The Sugar Girls

by Duncan Barrett

  Before long, she saw a stern-looking woman with very dark hair marching towards her, hands clasped firmly behind her back.

  ‘Gladys Taylor?’

  Gladys nodded.

  ‘You’re late.’

  Defiance welled up in Gladys’s chest. ‘It weren’t my fault,’ she retorted. ‘It was the train. Silly place to put it, if you ask me.’

  Julie looked at her straight-faced. ‘I didn’t.’

  They headed to the surgery, where a nurse checked Gladys over and passed her fit for work. Then Gladys followed Julie into another building. ‘We’re in here, underneath the syrup-filling,’ Julie said, leading her into a cloakroom and pushing a bundle of clothing into her hands. ‘Don’t be long.’ The door swung closed, leaving Gladys alone in the little room.

  She laid out the pile of clothes on a wooden bench: a pair of dark-blue dungarees and a blue-and-white checked blouse – plus a spare set of each. Like going into the bleedin’ Army, she thought ruefully.

  Gladys changed into her new uniform. The dungarees hung loosely on her boyish frame, the crotch resting somewhere down by her knees and the backside looking like a crumpled sack waiting to be filled with potatoes. The short-sleeved blouse seemed to have been designed with a buxom matron in mind, and one with arms as thick as her legs, not a skinny, flat-chested 14-year-old. What kind of monstrous creatures worked in this Blue Room?

  Then Gladys noticed the final addition, which had fallen to the floor by her feet – a piece of checked cloth which was evidently intended for a turban. ‘How am I supposed to wear that?’ she muttered, scooping it up. She twisted it around her head a few times, shoved the end under the rim, and tried unsuccessfully to poke her red hair beneath the material.

  As she left the cloakroom, the dungarees flapping between her legs almost tripped her up. She followed Julie McTaggart into a long, narrow room which was painted blue. ‘This is where we print the packets for the sugar,’ Julie told her.

  Around twenty girls were standing at machines of varying sizes. They were chatting and laughing loudly, singing along to music, or talking to young men who were hauling great reels of paper onto one end of the machines. Behind a glass partition was an office where the forelady Peggy Burrows sat, busy with her paperwork.

  As Julie approached, a hush immediately fell and several girls rushed back to their machines from other parts of the room.

  Gladys stared at them open-mouthed. Far from the monstrous creatures she had expected, they were all extremely young, slim and glamorous, their dark-blue uniforms neatly tailored to show off their figures and their checked turbans not roughly assembled cowpats like her own, but towering works of art that gave them the stature of models. As they returned her gaze, some of them began to giggle and Gladys’s pale skin turned bright red as she remembered the baggy dungarees swinging between her legs.

  ‘Be quiet, the lot of you,’ snapped Julie. She turned to Gladys. ‘Let’s get you to work.’

  At each machine, a girl stood watching the progress of the paper, checking for smudging as it turned dark blue and the white letters ‘TATE AND LYLE PURE GRANULATED SUGAR, UNTOUCHED BY HAND’ emerged. The machine then cut the papers down to the size of sugar bags and spat them out at the other end onto a pallet which, when full, was taken away by one of the boys to the Hesser Floor for filling. Every now and then the girl would pick up one of the stacks of paper, fanning them out and expertly counting them in fives up to 1,000. Everybody, Gladys noticed, had blue ink-stained fingers.

  Julie led Gladys over to a machine. ‘If your reel starts running out, call one of the boys to replace it immediately, and keep an eye on the ink duct – if it’s running low, get an engineer to top it up,’ she told her. ‘And if you need the loo, put your hand up so someone can take your place. We can’t have the machines stopping for anything.’

  Gladys nodded.

  ‘Maisie!’ Julie shouted across the room. ‘Stop flirting with the reel boys and come and show Gladys the ropes.’

  Gladys turned to see a young blonde woman saunter across the floor. She was without doubt the prettiest and most glamorous of all the Blue Room girls, and that was no mean feat. Her uniform seemed to be a few centimetres tighter even than everyone else’s, and the top few buttons of her blouse were undone. She walked with a distinctive wiggle, which the best-looking boy on the floor was currently doing an impressive job of imitating behind her back. When she heard the other boys begin to whistle at the spectacle, she swung her head round with a swish of her beautiful hair. ‘Give it a rest, Alex, you ain’t got the hips for it,’ she told him.

