Wartime for the Sugar Girls

by Duncan Barrett

  Joan felt an enormous wave of relief wash over her. Finally someone in her new life understood who she really was. Even though she continued to keep the secret from the girls at work, she felt lighter and freer around them than she had before.

  But if Joan thought that telling Lenny about the baby would bring her peace, she was wrong. A letter arrived not long afterwards, and enclosed was a form finalising Terry’s adoption. Joan’s pen hovered over the space where her signature was required – Lenny’s words had opened up a tiny chink of hope in her mind.

  Later that day she called the Crusade of Rescue and, bracing herself for the reply, asked how Terry was getting on with his adoptive family.

  ‘Oh, hello, Joan,’ said one of the nuns, cheerfully. ‘Yes, your boy’s doing very well. In fact his new parents are so happy with him that they’ve taken another one from us.’

  Joan could see the happy family in her mind’s eye: mum, dad, two kids. Could she really shatter that perfect picture?

  Muttering her thanks, she hung up and tried again to sign the form. But again her pen wavered. She simply couldn’t do it until she had opened the door to that niggling hope and confronted it properly. Lenny loved her. She knew he was serious about her. Would he be willing to try and help her get Terry back, and make that perfect family theirs, not someone else’s?

  The next time they met, Joan showed him the form. ‘Lenny,’ she said, shakily, ‘can I – can we – try to do anything about this?’

  Lenny held her hand and looked into her eyes. He loved her with all his heart, but he had already done far more than many men of his generation would have been able to.

  ‘No, Joan,’ he said, quietly but firmly. ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t.’

  Joan nodded, her eyes filling with tears. By now she had learned the hard way that there were some battles in life even she couldn’t win.

  Joan kept the little picture of Terry with her always, but she closed the door on her hopes of ever getting him back. Over time, when she recalled the nun’s words on the phone that day, they seemed reassuring rather than painful. She was glad his new family were so happy with him, and felt proud to have played a part in that happiness. Soon she found she could no longer remember Terry’s birthday.

  All the same, she always hoped that one day, many years down the line, a young man might knock on the door and ask if Joan Cook was his real mum.

  After a year and a half of courting, Joan and Lenny were married. This being the Cook family, there was no living with the in-laws while painstakingly saving for a deposit, or even any need for a dreaded mortgage. Joan spotted a house on Roman Road, the very street she’d once fooled Lenny into believing she lived on, and told her dad she wanted to buy it. ‘How much do you need?’ John Cook asked her, and the next day she was walking up to the house with the entire amount in cash stuffed underneath her jumper.

  Nor was their honeymoon a run-of-the-mill affair. Joan was determined that she and Lenny would be the first people they knew to have a foreign holiday, and when she spotted an advert in the Daily Mirror for Hotel Ricardi, just outside Rimini, she was seduced by the exotic-sounding name. She wrote at once and booked the biggest room they had.

  As she and Lenny stood staring at the aeroplane they were about to board, however, the reality of it suddenly hit her. They were actually going up in the air! For once, Joan was a gibbering wreck.

  Worse, the plane was full and she was forced to sit up one end while Lenny anxiously took a seat at the other. Eventually a kind old man offered his seat to Lenny’s fretful new wife.

  Once they reached Italy, the luxury holiday Joan had envisioned was laid out before her: it was blissfully hot, the hotel was beautiful and the beach was perfect. But, to her surprise, she hated everything about it. Much as her family had done their best to rise above their origins, she was an East End girl through and through, and she couldn’t wait to get back home.

  When she stepped off the plane back in England, Joan had to resist the urge to throw herself down on the tarmac and kiss it. From that day forth, the furthest she and Lenny ever went was to visit his lobster-fishing relatives in Jersey.

