As they were leaving, one of the nurses called out, ‘See you next year, mother!’
‘You won’t see me no more,’ retorted Ethel.
As a full-time housewife and mother, the diligence and perfectionism Ethel had once brought to bear at Tate & Lyle were now employed in making sure that her home was clean and tidy, and she spent hour after happy hour scrubbing, mopping and polishing until every surface sparkled. Now when guests came to visit, they invariably commented that Ethel’s was the most spotless house they had ever been inside.
Archie assured her there was no need for her to go back out to work, and that they could survive perfectly well on just his wage. After 18 months, however, he had to admit that they were struggling a bit.
‘I’ll get another job, Arch,’ Ethel offered.
‘No,’ he insisted. ‘You ain’t going back to work until Colin’s at school.’
Ethel returned to the housework and childcare. But she didn’t let the idea drop, and when she heard there were part-time jobs going at the Standard Telephone and Cables factory in North Woolwich, she was determined to convince Archie that she should apply.
‘It’ll only be in the evenings,’ she told him, ‘so it won’t be like I’m working full time.’
‘All right then,’ he said, resignedly, ‘if that’s what you want.’
Ethel was delighted to be back at work, and the arrangement meant she could still spend all day cleaning the house to perfection and spending time with Colin. But soldering electrical parts as a factory floor worker was hardly the same as being a charge-hand, and she couldn’t help missing her beloved Tate & Lyle.
A few months later, Ethel was at home one morning when she heard something drop through the letterbox. She went to the front door, collected a letter from the mat and wandered back towards the kitchen, opening the envelope absent-mindedly. As she unfolded the paper inside, she stopped dead in her tracks. There at the top right-hand corner was the Tate & Lyle logo, embossed on the page, and at the bottom she could make out the familiar scrawl of Miss Smith’s signature.
Dear Ethel,
I hope that all is well with you since you left us, and your family are in good health. I am writing to let you know about a new part-time evening shift we are starting in Small Packets. Could you come down to see me about this? If so, please make an appointment with Betty and I should be pleased to discuss it further with you.
My regards to Arthur and the baby.
Yours sincerely,
Miss Florence Smith
Ethel could hardly believe her eyes. A part-time evening shift like the one she was working at Standard, but at Tate & Lyle! Archie had barely got through the door that evening before she had thrust the letter into his hands. ‘Look, Arch,’ she cried. ‘Miss Smith wants me to go in about a job!’
Archie was less delighted than his wife, remembering the sleepless nights he had endured while Ethel tossed and turned thinking about the Hesser Floor. ‘You’re not going back there if you’re going to start worrying like you did before,’ he told her.
‘I won’t do that no more, Archie. I promise I won’t!’
It was clear there was no keeping Ethel from Tate & Lyle, so he agreed she should call and make the appointment.
A few days later, Ethel arrived at the entrance to the refinery, wearing her very best dress. It was two years since she had last been inside, and it felt like a lifetime since she had stood at the old factory gate as an anxious 14-year-old. She looked up at the imposing stone frontage that now stood in its place, bearing the square-shouldered letters:
TATE & LYLE LTD. PLAISTOW WHARF
Despite all that had changed, a bit of her felt nervous this time round, too. She still didn’t know what job Miss Smith had in mind for her. What if she wanted Ethel to start at the bottom again, as a mere machine worker in the same department where she had once been a charge-hand?
The door to the Personnel Office was open, and Ethel knocked quickly before letting herself in. Miss Smith had her head buried in a filing cabinet while the two Betties were busily typing away.
‘Hello, Miss Smith,’ Ethel said.
‘Ethel!’ she replied, looking up with a warm smile. She stepped forward and shook her hand, before ushering her to a seat on the other side of the desk.
‘I was just looking out your file,’ she told her, setting it down on the table between them and flicking through it.
