Wartime for the Sugar Girls

by Duncan Barrett

  ‘I’ve found out about a lovely little place run by the Salvation Army,’ she told Edie a few days later. ‘It’s in Hackney, up in North London, so no one from round here will know where you are.’

  Edie nodded silently. She knew there was no point in protesting. Lilian said goodbye to her sister, and for the next few months Edie disappeared from their lives, seen only by their mother in discreet visits.

  In the autumn of that year, Edie returned, looking older and more womanly than Lilian remembered. In her arms was a little baby boy. ‘I named him Brian,’ she said. ‘Brian Tull.’

  Her father looked down at the sleepy face of the baby, not so unlike little Charlie who had been lost before the war, and his heart melted.

  Before long Harry Tull was out in the yard once again, this time whistling away as he built a cot for Brian out of some scraps of wood. He duly proved himself the most doting grandfather in the East End.

  Meanwhile his daughter Edie lived in hope that once her Harry came out of the Army he would return to her and meet the son he had fathered.

  By the time Lilian joined Tate & Lyle, soon after the war was over, Reggie’s letters to her had stopped completely. Yet something about him, about the way he had made her feel when she danced in his arms, meant she just couldn’t let him go, and she felt that she never would.

  Lilian kept the little black-and-white photograph he had given her when she left Kirtlington, and when she thought no one was looking she would take it out and look at it longingly. She read his last letter over and over again, trying to decipher the meaning behind the words. Had he met someone else? Had she done something wrong? The questions hanging over the end of their affair tortured her constantly.

  Meanwhile her best friend, Lily Middleditch, wrote to say she had met and married a soldier while in the forces and would be moving to his home town of Blackpool. Lilian had never felt more alone.

  At the factory, Lilian found she wasn’t the only one whose mind kept drifting back to the events of the war years. In her department, a girl called Winnie Taylor told of her friend Olive, who had been buried in the rubble when the shop she worked in was hit by a doodlebug. She escaped with her life but was deeply traumatised, unable to cope with any sudden noises, and thereafter always had a stammer. Many Tate & Lyle workers found it hard to escape their memories, particularly the scenes of violence and bloodshed they had witnessed. On the Hesser Floor, Anne Purcell couldn’t shake the image of a neighbour she had found lying on the ground after a bombing raid, her arteries and veins hanging out of her arm; in the Print Room, Pat Johnston was haunted by the memory of a bus conductress she saw running up her road with one eye blown out. Meanwhile, Pat’s teenage cousin was losing his hair from the stress of witnessing a woman’s head being blown off by a bomb, seconds after she had pushed him out of harm’s way.

  In the factory offices, a girl called Barbara Bailey still bore the scars she had suffered when a window had blown in during a bombing raid and filled her face with glass. Her mother had told her to get under the kitchen table, but Barbara was reading a book at the time and had insisted on getting to the end of the page.

  The men of the factory had their own traumatic memories to deal with. Some had been interned in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and now struggled when they saw oriental boats on the Thames – whenever one passed the raw sugar landing, the men there shouted for ‘the bastards’ to be thrown overboard. Others had been involved in the liberation of Belsen, and told stories of the terrible scenes they had witnessed.

  Many refugees had settled in the East End after the war, and among them, at Tate & Lyle, was a Polish man called Bassie. His steel-grey eyes always seemed to be staring at unknown horrors, but nobody dared ask what they were.

  One bitterly cold day it was snowing, and Bassie was pulling the handle of a truck carrying bags of sugar on steel pallets. Two younger men were meant to be helping, but were slacking off and complaining about the cold.

  ‘You think this is cold?’ Bassie demanded suddenly.

  ‘Yeah, Bassie, it is,’ they replied.

  ‘You don’t know cold,’ he said. ‘You don’t know hard. I’ve chopped trees at 50 below zero in Siberia. When the Russians invaded our country they took us away in cattle trucks and gave us rotten fish eggs and old bones to eat. They made us dig holes to live in. If you couldn’t do it, kneel down and bang, you’re dead.’

