The Sugar Girls

by Duncan Barrett

  ‘I was so sure he’d change his mind,’ Joan replied, still devastated by the failure of her plan.

  ‘Well, he’s a fool if you ask me,’ Kathy said. ‘He don’t know what he’s talking about.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him, then?’ Joan asked, suddenly.

  Kathy hesitated. ‘Yeah,’ she admitted.

  ‘What did he say?’ Joan asked.

  ‘I don’t know if I should tell you, Joan. I don’t see as how it would do any good.’

  ‘Come on, Kath,’ Joan pleaded. ‘I’ve got to know.’

  ‘All right then,’ Kathy replied uncertainly. ‘He said he didn’t like the cut of your skirt, he thought it was too short. He told me he wasn’t sure the baby was his after all.’

  ‘Well, who the hell else’s could it be?’ Joan felt as if her veins were pumping pure rage. How dare Alfie say that about her? And all because she had bought a new outfit to look nice for him.

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Kathy, ‘I reckon that was just an excuse. He was looking for a way out and that was the best he could come up with.’

  Joan went silent. There was nothing more to say. She had failed, and now her baby was going to be taken away from her.

  In her final weeks at the home, Joan was filled with desperation as she waited for the day when she and Terry were to be parted. The two of them had grown closer than ever, and she could scarcely bear to think about losing him.

  Sure enough, though, the fateful day arrived, and his departure from her life was signalled by the reappearance of her mother. ‘I’ve come to help,’ Mrs Cook informed her neutrally, ‘and once we’re done here, you can come with me to stay at the caravan.’

  The nuns gave Joan a piece of paper with the address of Terry’s adoptive parents, together with directions, as she and her mother were to take him there themselves. Joan dressed him in a little outfit she had bought on the Holloway Road, said a tearful goodbye to her friends at the home and followed her mother out of the door.

  On the bus, it was all she could do to stop herself from bursting into tears in front of all the other passengers, and her mum’s constant attempts to make polite conversation didn’t help. Still, for Terry’s sake, she didn’t want to show her distress. He was happily snoozing in her lap, and the fear of upsetting him and spoiling their last moments together was enough to help Joan keep a lid on her own emotions.

  Eventually, they got off the bus and took a short walk to a long, tree-lined street flanked with tall Victorian houses. Joan’s mother took her by the arm and gently guided her up to one of the doors. Through the large bay window to one side she could see into a spacious living room, where several little sheets were drying on a clothes-horse and a stash of clean cloth nappies were piled up on a sideboard, ready for the new arrival.

  Joan’s mother knocked boldly on the door, and it was opened by a kind-looking woman. A smile spread rapidly across her face as she saw Joan and the baby. Mrs Cook stepped discreetly to one side to allow her daughter to approach the threshold.

  ‘He’s beautiful,’ the woman cooed, gazing into Terry’s little face.

  ‘Yeah,’ was all Joan could say in reply. She felt as if the life had been drained out of her. The rage that she had felt before was gone, but nothing else seemed to have taken its place.

  Slowly, she lifted Terry up towards his new mother.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of him,’ the woman told her, gratefully accepting the little bundle.

  Joan was about to let her arms drop to her sides, but Terry reached out a tiny hand in her direction. She offered him her little finger, and he gripped it firmly, smiling. ‘Goodbye, little one,’ she whispered. ‘Thanks for everything.’ Then she pulled her finger away.

  Joan turned to look at her mother for a moment, hoping for a mirror of the turmoil she was feeling inside, but all she saw was a face set in perfect serenity. She looked back towards the house, but the great front door had silently closed. She and her mother were shut out in the cold.

  ‘Come on, Joan,’ Mrs Cook said, gently taking her hand and leading her away.

  Joan fumbled for the little photograph inside her pocket, making sure it was still there. It was all she had left of Terry now. She gripped it, as the tears streamed down her face.