  But the holiday proved to have one rather more positive legacy. Joan spotted a competition in The Sun for ‘the funniest 25-word story about your love life’ and was determined to win it – especially since the prize was a double divan. Relishing the chance to put her cheeky way with words to use again, she sat down and wrote:

  My husband opened a bottle of champagne in our honeymoon bedroom. As the bottle popped, it shot under the bed, leaving him holding the cork.

  A week later, Joan opened the paper to discover that she had won the bed. But more importantly, there were her words in print on the page, with her name underneath them. She might have been bottom of her class at school, but now she could hold her head high: she was a published writer.

  Not long after they were married, Joan had left her job at the coconut importer and she was working as a wages clerk at Dickie Bird’s ice cream when she discovered she was pregnant. Instantly, she thought back to her 16-year-old self, lying in the bath, wishing she was no longer alive. How different things were now: she was a married woman with her own house and a husband who she knew would be over the moon when he found out. Just a few years earlier, the same piece of information had destroyed her world.

  Lenny rushed round to tell his parents, and began planning a nursery for the little boy or girl. Joan’s own parents welcomed the news that she was pregnant as if they had never heard it before. No one mentioned the child that had never been acknowledged. Everyone played the part of the delighted family to perfection. Happy as she was, the contrast was painful for Joan. She did her best to hide her darker thoughts, but she suspected that Lenny could tell.

  They were at home together one day about three months later, talking about paint colours for the new nursery, when Joan felt a sudden pain in her stomach. ‘Back in a sec,’ she told Lenny, running to the toilet. When she sat down, she realised she was bleeding.

  Lenny was taking no chances and immediately called an ambulance. By the time it arrived Joan was haemorrhaging badly, and she was distraught. Could it be that after having to give up a perfectly healthy baby, now the one she was able to keep was dying?

  As she was carried into the back of the ambulance on a stretcher, Joan sobbed uncontrollably, and passers-by stopped to stare. ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry,’ said the young nurse, patting her hand anxiously. Joan pushed her away. She didn’t care what anyone thought. As they drove away with the siren blaring, she was crying now not just for the baby she was losing but for the one that she had already lost.

  At Mile End Hospital, the doctor leaned in and whispered, ‘Are you sure you haven’t done something to yourself?’

  Joan’s eyes were streaming and she could hardly see him through the blur of tears. She wanted to scream but she was so choked with crying that she couldn’t catch enough breath even to speak.

  ‘No,’ she managed to sob, ‘of course not.’ Then she passed out.

  Joan was in Mile End Hospital for a week and had several blood transfusions. When she came round, she discovered she had been put on a ward next to a young girl who had just given birth to a perfectly healthy baby boy.

  The girl was blind, and she didn’t have a ring on her finger. Joan blinked at her, unable to comprehend the injustice of it. ‘How are you going to look after him?’ she demanded, before a nurse came and hastily drew the curtain between them.

  Back in East Ham, Lenny was anxious to do everything he could to look after his wife, insisting she go part-time at work and take it easy. On her days off, Joan spent a lot of time staring at the wall, thinking through all the events of the last few years. She was still barely into her twenties, yet already she’d had her heart broken by the man she thought she would marry, been forced to give up her first baby, and lost her second before it was born. She realised that, for all the money they had, her family were as helpless in the face of fortune as
their neighbours.

  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t fight back. Joan thought of the days when she had stood up to her father as his blows rained down on her mum’s head. She thought of the pain she had managed to turn into pride, knowing that the child she had given birth to was now making another family happy. Joan had never been a victim, and she was not about to start being one now.

  ‘Lenny,’ she said, when her husband came in from work, ‘I want to try for another baby.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, concerned. ‘It’s only been three months.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said, kissing the scar above his left eye.

  Nine months later, Joan returned to Mile End Hospital. There, she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl weighing 6 pounds 8 ounces, and took her home.

  24

  Ethel

  Ethel’s younger sister Winnie had recently got married, and she was leaving the little house she shared with Ethel and Archie for a flat in Poplar. Since the syrup-filling department was off-limits to women once they were wed, Winnie would no longer be working at Tate & Lyle with Ethel either. Nonetheless, she could not have been happier in her new life, and her joy was only multiplied when she learned not long after the wedding that she was pregnant.