  Julie McTaggart looked at Maisie disapprovingly before marching off, her hands behind her back.

  Maisie walked over to Gladys, and leaned in to whisper in her ear. ‘She was in the ATS in the war,’ she said, nodding to Julie. ‘Thinks she still is.’

  Gladys giggled. Then, looking up at Maisie, she found herself mesmerised by her eyes. Each one was framed by the thickest, darkest, most luscious curled lashes she had ever seen.

  ‘Like ’em?’ Maisie asked, batting them seductively. ‘I bought them myself. Now let me introduce you. That’s Joycie and Eileen – they’re sisters – and Rita their cousin. Over there’s Ruthie, Annie, Blanche and Joanie,’ she said, pointing to girls who looked no more than 14 or 15 themselves and who gave her a friendly nod. ‘And that’s the other Annie, Dolly, the two Lils and Ivy the cleaner,’ she added, waving to some women who looked very grown-up. They must be in their early twenties at least, thought Gladys.

  ‘That cheeky bugger working on the scrap paper is Alex,’ Maisie said, ‘and the reel boys are Robbie, Johnny, Barry and Joey – he’s that sweet one over there who’s lame in one leg. A word of advice – don’t get stuck behind a reel with Robbie or you’ll find his hands wandering where they shouldn’t.’

  ‘Oh no they won’t,’ said Gladys confidently, ‘or he’ll get a clout from me.’ Inwardly she felt relieved that there were some lads here she could have a laugh with, amid all the glamour girls. She had grown up with four brothers, and most of her friends in Plaistow were male.

  Gladys soon discovered that working in the Blue Room was far from strenuous, and after twenty minutes or so she began to realise that the hardest thing about it was keeping her concentration. She found it was perfectly possible to take her eyes off the job for several minutes at a time and look around for something more entertaining to do – as long as she turned back quickly enough when Julie McTaggart came past on patrol, or Miss Smith appeared on her daily round. Since the other girls appeared to be terrified of Miss Smith, a shout of ‘The Dragon’s coming!’ went up from the person nearest the door as soon as she approached, and the warning was quickly passed around the floor.

  The best opportunity for fun came from the reel boys who, working on a floor full of girls, were in a permanent good mood. When Barry went past with a reel of paper, Gladys fell into easy conversation with him. ‘They left you room to grow in that, have they?’ he teased, pointing to her outfit.

  ‘Oi you, don’t be cheeky,’ she retorted. ‘I’m not so skinny I couldn’t lift one of those reels of yours.’

  ‘Nah, girls can’t do it. That’s why you need us strong men around,’ he joked.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she said. ‘Pass me one then, and let’s see.’

  As she turned towards him, away from her machine, Gladys felt something tugging at the back of her right thigh. Maisie’s warning about Robbie’s wandering hands flashed into her head, and she quickly looked over her shoulder, her fist clenched in readiness to deliver the promised clout.

  To her surprise, there was no one there. Instead, she looked down with horror to see that the machine was giving her dungarees the alteration they so desperately required, wrapping the baggy material round and round a spindle and making them increasingly tight.

  ‘Barry, help me!’ Gladys said, turning back to him while frantically clutching at her behind.

  ‘Oh, so you’ve changed your mind now, have
you?’ he joked. ‘You girls do need my help after all?’

  ‘No, you don’t understand – I’m being sucked into the machine!’ she cried, pulling at the material with all her might and feeling it slip, bit by bit, through her fingers.

  ‘Yeah, nice try,’ laughed Barry, turning away with his reel.

  ‘It’s cutting off my blood flow!’ Gladys hollered, her face bright red with the effort of resisting the machine. Her right trouser leg was now at least as figure-hugging as those of the other Blue Room girls, and it was getting tighter by the second. She could feel a creeping numbness at the top of her thigh.

  Barry dropped the reel he was holding, which went careering along the floor leaving reams of paper in its wake, and grabbed her around the waist. ‘Let’s pull at the same time,’ he said. ‘Maybe we can rip the material.’