Ethel stared at the file, which charted every twist and turn of her career at the factory: from her first day as a humble sugar packer in the final months of the war, through her promotion to the office and demotion back to packing again, to her brief unsuccessful spell on the tally shortly after her mother’s death, her return to packing for a third and final time, and her ascent through the ranks from filler to driver and finally to the factory’s youngest charge-hand.
She held her breath, waiting to hear what her fate would be.
‘So, what do you think?’ Miss Smith said at last. ‘Would you like to come back – as a charge-hand on the evening part-time shift?’
Ethel was too stunned for words.
‘Of course, we’d take your previous service into account, so for the purposes of your pension and other benefits it would be as if you’d never left,’ she added quickly. ‘And the rate has gone up since you were here previously.’
Ethel was silent for a moment, struggling to take in what she was being told.
Miss Smith leaned foreword, hopefully. ‘Do you have any questions?’ she asked.
Ethel was grinning from ear to ear as the words came out of her mouth. ‘Only one,’ she said. ‘When can I start?’
Epilogue
Ethel could not have been happier to be invited back to Tate & Lyle, and she gave the rest of her working life to the company. Promotion followed promotion until before long she was doing Ivy Batchelor’s old job, with over 200 girls working under her. By then, her house in Oriental Road had been demolished, and she, Archie and Colin were living in a brand-new flat directly opposite the factory – which she could watch over from her kitchen window.
For many years Archie continued to work at Hollis Bros timber yard, until suddenly he was made redundant. True to form, Ethel threw herself into the challenge of finding him employment. She marched from door to door, pencil in hand, drumming up window-cleaning work for him in the local area, and later managed to get him a job at Tate & Lyle, cleaning out the sugar hoppers.
‘I ain’t working with you, Et!’ he said anxiously, when she told him about the position.
‘Don’t worry, Arch,’ she laughed. ‘You’ll be right up the top with the other men. You won’t barely see me.’
Since she had first moved out of the family home following her mother’s death in 1947, Ethel had not had any contact with her father Jim. But one day, in the mid-1980s, she received a call from one of his stepchildren announcing that Peggy, his second wife, had died, and that he wanted to get back in touch with his daughter. After 40 years of separation, the two of them were finally reconciled, and from that day until his death at a ripe old age they saw each other every weekend.
Ethel retired from Tate & Lyle in 1986, and her sugar girls showered her with gifts, among them a figurine of her made out of a Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin. Her friends feared that her life might feel empty without the factory in it, but they soon found that they were mistaken. After years of hard work and the strain and stress of management, she found a new lease of life in retirement, and thanks to a line-dancing class at the local activity centre she discovered a social network of former Tate & Lyle workers. These days, as the group of old sugar girls gather every Friday to play bowls and darts together, the temptation to take charge and boss them about sometimes creeps back in. ‘Ethel, we’re not at work any more,’ they remind her gently.
One day, after Ethel had retired, she received a phone call from Miss Smith. The former manageress was approaching her 80th birthday and was planning a joint party with her old friend and colleague
Betty Phillips, which she hoped that Ethel would come along to.
Ethel was honoured to be invited, but the highlight of the day was when Miss Smith said to her, ‘Ethel, I’ve always admired you for how you worked your way to the top.’ Coming from Miss Smith, who had held the highest female role in the factory for so many years, that meant a lot.
Archie died in 2009, but Ethel, now in her eighties, still lives in Silvertown, just around the corner from her old workplace. In the last few decades she has seen the neighbourhood change almost beyond recognition as the familiar factories have closed down one by one. Although a small team at Plaistow Wharf still produces Golden Syrup, there are no longer any Hesser floors there, and the beautiful frontage has been demolished to make way for the Docklands Light Railway.
Today, where the factory gates once stood there is nothing but a wire-mesh fence, and beyond it not a bustling yard full of workers but a derelict no-man’s-land where weeds grow waist high. Set back some way, behind concrete walls covered in graffiti, a small nucleus of buildings is all that remains of the factory, taking up just a quarter of the old site. When Ethel started there in 1944 she was one of 2,500 workers – now there are fewer than 50.