  ‘I’m so excited, Et,’ she told her big sister when she came round to visit. ‘I’m going to have a little family of me own now.’

  Archie’s sister Honour had also recently got married, to a colleague at the factory named Johnny Gibbons, and Ethel wondered how long it would be before they started a family as well.

  After Winnie had given birth, Ethel went up to the hospital in Poplar to bring her a change of clothes and take her home. When she entered the ward, she spotted her little sister lying in bed, cradling a tiny baby. ‘Come on!’ Winnie beckoned her closer. ‘Say hello to Tony. Tone, this is your Auntie Ethel.’

  Ethel examined the little crumpled face. ‘He looks very nice,’ she told Winnie approvingly.

  ‘I’m so happy, Et,’ her sister replied, beaming.

  Ethel put an arm around Winnie’s shoulder, squeezing her tight. The baby made a gurgling noise, and began to drift off to sleep.

  ‘Don’t you want one of these?’ Winnie whispered. ‘I always thought of you as a brilliant mum.’

  ‘We’re all right, Win,’ Ethel replied, laughing. ‘If that’s what happens then we’ll let nature take its course, but I’ve got my job at the factory.’

  Ethel had watched numerous sugar girls leave Tate & Lyle to start a family over the years, but she had no particular desire to have a child, and would quite happily have stayed there forever. She had a supportive husband and the freedom and independence of her own career, almost unheard of for a woman of her background in 1950s London. It seemed that her mother had been right to expect great things of her.

  Not long after, Ethel was inspecting one of the machines at work when she was struck by a peculiar giddy feeling. Her legs felt weak beneath her, and her vision was beginning to blur. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said to the girl at the machine, as she wobbled off in the direction of the cloakroom.

  Just before she got to the door she felt herself sway more profoundly before suddenly falling towards the ground. It was lucky for Ethel that Honour’s husband Johnny happened to be passing through. He rushed over and managed to catch her before her head hit the shiny tiled floor. Scooping her up into his arms, he carried her into the cloakroom, and gently sat her down.

  Ethel came round relatively quickly. ‘Are you all right?’ Johnny asked, anxiously. ‘Do you want me to get someone?’

  Ethel put her hand up to her head. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she insisted. ‘No need to fuss. I’ll be right as rain in a minute.’

  Before long she was up on her feet and back on the floor, busily pacing around the department.

  A month later, Ethel was eating her lunch in the canteen when again the dizzy feeling came over her. She calmly pushed her plate of food to one side, making a space big enough for her head on the table in front of her, and then allowed the faint to take its course. She woke up once again to find that a crowd had gathered around her, but she was on her feet within minutes, assuring them that nothing was wrong.

  When the fainting attacks recurred the next month, Archie insisted that Ethel go to the doctor. ‘This can’t go on,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to find out what’s wrong with you.’

  Reluctantly, Ethel admitted he was right.

  A few weeks later, Ethel sat in front of the doctor as he read through her test results. ‘Everything appears to be normal,’ he said, somewhat baffled. ‘My advice to you, Mrs Colquhoun, is to have a baby. That ought to sort you out.’

  Though she hadn’t previously given the idea much thought, once Ethel had been set the challenge of conceiving a child, she was determined to succeed at it. However, despite her and Archie’s best efforts over the following months, she was frustrated to discover that in this area of her life success was elusive.

  ‘Well, you told me what would cure me,’ she complained to the doctor, ‘but nothing’s happening.’

  ‘Mrs Colquhoun,’ he said carefully, ‘you do know there are certain times of the cycle that are advantageous, don’t you?

  The fourteenth day onwards is the best time to try.’

  Ethel returned home with this new piece of information. ‘Right you are, then,’ said Archie, and they waited for the auspicious date to arrive.