  The boys were shocked by Bassie’s words, but fascinated to hear the normally reticent man speak about his past, and were determined to question him further. They learned that he had come to Britain under an arrangement to take Polish prisoners into the forces.

  ‘Why didn’t you go back to Poland after the war?’ asked one of the young men, Erik Gregory.

  ‘I can’t go home,’ Bassie replied. ‘There is nothing there.’

  ‘What about your family?’ Erik asked him.

  Bassie shook his head. ‘Auschwitz,’ he said quietly. ‘Gassed by the Germans. You don’t know what hardship is, and I never want you to. But don’t you take the piss with me.’

  The boys nodded respectfully, and never complained to Bassie about their work again.

  3

  Gladys

  While Lilian Tull’s family seemed to live under a curse, Gladys Taylor’s had something of a lucky streak. Although their house had received a direct hit on the first night of the Blitz, seven-year-old Gladys, her four brothers, baby sister and parents had survived – emerging blinking from their Anderson shelter just a few feet away, completely unscathed.

  They had just been admitted to the local rest centre, in the basement of South Hallsville School in Canning Town, when they were intercepted by Gladys’s Aunt Jane. ‘Don’t even bother staying here, the place is packed to bursting,’ she advised them. ‘We can hitch a ride to Kent instead, and go hopping till things quieten down.’

  Soon the whole family was huddled in the back of a lorry, relieved to be getting out of harm’s way. They began to curse their decision, however, when a German fighter plane swooped and began machine-gunning the vehicle as it was going over Shooter’s Hill. They passed the rest of the night cowering underneath the lorry, wishing they hadn’t listened to Aunt Jane, before finally making it safely to the hop fields in the morning. But little did they know how fortunate they had been.

  While the Taylors spent the next two days hop-picking, the 600 people at South Hallsville School continued to wait for the coaches that were due to pick them up and take them to the countryside. Sunday and Monday went by, and still the vehicles hadn’t arrived. They were offered no explanations, just endless cups of tea. A rumour went round that the drivers had mixed up Canning Town with Camden Town in North London and gone to the wrong place.

  As darkness fell again on Monday night, so too did the bombs. One made a direct hit on the school, demolishing half the building and causing many tons of masonry to collapse onto the people huddled below. Hundreds of terrified men, women and children lost their lives, in one of the worst civilian tragedies of the Second World War.

  Five days later, when the Taylors returned to London to pick through the wreckage of their home, neighbours’ mouths gaped at the sight of them. Their names had been on the list of those declared dead, and if not for Aunt Jane they too would have ended their days in the wreckage of Hallsville.

  Some attributed the Taylors’ luck to the fact that Gladys’s mother Rose was from a well-known gypsy family, the Barnards. A tiny Romany woman with long, plaited hair rolled into enormous coils on either side of her head, Rose had been expected to marry inside the gypsy community. But after a childhood spent roaming the fields of Kent and Sussex in a caravan, she had been determined to give her own children a more settled existence.

  To that end she married a young man from Tidal Basin, near the Royal Victoria Dock, moving into a flat on Crown Street right next door to his parents. The neighbourhood was full of sailors who had married and settled down there – many of them black men who had taken up with lo
cal white girls, lending the road the nickname Draughtboard Alley.

  Rose may have wanted a settled life, but her new husband Amos, a red-headed and rebellious seaman, had other ideas. Perhaps she should have heeded the warning lying in his parents’ garden – Amos’s uniform, helmet and gun, which had been hastily buried there when he deserted from the Army and ran off to sea during the First World War.

  After fathering three sons with Rose, Amos did a second disappearing act, going AWOL from the family for 18 months without a word. When Rose could bear his silence no longer, she threw off her pinny and marched up to the shipping office, demanding that her husband be traced. The errant father was discovered to be working as a professional footballer in New Zealand, and duly returned with his tail between his legs.