  That weekend at the caravan, Joan sat in front of the fire, still feeling like little more than a dead weight. Her arms felt empty with no baby cradled in them, and she let them hang down limply in her lap. Her breasts were leaking milk that was no longer needed.

  The sight of her daughter so obviously distressed seemed finally to move Mrs Cook to pity. She came and sat down next to Joan, reaching out and pulling her into a hug.

  For what seemed like hours, the two of them sat like that together, bathed in the warmth of the fire. ‘You poor soul,’ Mrs Cook whispered. ‘Oh, whatever have you been through, my poor girl?’

  21

  Ethel

  The winds of change were beginning to blow through the factory. News had filtered down to the girls that the old Hesser Floor was going to be wound down and the sugar-packing operation moved to a brand-new building being put up in the yard. The two new floors would be known as the Rainbow and Harlequin rooms, and the girls would be transferred there gradually as the machines were installed one by one.

  For one of Ethel’s sugar girls, Eliza, the news was particularly exciting, since her boyfriend Ron was part of the team from Gleeson’s, the builders who were constructing the new building. Eliza found that if she walked out onto the steps outside the department she could often spot him down below. ‘Cor, I feel like Juliet on her balcony,’ she told the other girls after spending her toilet break waving down to him and blowing kisses.

  After many months, the Rainbow Room was finally complete. Ethel was delighted when she and her friend Beryl Craven were asked to get the new floor up and running. At first, the department would be offering just one day-work shift, but in time, as more machines were installed and extra staff were found to run them, a two-shift system would be introduced and the two young women would head up a shift each.

  A team of men and girls were working hard to get the new packing machines ready as quickly as possible. Ethel stopped to admire the handiwork: the brightly coloured machines were based on a new design, with two heads instead of one, which meant they could process nearly double the quantity of sugar, churning out 150 bags every minute. The packing – long considered the most gruelling part of working as a sugar girl – would from now on be done automatically.

  The Rainbow Room was appropriately named since the new machines installed there came in different colours – Orange, Apple, Lemon, Scarlet, Lavender, Ocean and so on – while the Harlequin Room was to have a similar mix. When Ethel first entered the new building, she found a workman gazing at the stairs between the two floors. ‘We can’t decide what colour to paint them,’ he commented.

  ‘Well, it is called the Rainbow Room, isn’t it?’ she replied. ‘Why don’t you paint each step a different colour?’

  ‘Brilliant!’ the workman said, before setting off up the road to Pinchin Johnson’s paint factory.

  Once the machines were up and running, refinery director Oliver Lyle came along to see them in action. One of Ethel’s new girls, Frarnie Swallow, was fixing a problem with the belt when he arrived on the floor, while Betty Foster and Jeanie Pearse were standing around waiting to get the machine going.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Mr Lyle. ‘I’ve come to see how you lot are getting on.’ He went along the line of young women, shaking their hands enthusiastically until he came to Frarnie, who was horrified to realise that her hands were still dirty from the job she had just been doing. ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said awkwardly, wiping them on her dungarees.

  ‘Nonsense!’ the old man said, grasping her hand and shaking it for all he was worth. ‘Nothing wrong with a bit of grease! Can’t run the machines without it, can we?’

  Frarnie blushed. ‘No, sir. Of course not.’

 
As well as the colourful machines, some other new arrivals were also turning heads among the sugar girls. At lunch one day in the canteen, they were surprised to see Miss Smith walk into the room with a black woman – the first she had ever hired to work at the factory. ‘Look! Look!’ everyone whispered, trying to get a glimpse of the new recruit. But Miss Smith’s presence, as she had no doubt intended, ensured that their stares were not too obvious and that they kept their thoughts to themselves.

  Before long, the Rainbow Room had begun to live up to its name, and not one but two black women were working on the machines there.

  Monica Liverpool had recently come over from the Dominican Republic. She was a hard worker, but Ethel found that she was frequently being brought before her accused of some minor crime or other. It was hard to know whether the accusations were genuine complaints, or if there was an element of prejudice lying behind them. Ethel would try her best to listen to both sides, but generally Monica seemed to be blameless.

