelled at miniature Baby Belling cookers and Kenwood food mixers. The ultra-modern furniture included seats that unfolded into cocktail cabinets and sofas that turned into beds.

  ‘Oh Alec, look!’ said Lilian. Inside one show house was the most beautiful bedroom suite she had ever seen: a double bed, an enormous wardrobe with a big golden key, a big dressing table and matching his-and-hers bedside tables.

  ‘You want it, don’t you?’ he said, smiling at her.

  Lilian couldn’t recall her parents ever going out to buy furniture, and she thought back with a sense of guilt to the time when the only item in their front room was the little marble washstand that her father had used for Charlie’s gravestone.

  ‘Maybe in another life,’ she told Alec.

  ‘No, in this one,’ he said, pressing her hand.

  ‘But –’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Alec said firmly.

  In the can-making department female workers had to leave their jobs when they got married, and as her wedding loomed, so too did Lilian’s last day at the factory. Her happiness about the one was tinged with sadness at the other.

  Tate & Lyle had been the first place where Lilian had felt she was really good at something, and although she had turned down the offer of promotion she had never forgotten the sense of pride she had felt when the forelady, Rosie Hale, had expressed confidence in her. It was also the place where she had found true friendship with Old Fat Nell and Little Lil, and rediscovered her own capacity to have fun again, after the heartbreak of Reggie and the bleakness of life at home. The thought of losing all that brought a lump to her throat.

  But Old Fat Nell and Little Lil weren’t going to let her leave without something to remember them by, and when Lilian came in telling them about the new bedroom suite she and Alec were buying, they winked at each other. A collection was soon started and all the girls, including the forelady, pitched in.

  When Lilian came in on her very last day, a present was waiting by her machine. She blushed as everyone crowded round to watch her undo the ribbon and lift the lid off the box.

  Inside, resting on a bed of white tissue paper, was a sparkling trinket set in pink glass, with a tray, a pair of trinket dishes, a powder box and two candle holders. Lilian gasped at the beauty of it.

  ‘For your new dressing table,’ said Little Lil, smiling up at her. ‘You’ll need something to put on it, won’t you?’

  Married life, Lilian discovered, was surprisingly simple with Alec. As long as he had a home-cooked meal on the table when he got in, his clothes set out ready for him in the morning, and enough money for his smokes, he was satisfied. He was a hard worker, didn’t drink too much, and lived only to make her happy. After her Victorian father, Lilian couldn’t quite believe how laid-back a husband could be.

  ‘Why was my old dad so strict?’ she asked Alec. ‘He didn’t need to be like that.’

  ‘Well, Lil,’ he replied, looking at her admiringly, ‘it never did you any harm.’

  He was the perfect husband, thought Lilian. But still she couldn’t bring herself to throw out the photograph of Reggie, and kept it squirrelled away in a locked drawer where Alec wouldn’t find it. It was a secret she would just have to keep throughout their marriage.

  With her Tate & Lyle job gone, Lilian looked for work elsewhere, and she soon found a position in the laundry room of the school of nursing at the London Hospital, Whitechapel. There were over 300 student nurses there, kitted out in the traditional uniform of big puffed sleeves, white aprons and caps, all of which Lilian had to wash, starch and iron. The student quarters were presided over by an elderly Sister who kept a strict eye on her young charges, creeping up behind any hapless girl who so much as dropped her hanky, and startling her by shouting ‘Nurse!’ in her ear. The students, Lilian discovered, liked to get their own back on Sister by leaving imitation turds on the floor of the bathroom.

  It was hard work in the laundry, and as she spent her days scrubbing away, Lilian was reminded of her poor mother doing the washing for the whole family every Monday when she was a child. But she was content, and soon she and Alec had moved to a nicer flat in Warwick Road, Stratford, 15 minutes from their previous one.

  Her siblings were all getting married now and starting families of their own, and she and Alec spent many happy e
venings playing bingo at West Ham Lane with her sister Sylvie and her new husband Tom. One night, to her astonishment, Lilian scooped the jackpot. It was more money than she had ever seen in one place before, and as soon as she got home she threw all the notes up in the air for the sheer joy of watching them flutter down around her. My luck really has changed, she thought.