  The arrival on the scene of Gladys, with a shock of red hair just like her father’s, prompted the final showdown between Rose and Amos, whose seafaring could no longer be tolerated now that there were six mouths to feed. 19 Crown Street trembled to the sounds of the almighty row, which ended in his service book being ripped up and thrown onto the fire. Amos accepted his fate, and a job in the docks – where he would wistfully sing the dirty sea ditties of his youth. But he never quite forgave his daughter for thwarting his ambition.

  Fourteen years later, Gladys’s own ambition in life was to become a nurse. Playing doctors and nurses had been a favourite game ever since, aged three, she had fallen ill with diphtheria and had her life saved by the staff at Sampson Street fever hospital. She had also been told more than once that, compared to other girls, she was remarkably unsqueamish, a virtue she assumed was much needed in the medical profession. Having been brought up with four brothers, she was a natural tomboy who didn’t think twice about picking up spiders or other creepy-crawlies, to the horror of the girls at school – a habit which frequently landed her in the headmaster’s office. One day she had pierced her own ears out of curiosity, and she was soon piercing those of the local gypsy boys as well. She was used to the sight of blood, thanks to her dad’s hobby of breeding chickens and rabbits to sell at the pub, which he would slaughter and nail upside down in the back yard to drain.

  With no qualifications to her name, save for a half-hearted reference from her long-suffering headmaster stating that she was a trustworthy sort, Gladys headed straight to the hospital on Sampson Street as soon as school was out, and collected an application form.

  She returned excitedly to Eclipse Road, clutching the papers in her hand.

  ‘What’ve you got there, love?’ her mother asked.

  ‘It’s my papers from Sampson Street. I’m going to be a nurse!’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said her father, raising his red eyebrows. ‘And do you know what you have to do when you work in a hospital?’

  ‘Well, look after people and all that,’ said Gladys.

  A mischievous grin spread across Amos’s face. ‘You have to get old men’s willies out and hold them while they wee!’

  ‘I’m not doing that!’ shrieked Gladys, who had never seen a grown man’s willy in her life.

  ‘Well you’re not going to be a nurse then, are you?’ said her father, erupting into a loud belly laugh.

  Gladys tore up the papers in disgust and threw them onto the fire, watching her own ambitions fly up the chimney. ‘What am I going to do then?’ she moaned.

  Her dad grinned with satisfaction. ‘What do you think? Go down Tate & Lyle’s like everyone else.’

  On Monday morning, Gladys found herself outside the Personnel Office at the Plaistow Wharf Refinery. A shiny new sign on the door read: MISS FLORENCE SMITH, LABOUR MANAGERESS.

  Gladys knocked reluctantly and a deep voice issued from the other side of the door. ‘Come in.’

  Inside the pokey little office, three women were seated behind a single long table. In the centre was Miss Smith, a huge, broad-shouldered boulder of a woman with a stern, matronly look. Her blonde hair was cut in a short, severe crop, and her grey suit and white blouse were buttoned up so tight over her enormous bosom that it was a wonder she could breathe. She was a recent appointment to the top woman’s job at the factory, although no one who met her would ever have guessed.

  The other two women in the office were both called Betty. To Miss Smith’s left was the young Personnel secretary, Betty Harrington, and on her right sat her deputy, Betty Phillips, a thin woman with glasses.

  Miss Smith nodded to a chair opposite the three of them. ‘Sit down,’ she ordered.

  Gladys slumped into the seat. Miss Smith took in her boyish frame and messy ginger hair. ‘Have you left school yet?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ Gladys retorted.

  ‘Name? Address?’

  ‘Gladys Taylor, 38 Eclipse Road, Plaistow.’

  Miss Smith scribbled on a white form.

  ‘Do you have a letter of recommendation?’

  Gladys fished around in her pocket and handed over a crumpled piece of paper. Miss Smith read the headmaster’s carefully chosen words.

  ‘Well, that’s certainly concise,’ she said, handing it back.

  What a cow, thought Gladys, stuffing the paper back into her pocket.

  ‘And why did you wish to work at Tate & Lyle in particular?’

  ‘I didn’t really,’ Gladys said, before she could stop herself. The two Betties shuffled nervously in their seats.