  When it did, they dutifully climbed the stairs to bed, but before they had even reached the top they were both cracking up at the ridiculousness of the situation. ‘Oh Arch,’ said Ethel, ‘we mustn’t laugh!’

  They tried their best to suppress their giggles, but as they got under the covers, one look at Archie’s face, trying hard to assume an expression of serious concentration, made Ethel burst out laughing again, and he was soon following.

  It was no good – the knowledge that the doctor had prescribed their night together had made it impossible. Eventually they were so exhausted from laughing that they fell asleep.

  In the middle of the night, the two of them woke up and, with the pressure off, the intended act finally took place. The next morning, as Ethel was leaving the house, her neighbour couldn’t help remarking, ‘I heard you and Archie last night – what were you two laughing your heads off about?’

  ‘Oh nothing,’ said Ethel quickly, scurrying off up the street.

  The prescription worked, and soon Ethel was expecting. Like all those sugar girls before her, she was now faced with the necessity of having to tender her resignation, as the rules of the factory dictated.

  As her bump grew larger and larger, Ethel tried not to think about what the baby’s arrival would mean, but now and then she caught herself worrying about leaving Tate & Lyle. She had dedicated herself to the factory, and it had rewarded her richly. But if she was no longer a sugar girl, then what was she? Her anxious ruminations were not helped by the constant stream of comments that seemed to follow her everywhere she went. ‘Ooh, you must be looking forward to being at home with the baby … Won’t it be a relief not to come in here day after day? … I bet you can’t wait till you hang up that white coat for good.’

  When her final day at the factory came around, Ethel faced it bravely. The girls on the floor had shown their usual generosity in the presents they bought for her and the baby.

  ‘I bet you’re all just pleased to see the back of me,’ Ethel joked, wiping a tear from her eye. She hugged a few of the girls, before gathering up the gifts and heading home.

  It was only once she was alone in her own house that Ethel really allowed her emotions to come out. She cried and cried all night long, distraught at the thought of never going into the factory again. Tate & Lyle had been her world, and the sense of loss was enormous.

  Ethel was taken into hospital at six a.m. one Saturday with complications, and baby Colin was born a week later by caesarean section. She was seriously ill afterwards and lay in her hospital bed for two weeks whil
e Archie waited anxiously at home, calling up every day to ask if his wife could be discharged yet.

  Colin had been put on another part of the ward, and as soon as Ethel came round she asked after him. ‘He’s ginger, like his dad,’ she was told. ‘We’ve been showing him off round the ward ’cause he’s got more hair than we’ve ever seen on a baby!’

  After a while the nurses said they would bring Colin to her to breastfeed. Although she was exhausted and groggy from the drugs she had been given, Ethel couldn’t wait to meet her baby and did her best to sit up in bed. Two nurses arrived in the doorway, one of them clutching a small bundle from which a couple of tiny arms were protruding.

  The other nurse helped Ethel adjust the hospital gown she was wearing, and put the child to her breast, but he didn’t take.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Ethel asked anxiously.

  ‘Just try again,’ the nurse replied, trying to push the baby towards her.

  Ethel knew she was feeling a bit out of it, but looking down she was sure the baby’s hair looked more brown than red.

  ‘I thought you said Colin had ginger hair,’ she said, panicked.

  Just then another nurse appeared in the doorway, laughing her head off. ‘You do know you’ve got the wrong baby there!’ she told her colleagues, who all burst out laughing as well.

  Ethel felt so horrified she could have hurled the baby across the room, but the nurses quickly whisked him away and left, still laughing. She lay back down on her bed, feeling sick to her stomach. She knew if she’d had her normal strength she wouldn’t have let them get away with what had just happened, but she felt too ill to fight.

  After a while, Ethel’s strength returned to normal, and by the time Archie was finally allowed to take her home, she and baby Colin had formed a close bond. But the experience in the hospital had put her off ever having another child.