  But Luck is a tricky lady, and with Lilian’s reversal in fortune came a corresponding one for her mother. Edith Tull’s health was once again deteriorating rapidly. First climbing the stairs left her breathless and weak, then walking anywhere became a trial, and finally she was more or less housebound. Despite being a married woman now, Lilian was still the eldest Tull daughter, and once again the responsibility of caring for her invalided mother fell to her.

  After exhausting days in the laundry Lilian would rush back to Cranley Road to tend to Edith, cook the dinner for her father and clean the old house. She began to feel the familiar tiredness and sense of foreboding creeping back into her bones, just as it had the last time her mother was ill and Lilian had suffered her breakdown at Tate & Lyle. This time, however, she had Alec in her life, and the thought of him made her determined not to go down that road again. She asked the London Hospital for a leave of absence, so that she could care for her mother properly.

  Lilian devoted herself utterly to Edith’s care, but all the love and attention in the world couldn’t bring her mother’s fragile body back to health. At 62, Edith Tull was already an old lady, worn out and weary from all that life had thrown at her. One day, her heart simply gave up beating.

  Harry Tull fell to his knees, lifted his wife’s tired head from the carpet where she lay dead, and cradled her in his arms. ‘That’s the girl I married,’ he said, looking into her face, devastated. ‘That’s the girl I married.’

  Lilian had always thought of her father as a strong, even formidable man, but with the death of his wife something in Harry Tull seemed to crumble. He was now living alone in the house at Cranley Road, where Lilian and her sister Sylvie visited him frequently.

  ‘Your mum used to like this wallpaper,’ he would mutter wistfully, as he opened the door and led them in. ‘Your mum loved this table.’

  ‘Yes, Dad, she did,’ Lilian would reply gently.

  Not long after they had buried Edith, the Tulls had another worry on their minds. Harry Jnr, the great hope of the family – who had passed his exams and elevated himself to an office job at his father’s old firm – had left the East End and was living in Harold Hill, Essex, with his wife and their two little girls. One day, taking the train into London, Harry Jnr collapsed and was rushed to Westminster Hospital.

  Harry Tull Snr was beside himself at the news, and insisted on going up to visit him immediately.

  ‘Let me come with you, Dad,’ said Lilian, worried about her father’s state of mind.

  At the hospital, Harry Jnr was stable, but the doctor drew Lilian and her father to one side. ‘I’m afraid it’s his heart,’ he said, gravely. ‘Do you have any history of heart trouble in your family?’

  ‘No,’ Mr Tull replied confidently.

  But Lilian couldn’t help thinking back to the time her brother had been rejected from the Air Force during the war because of an irregular heartbeat, and of little Charlie and the baby twin boys who had died so suddenly. Could the Tull curse be returning?

  A few days later, just three months after his mother, Harry Jnr was dead.

  Losing his golden boy so quickly after his beloved wife plunged Mr Tull into new depths of despair, and he was inconsolable. ‘You don’t bring children into this world to see them go before you,’ he cried, shaking his head. ‘It’s not right.’

  Lilian and Sylvie increased their regular visits to Cranley Road, but they could see that their father was in a hole so deep he was at risk of never coming out.

  One day, Harry Tull went to the corner shop on Cranley Road and bought a newspaper. ‘Can I have the change in shillings?’ he asked the woman behind the counter. ‘For the gas meter.’

  When Sylvie came round that evening to check on her father as usual, there was no reply to her knock on the door. She put her key in the lock, but for some reason the door wouldn’t open.

  When she finally managed to fight her way inside, she discovered her father’s body on the floor. Harry Tull had gassed himself.

  Next to him lay a letter, addressed to his eldest daughter, Lilian.

  Later that day, Lilian trembled as she held it in her hand. ‘For what I’m about to do, I shall be happy,’ it read. ‘I’ll be with Mum and Harry.’

  At the coroner’s inquest in Poplar, Lilian and the rest of the family were determined not to have their father’s death recorded as suicide. Apart from the shame the word still carried at the time, after all the years that Harry Tull had toiled to keep his family going it seemed like an insult to suggest that he had somehow given up.

  Lilian pleaded with the coroner. ‘His mind was warped,’ she said, ‘losing his wife and son like he did.’

  But once the suicide note was produced, there could be no doubt. ‘He must have known what he was going to do, because he left you a letter,’ she was told.