  Gladys nodded.

  ‘Ready? One … two … three!’

  They both yanked as hard as they could, but the factory-issue dungarees were sturdy. Gladys herself was now pressed right up against the machine. ‘It’s going to swallow me,’ she gulped.

  Other girls ran over to see what the commotion was about and one of them began to scream.

  ‘Turn off the machine!’ shouted Barry.

  ‘But we can’t – we’re not allowed,’ said Maisie, flustered.

  ‘Turn it off now!’ screamed Gladys, silencing them all.

  One of the other reel boys ran round to where a big red button waited, ready for the unthinkable act. He slammed his hand down hard and the machine whirred briefly before coming to a final, juddering halt. The spindle gave up its claim on Gladys’s trouser leg and she pulled it free, feeling the blood rushing back all the way down to her foot. She gave the machine a heartfelt kick of retaliation.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Julie McTaggart shouted, rushing out of the office. ‘And how dare you turn off this machine!’

  Gladys opened her mouth to protest, but Julie didn’t give her a chance to answer.

  ‘Get to Miss Smith’s office immediately,’ she told her.

  The other girls stared at Gladys as if she had just been handed a death sentence.

  ‘Good luck,’ whispered Maisie, anxiously.

  ‘The rest of you, back to work,’ snapped Julie, and they all hurried off to their machines.

  Inside the Personnel Office the two Betties were typing away, but there was no sign of Miss Smith.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ said Betty Phillips. ‘We didn’t expect to see you again so soon.’

  ‘I couldn’t stay away,’ quipped Gladys, bitterly.

  Miss Smith marched into the room and took her seat behind the desk, leaving Gladys standing awkwardly before her. ‘So what have you done? I’m waiting,’ she demanded.

  ‘They had to turn off my machine,’ Gladys admitted. ‘But it weren’t my fault! I only looked away for a second, and my trousers got sucked in.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have looked away at all,’ Miss Smith told her sternly. ‘Not only is it extremely dangerous, but if the machine has to be stopped then the company loses money.’

  Gladys looked at the floor. ‘It would never have happened if they’d given me the right size uniform,’ she muttered bitterly.

  ‘I think you’ve forgotten my fourth rule,’ said Miss Smith.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Gladys, struggling to recall anything before the life-threatening incident.

  ‘No cheek,’ said Miss Smith, firmly.

  When Gladys returned to the Blue Room, the girls were astonished to see her. ‘We all thought The Dragon was going to sack you,’ Maisie whispered. ‘How come you’re still here?’

  ‘I dunno. Beginner’s luck?’ shrugged Gladys.

  When break time finally came, the girls invited her to come with them for breakfast at the café across the road. ‘You don’t want to bother with the canteen here, it’s too dear,’ Maisie told her.

  They joined a gaggle all heading across the road, some of them dressed in dungarees and checked shirts like her own but in a lighter blue. ‘Those are the Hesser girls,’ said Maisie, disdainfully. ‘Look at them, they’re like navvies!’

  As they neared the café they saw two dockers who were about to go in. Hearing the girls’ chatter, the men glanced behind them and immediately changed their minds. ‘We’re not going in here, mate,’ said one to the other, as they hurried off. ‘Not when it’s full of sugar girls.’

  Once inside, Gladys could see why. The place rang with the noise of female shift workers laughing, singing, chatting and shrieking, while the café owners ran around like maniacs trying to deal with the breakfast rush.

  She looked at the menu. Eggs, bacon, tomatoes, bread and butter … and fried mushrooms! Gladys had never eaten mushrooms before, and after the events of this morning who knew if she’d survive long enough at Tate & Lyle to get another chance to try them?

  ‘I’ll have mushrooms on toast,’ she said confidently, as if ordering her usual.

  The mushrooms arrived, tender and dripping with butter, and Gladys savoured each bite of her exotic treat, while trying not to appear too excited. As she did so, the other girls confided to her the secrets of the Blue Room. Printing was the easiest job in the factory, they told her, so she was very lucky to have been given it. Theirs was one of the smallest departments – much smaller than the Hesser Floor – and therefore far more exclusive. Peggy Burrows, the forelady, took such pride in her machines that every night at the end of the late shift the girls were told to stop work half an hour early to clean them with methylated spirits till they shone.