  Miss Smith looked up from her form and glared at Gladys. ‘I have four rules in this factory,’ she said. ‘No make-up, no jewellery, no swearing – and no cheek. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ muttered Gladys, beginning to feel she had walked straight out of one headteacher’s office and into another.

  ‘Good. I think we’ll start you in the Blue Room and see how you fit in there.’ Gladys could have sworn she saw a glint in Miss Smith’s eye. ‘You’ll be on six-to-two one week and two-to-ten the next. Report to the gate at six a.m. sharp tomorrow and ask for Julie McTaggart. She’ll be your charge-hand.’

  Six a.m.? Gladys was horrified. But before she could protest, Miss Smith had stamped the form and handed it to one of the Betties for filing.

  Gladys’s first week at Tate & Lyle made her school record look flawless by comparison. On Tuesday morning she was woken by her mother at four-thirty a.m. ‘Your shift starts at six – you’d better be quick,’ Rose said, shaking the snoring bundle under the sheets.

  ‘Can’t,’ Gladys protested.

  ‘Well, you’ll be on two-to-ten next week – you can sleep then,’ said her mother, plonking a bowl of bread and hot milk down next to her.

  Gladys dragged herself into a sitting position and slurped her breakfast down. She grabbed the nearest available clothes and put them on, before attempting to pull a comb through her unruly red hair.

  ‘Time to go or you’ll miss your bus!’ called her mother. Gladys gave up the battle with her hair and ran down the stairs, passing her father as she went. ‘Have fun!’ he chuckled, and she gave him a scowl.

  From Eclipse Road it was only a couple of minutes’ dash to the bus stop, where Gladys hopped on the back of a 175 trolleybus along the Beckton Road. At Trinity Church she caught a second bus, the 669 to North Woolwich, which she knew would drop her at the gates of the factory.

  The bus travelled down the Barking Road, passing Woolworths, the men’s outfitters Granditers and the women’s clothes shop Blooms. They went by the corner of Rathbone Street, home to the area’s thriving market, where anything and everything could be bought for the right price, from eels still wriggling in their buckets and freshly beheaded chickens to broken biscuits, soaps made from the pressed-together pieces collected from hotel bathrooms, and steaming cups of sarsaparilla.

  At the end of the high street, the bus turned left onto Silvertown Way, passing the Liverpool Arms pub and the Imperial cinema as it began the gentle climb up to the familiar twin protractors of the Silvertown Viaduct, which crossed over the railway lines heading further east. It was here that Winston Churchill had st
ood during the early days of the Blitz to survey the horrors meted out on the dockside community, and from the same vantage point seven years later Gladys could see the extent of the devastation suffered in her former stomping ground of Tidal Basin. The area had been virtually flattened, and the old Victorian dwellings were now being replaced with the modern flats and houses of the Keir Hardie Estate, the most ambitious building project in West Ham’s history.

  As the road dropped down towards Silvertown, the great expanse of the Royal Victoria Dock stretched out to her left, where the giant ships unloaded cargo from all over the world. She passed the lock that linked the dock to the Thames, and then suddenly they were in the heart of industrial West Silvertown, with British Oil and Cake Mills, Pinchin Johnson’s paint factory and Ohlendorff’s fertiliser plant spewing out smoke from their giant chimneys. A swarm of shift workers was descending on the factories lining the river on her right, and on her left was the parade of little shops and cafés that served the local community, as well as the Jubilee pub where many a Tate & Lyle worker celebrated the week’s end. Before long she could see the refinery itself, and the bus conductor called out, ‘Tate and Lyle, Plaistow Wharf. Disembark here for the knocking shop!’

  A peal of gruff laughter went around the bus, which was largely filled with dockers and factory men, among whom Tate & Lyle had something of a reputation for promiscuity.

  But one young sugar girl on the bus was not amused. ‘Excuse me, mate,’ she shouted angrily, ‘I work there and I’m not a tart, so I think you ought to shut your mouth!’

  There was another roar from the crowd, this time of approval for the plucky teenager. The cowed conductor muttered an apology, before the tough young woman marched off the bus. Gladys followed close behind, a little in awe.