  Edna Henry had grown up a few miles away from the factory, in Forest Gate. As a little girl she had heard tales of her grandfather working at Tate & Lyle as a pansman. Edna had never known her mum’s parents – an Orthodox Jewish family, they had disowned their daughter for marrying a sailor from Trinidad – and the stories that her mother told her about factory life were all that she knew of them.

  When Edna left school she had been determined to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps and get a job at the factory. At first her mother had done her best to frustrate Edna’s plans, worried about the company’s reputation for loose morals. ‘You’re not going there, it’s a knocking shop,’ she had declared, arranging a placement at a dreary little dressmaking firm instead. Several years later, and by now married with children, Edna finally secured her dream job.

  Once in it, however, she found she had new battles to fight. The Rainbow and Harlequin rooms had both been running successfully for many months now, and such was the need for new girls as more and more machines were added that opportunities for promotion were coming up increasingly often. A vacancy came up for a key girl – the equivalent of a driver on the old machines – and contrary to the traditional practice of such appointments being made by the forelady or charge-hand, under new rules any girl could apply.

  By now Ethel’s sister-in-law Honour was working in the sugar-packing department, on a different shift from Ethel’s, and had risen up through the various jobs on the machines. When the post of key girl came up, she decided to put her name down.

  Edna, meanwhile, had also decided to throw her hat into the ring. She had started at the factory a little earlier than Honour and had never missed a day through sickness, so she was sure her application would be successful.

  Evidently, the powers that be did not agree, and a week later Honour’s name was posted on the departmental board. The other key girls were delighted – with her cheerful personality and easy-going nature Honour had quickly made friends on the floor.

  Edna, however, wasn’t about to take it lying down. The job was hers by rights, she felt, and she refused to see it go to someone else, even if she was a charge-hand’s sister-in-law.

  Edna gathered her courage, made her way up to Mary Doherty’s office and knocked on the door. ‘It’s not fair,’ she told the surprised forelady. ‘I’ve been discriminated against. I’ve got longer service and better timekeeping than Honour. And if you don’t believe me, you can check for yourself.’

  ‘All right then, I will,’ replied Mary, ‘but I’m sure you’ll find that’s not the case.’

  Edna waited resolutely as Mary dug out the relevant records. Having compared the two sets she was forced to concede that Edna was right.

  ‘Am I the new key girl then?’ demanded Edna.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you are,’ came the reply.

  Satisfied, Edna returned to the factory floor and resumed her work.

  The other key girls were not exactly welcoming, however. When Edna went to sit with them at break time, they promptly stood up and relocated to another part of the room. Not to be deterred, Edna moved with them. They stood up en masse and moved again.

  Eventually, she resorted to blocking their way. ‘Look,’ she told them, ‘wherever you go, I’m going. I’m a key girl, same as you are, and if you don’t agree you can go up the office and ask them.’

  The other girls were forced to admit defeat, and from then on treated ‘Ed’ as one of their number. Honour, meanwhile, had to wait a little longer for the promised promotion.

  Edna was never afraid to ruffle a few feathers if she felt that something was not above board. The next time she clashed with Mary Doherty it was over a bonus payment which the forelady had refused to pay to her. Mary eyed her coolly as she gave her explanation. ‘You didn’t start on the first day of the month, so your service isn’t complete.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Edna remonstrated. ‘The first day of the month was a Sunday.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid those are the rules,’ the forelady replied, turning back to some paperwork on the desk in front of her.

  ‘In that case, I’d like to make an appointment to see Miss Smith,’ Edna retorted.

  ‘You can’t do that – Miss Smith is a very busy woman.’

  ‘Yes I can,’ Edna replied, marching out of Mary Doherty’s office and straight down to Personnel. As she had predicted, The Dragon proved as fair as she was fierce, and agreed that Edna’s interpretation was the right one. Reluctantly, Mary Doherty signed off the bonus.