But when she needs a reminder of how things used to be, Ethel turns to the book that she keeps permanently on her bedside table: The Plaistow Story, written by Oliver Lyle himself shortly before he died in 1961.
A couple of years after leaving the Blue Room, Gladys was astonished to receive her own invitation from Miss Smith, asking her if she would like to return to the factory. She couldn’t quite believe it – after all the mischief she had got up to, almost landing her with the sack more times than she could remember, was it really possible that Miss Smith would consider re-employing her? Part of her would have loved to take the opportunity, but she and John had moved to Forest Gate by then, and commuting all the way to Silvertown wasn’t practical. Besides, without Betty and Eva there with her it just wouldn’t have been the same.
Gladys tried her best to keep in contact with the rest of the old gang, but with a pair of boys to raise and new jobs to hold down, somehow she lost touch with her old friends. In 1985, after working in a string of different occupations – baking asbestos rings for Thermos flasks and working in a matchbox car factory in Stratford, blagging her way into silver service in the city, even helping out at a family-planning clinic – she came to a decision: she would organise a Blue Room reunion and get as many of the old girls to attend as possible.
Betty and Eva were on board within seconds of receiving Gladys’s call, although Eva, remembering the old rivalry in the Beauty Shop, asked anxiously whether Maisie had replied.
‘Oh yeah, she’s coming all right,’ said Gladys. ‘Here, do you think I should invite Flo? She was probably the person I saw most often at the factory.’
Betty thought the idea was hilarious. ‘Miss Smith coming round your house, Gladys? There’s fat chance of that!’
But Gladys decided it was worth a shot. After all, it wouldn’t really be like old times without The Dragon present to put the wind up the lot of them.
To her astonishment, once Tate & Lyle had passed on the message, Miss Smith readily agreed to the invitation, only asking if she could bring her friend Betty Phillips along too.
Gladys threw herself into the preparations for the party, even ordering a special cake in the shape of a two-pound bag of Tate & Lyle sugar. She was looking forward to the event, but there was another feeling mixed in with her excitement, and it had started when Miss Smith had agreed to attend. As the prospect of The Dragon arriving at her door became ever more real, Gladys found to her surprise that she felt nervous. Was it possible that she, a grandmother in her fifties, could be intimidated by an old lady, just because four decades before they had been arch-enemies?
When she arrived, Miss Smith turned out to have lost both her bark and her bite. Now that she was no longer in charge, she was able to come down to the same level as everyone else. ‘Please call me Flo,’ she told the other women. ‘After all, we’re equal now.’
She was friendly and charming and remembered all the girls’ names. ‘How’s your sister Mary?’ she asked Betty kindly, before remarking to Eva, ‘You always did have a mop of hair, and I can see that hasn’t changed.’
Maisie turned to Eva too. ‘I was so jealous of you,’ she admitted. ‘But we’re grown-up now, aren’t we?’ The two old rivals squeezed each other’s hands.
Finally, Miss Smith turned her attention to Gladys. ‘You were such a cow, you know,’ she told her, with an affectionate laugh.
The evening was a rollicking success and it was four a.m. before they all went home. As Miss Smith was on her way out, she caught Gladys’s arm. ‘I want to ask you something,’ she whispered urgently. ‘Back at the factory, did all the girls think that I was gay?’
Gladys was flabbergasted. It was the last thing she had expected to hear from Miss Smith’s mouth, and she didn’t know how to respond. She decided it was best to play dumb. ‘No, Flo, not that I know of,’ she lied, solemnly.
The reunion reminded Gladys what special friends she had made at Tate & Lyle, and from then on Betty and Eva became regular visitors to her house. They still hang out together to this day, meeting up to bicker and tease each other and to reminisce about their adventures at the factory. All three of their husbands have died now, but they still have each other – a gang of Blue Room girls to the last.