  But the biggest source of pride was the fact that the Blue Room had acquired the unofficial title of the Beauty Shop, thanks to the svelte appearance of the girls. One of their number, Iris – a six-foot stunner – had gone down in legend for running off to Paris to join the Bluebell Girls as a topless dancer. It was beginning to dawn on Gladys that there were standards she was expected to uphold – and that she was rather ill-equipped to do so. Had Miss Smith sent her to the department for her own amusement?

  ‘Why are all your uniforms so tight compared to mine, then?’ she asked, butter dribbling down her chin.

  ‘They weren’t when we got them,’ winked Joanie. ‘The trick is, once you get them home, you put a seam up the front and back of the dungarees so they fit more snug. You’ll have to take your blouse in, too.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to get that turban up a bit higher,’ put in Joycie.

  ‘How do you do that?’ asked Gladys.

  ‘Knickers,’ she said.

  ‘Knickers?’

  ‘Yeah, you wind up the turban with stockings, knickers, socks, whatever you’ve got. Helps bulk it out a bit. Flo Smith don’t like it – a notice went up saying we wasn’t to do it no more, but bit by bit we’ve been sneaking them in again.’

  Work finished at two p.m., but Gladys knew she still had a long afternoon ahead of her. She was determined to rein in her unwieldy dungarees before tomorrow, and that meant taking them in by hand – a laborious process, especially given her pitiful needlework skills.

  She caught her two buses home and turned the corner into Eclipse Road, where she spotted the group of local lads she usually hung around with, going up the street with a football. Among them was a bespectacled boy called John, whose mother always made him wear a ridiculously short leather sports jacket. ‘Oi, Bum Freezer!’ Gladys shouted. This was her nickname for him, in return for which he called her ‘The Girl with the Lovely Legs’, which was guaranteed to annoy a tomboy like Gladys.

  ‘You coming for a kickabout?’ he asked her. ‘We’re going over Beckton Road Park.’

  Gladys considered for a moment. She would dearly love the opportunity to give John a good thrashing at football, especially considering how stupid he looked right now in his jacket. But then the image of the glamour girls in the Blue Room floated back into her mind.

  She sighed. ‘Can’t. Got more important things to do now, ain’t I?’

  On Wednes
day, Gladys went into Tate & Lyle with her head held high – very high, in fact. Her turban was now stuffed full of as many of her brothers’ socks as she could find, as well as several pairs of knickers and a few stockings for good measure. Her dungarees had been sliced almost in two to fit her skinny frame, and the crotch was now where it belonged.

  As she walked into the Blue Room, the girls nodded in approval. ‘I like your turban, Gladys,’ said Joycie. ‘It’s even taller than Maisie’s!’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Gladys, with attempted nonchalance, shoving the enormous bundle back into place as it began to slide down her forehead.

  To the girls, Gladys had come top in the day’s unofficial fashion stakes, but the boys saw her new headwear as an irresistible challenge – particularly since they knew what must be wrapped up in it. When the coast was clear, Robbie and Joey gave each other a quick wink and Joey walked over to Gladys’s machine with a concerned look on his face. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, frowning as he pointed to the ink duct. ‘I think you might be running out of ink.’

  ‘Really?’ said Gladys, peering into the duct, unaware of Robbie sneaking up behind her. ‘But I only just had it filled up.’

  She felt the turban sliding forwards again as she leaned over, and put up a hand to steady it. But before she even reached her brow, Robbie had already flung out an arm and whipped the turban clean off her head, leaving Gladys to grasp at nothing but a handful of ginger curls.

  ‘Oi, give that back, you buggers!’ Gladys shouted, spinning round in time to see the checked cloth flying through the air, her assorted underwear cascading out of it as it unravelled. The boys’ laughter was so loud it momentarily drowned out the noise of the machines. Then it stopped abruptly.

  Gladys followed their gaze and watched as a pair of white knickers finished its graceful flight and landed, with perfect precision, at the toe of a very large ladies’ shoe. She looked up at the shoe’s owner and found herself meeting the angry stare of Miss Smith, who had arrived on her daily round of the factory.