  Edna soon grew restless in the Rainbow Room. She began to work her way around the factory’s various departments, applying for a new transfer every so often until she had tried most of the women’s jobs on offer, from sugar-packing and syrup-filling to the canteen. Wherever she went, she brought her strong sense of justice to bear, and never more so than during a stint in the can-making department, where she clashed with a shop steward by the name of Carol.

  Coming into work one morning, Edna noticed that a girl called Dawn Riley was missing. Dawn’s mother had recently been diagnosed with cancer and the management had let her work part-time so that she could get home to make her mum’s dinner.

  ‘Has Dawn switched her shifts?’ Edna asked Carol.

  ‘Oh, no, she’s been sacked,’ came the reply.

  It seemed that, having trialled their sympathetic arrangement for a few months, the bosses had decided it was more trouble than Dawn was worth, and she had been swiftly dismissed.

  Edna was devastated. ‘That poor girl! What are you going to do about it?’ she asked Carol. ‘You can’t just let them get rid of her.’

  ‘What can I do?’ replied Carol, feebly. ‘They’ve already made their decision.’

  Edna was not to be put off. ‘Give me permission to speak for Dawn,’ she pleaded. ‘If you won’t fight for her, I will.’

  With Carol’s cautious blessing, Edna marched upstairs to speak to Bill Elliot, the manager responsible. This time she didn’t hold back.

  ‘It’s a bloody disgrace what you’re doing,’ she told him. ‘That poor girl is going through enough. You’re lucky she’s working part-time, and if you dare try to dismiss her I’m going to take it further.’

  Bill was so shocked at the impassioned outburst that he promised to look into the matter. Later that afternoon he called Edna back to his office to tell her the good news: they had decided not to get rid of Dawn after all, and she was to be reinstated under the previous arrangement.

  The next morning a very happy Dawn was back on the factory floor. Carol walked up to Edna. ‘I want you to know I’m resigning as shop steward,’ she announced.

  ‘Best day’s work you’ve ever done,’ replied Edna.

  Soon she was installed as Carol’s replacement, making her the first black woman in the factory to become a union rep.

  Edna’s determination to stand up to injustice stemmed from her childhood. Her father had died when she was young and her mother had remarried, this time to a Jamaican man who worked at P
inchin Johnson’s paint factory. Edna’s stepfather was an aggressive, violent man with a serious gambling habit, and he enjoyed having a new daughter to boss around.

  Each evening he would demand that the young girl read him the racing results from the paper. Having seen her mother’s hard-earned money forcibly taken to fund her stepfather’s flutters, Edna would take her own small revenge by pretending to get the names of the horses mixed up, eliciting silent fits of giggles from her mother.

  But there was precious little laughter in the family home, and before long Edna’s mum was being regularly beaten by her new husband. One evening he came home demanding that she hand over her housekeeping money so that he could go to the dog racing at West Ham Stadium. She refused, and before long a fierce row had started.

  Edna’s mother tried to get her to leave the room, but the little girl refused to go, standing squarely between her mum and her increasingly furious stepfather. He shoved Edna aside and soon had his hands around his wife’s neck, forcing her down onto the floor of the kitchen and choking her. Without thinking, Edna grabbed the nearest heavy object to hand – a metal poker – and brought it crashing down on his head.

  Her stepfather let out an agonised scream, letting go of Edna’s mother and turning to face the child. ‘You’re dead!’ he bellowed, lunging to grab his cut-throat razor. Edna ducked, scrambled between his legs and ran straight for the front door, hurtling down the road to hide in the grounds of the local timber yard.

  She crouched there, terrified, all night long – too scared to come out, even when her mother came by, calling to her that her stepfather had calmed down. Eventually, when Edna thought he would have left for work the next morning, she timidly made her way back home.

  Despite the incident, Edna’s mother stayed with her new husband. Edna kept out of his way as much as possible, but she never forgave him for the way he treated her mother.