  The remaining Tulls did what they did best: carried on in the face of tragedy. Two years later, Lilian’s youngest brother Leslie’s heart stopped beating. The doctors opened it up and got it going again, but shortly afterwards he dropped dead on holiday in Dorset, leaving a wife and two children.

  The doctors asked Lilian and her remaining siblings to have themselves checked out at the hospital. There, on the screen, the real Tull curse was revealed: a genetic flaw in the wall of the heart. Everyone in the family had inherited it, except for Lilian and her brother Victor.

  So I’m the lucky one, after all, she thought.

  Over the years, Lilian watched her sisters Edie and Sylvie die before their time too. Gradually nieces and nephews were also diagnosed with the heart condition. As ever, Lilian took on the role of carer, looking after them when they were sick and being there for everyone when they needed her.

  But Lilian herself never went under again. In the past few years she had discovered a brighter side to life, thanks to Alec and to her friends at the factory. She had been fortunate enough to be given a chance that so many members of her family had been denied, and she certainly wasn’t going to waste it.

  16

  Gladys

  For all her fearsome reputation, Miss Smith seemed to have a genuine soft spot for any sugar girl who she discovered was an orphan. First she had shown mercy to Eva’s friend Irene, choosing not to fire her when she got drunk on the job, and soon she was extending her care towards Gladys’s friend Betty as well.

  Gladys had recently noticed that Betty was becoming thinner, and her usually giggly personality seemed to have been dampened. Miss Smith must have spotted it too, because every time she came on her daily round she would stop by Betty’s machine and ask, ‘How are you today?’ – to Gladys’s perpetual surprise. ‘I’m fine, thanks, Miss Smith,’ Betty would reply weakly.

  Betty started to go off work sick, and Miss Smith went to her house to see if she needed anything.

  ‘You’d better watch out,’ the reel boys told her with a nudge when she returned to work. ‘Flo Smith’s quite partial to Betties. She’s already got two of them in her office.’

  With her close-cropped hair and broad shoulders, Miss Smith was widely rumoured to be a ‘dyke’, and there was speculation that she was in a relationship with one of the Betties. Some even claimed that they lived together.

  Poor Betty Brightmore, however, was either too depressed or too innocent to get the joke. It seemed the loss of her parents and the struggle she and her siblings had gone through to support themselves had finally caught up with her.

  Gladys and Eva tried to cheer her up with trips to Bianchi’s and nights out at dances, while her boyfriend Sid did his best to look after her. But nothing seemed to revive her spirits, and she was getting thinner than ever.

/>   One day, Miss Smith stopped to talk to Betty as usual, but on her way out added, ‘Come and see me later in my office.’

  ‘It’s usually me she says that to,’ joked Gladys, though privately she was worried about what The Dragon might have to say.

  When Betty returned from the meeting, however, there was a flicker of hope in her eyes. ‘Miss Smith’s given me two weeks’ paid leave, at the convalescent home in Weston-super-Mare,’ she told her friends. ‘She said she thought I needed a holiday.’

  When Betty came back to London a fortnight later, the colour was beginning to return to her cheeks. Sid had proved his worth during her time there, travelling up to see her and reporting back on her progress. It was no surprise to the rest of the girls when the two of them became engaged.

  Gladys was genuinely astonished, however, when word got round that Maisie had hooked up with Alex on the waste paper. ‘But they were always taking the piss out of each other!’ she said, confused.

  Betty and Eva gave her a knowing look.

  ‘Oh right, so everyone got that except me?’ she stropped.

  The Blue Room had always been a jokey, flirty place to work, but for some reason love was in the air now more than usual. Gladys could hardly stand the constant stream of suggestive remarks and the silly, giggly laughs they prompted.

  Worse, every Monday morning a new couple seemed to have got together over the weekend. The reel boys were doing very well – Barry had hooked up with Rita, Joey with the bad leg had coupled up with Joycie, and even Robbie with the groping hands had got himself a girlfriend. ‘What is this, a factory or a bleedin’ dating agency?’ wailed Gladys.

  Meanwhile, Eva’s relationship with her blond-haired boyfriend John from the Hesser Floor was going stronger than ever, despite the watchful eye of their ever-present families.