The curse of the Tull family continued throughout Lilian’s life, and as the years rolled by she lost count of how many relatives had died as a result of the genetic heart condition. But she never let the losses drag her under, reminding herself every time of what she had to be thankful for: that she was one of the lucky survivors.
Lilian and Alec had decided not to risk having children, but they later gave a home to their teenaged niece Lesley, whose father Leslie had died on holiday in Dorset. For the childless couple, the pleasures of surrogate parenthood were all the more sweet. However devastating the curse was, perhaps it brought the odd blessing as well.
Although Alec was without doubt the most significant man in her life, Lilian never forgot entirely about Reggie, and throughout her marriage she held on to his picture, keeping it hidden where no one would find it. But when Alec died after half a century of married life together, Lilian realised that she had been wrong to cling on to Reggie’s memory. ‘Alec was my husband,’ she told herself, ‘not Reggie.’ Ultimately, Alec was the man who meant more to her, who had given her all he had in the world, and who had loved her with all his heart. Once Alec was gone, there was no longer any room for Reggie’s memory, and Lilian finally tore up the photograph.
Despite losing her husband, Lilian’s recent years haven’t been lonely ones. She has made new friends through the Ascension Centre lunch club in Custom House, and chief among them is her dear companion Flo Waller. Until they both began attending the Ascension Centre, the two women had never met before, but for almost eight decades their lives had seemed to shadow one other. Flo had worked at Tate & Lyle at the same time as Lilian, and outside of work their paths must have crossed a thousand times as well: every Saturday, Lilian would go to the market at Green Street, where Flo would be visiting her cousin, and she was often to be found in the cinema opposite the flat Flo grew up in. Their photographs even appear in the very same issue of Tate & Lyle Times, where Flo is snapped cutting her wedding cake and Lilian departing on the beano to Margate.
The two women have become the best of friends, and since Flo was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Lilian, ever the carer, has devoted her life to looking after her.
Having given up one baby and lost another to a miscarriage, Joan had learned the hard way how to bounce back from misfortune, and the skill was to stand her in good stead. She and Lenny had been married for ten years and had two children together, when tragedy struck.
It was a hot summer’s night and Lenny had spent all afternoon spray-painting his car in the garage. He came
into the house with a pain in his chest, swallowed an alka-seltzer and refused to eat his dinner. By the time the couple went to bed, Joan was a bit frisky, but Lenny wasn’t feeling up to it. ‘Let’s go to sleep,’ he whispered.
Joan reached out and put her arm round him. ‘I ain’t sleeping while you feel bad,’ she told him. ‘If it was one of the kids I’d be up all night with them, and you don’t mean any less to me than they do.’
Moments later Lenny let out a kind of strangled gasp, and when Joan shook him there was no response. She jumped out of bed and called an ambulance, but when the paramedics arrived there was nothing they could do to revive him. Lenny had suffered a massive heart attack.
The next morning, Joan explained as best she could to her children that their father had died. She was determined to keep them away from the funeral, since she didn’t know how she herself would react, let alone what effect it would have on them. But if anything they took the loss better than she did. Her little boy drew a picture of his dad going off into the sky on a forklift truck, while her daughter proved to be remarkably mature for her years, helping her distracted mother keep track of her money.
For months after the funeral, Joan couldn’t face laying just three plates at the kitchen table, and took the family out for almost every meal. She and her kids became regulars at the local Wimpy and the fish and chip shop, as well as her old favourite, Chan’s Chinese restaurant.
One evening over dinner in Chan’s, Joan ran into Alfie’s half-brother, who she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. ‘I don’t want to disturb you, but is it true?’ he asked her. ‘We heard a rumour you and Alfie had a baby.’
Joan was stunned. So, even after all these years the little rat still hadn’t told the truth to his family! And yet, just as her mother had always feared, the gossip had got out eventually.
Wartime for the Sugar Girls Page 29