Wartime for the Sugar Girls

by Duncan Barrett

  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 Pinchin 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.

  Once Edna became an official representative of the women at the factory, she made it her business to study as many employment law textbooks as she could get her hands on, determined not to let her superiors take advantage of the girls’ lack of education to get the better of them.

  One winter’s day, she arrived for work at six a.m. to find that the factory floor seemed far colder than usual. She asked Des Nolan, a foreman, to come down to the floor, and to bring a thermometer.

  ‘I reckon it’s too cold for us to work today, Des,’ she told him, aware that the minimum working temperature was 61 degrees Fahrenheit. Edna escorted him over to the coldest part of the room, as per the rules she had diligently memorised, and sure enough, the reading was well below the acceptable limit.

  ‘You could keep your hats and coats on,’ he suggested.

  ‘No, sorry, Des,’ she told him, ‘we’re not allowed to – it’s dangerous. They might get caught in the machines.’

  Des agreed that the girls could go and wait in the canteen while the room was heated up. Edna and the others sat huddled over steaming cups of tea, waiting for word from the floor. Before long another manager appeared. ‘It’s much warmer now,’ he informed them. ‘You’d better come back to work.’

  ‘Wait here,’ Edna told the girls, as she went back to the floor with the manager. Sure enough, it was still cold. ‘It hasn’t warmed up at all,’ she told the man. ‘Were you planning to light a fire in here or something?’ She marched back to the canteen and rejoined the others.

  By this point the girls were getting anxious. ‘They’ll dock our pay, Ed,’ they told her. ‘We’re going to lose our wages.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ she replied. ‘As long as we’re on site they can’t dock us a penny. If they don’t provide the facilities for us to work in, we ain’t obliged to work.’

  As the time ticked by, the girls became giddy with their own bravery, and not a little high on all the caffeine they had consumed. After a whole eight hours in the canteen, Edna told the managers the women’s shift was over and they were leaving.

  ‘Cheers Ed!’ the girls called out, as they headed home. But Edna knew their bravado masked the fear that, by following her, they were risking their livelihoods.

  The next morning, the girls turned up for work as normal and nervously clocked in. When they arrived on the floor they were ecstatic to find that they were still in their jobs, their foreman was suitably humbled, and – most importantly – their factory was lovely and warm.

  As time went on, new waves of immigration from the West Indies meant that Edna and Monica were no longer the only black women in the factory. The Jamaicans and Trinidadians embraced Edna as one of their own, but when it came to the Dominicans and Saint Lucians, relations were rather frostier. To make matters worse, these women spoke a form of patois which to Edna was incomprehensible. One day as she was passing by a rowdy group of Saint Lucians, one of them turned to her and whispered, ‘En chou manman-ou.’

  Perturbed by this mysterious remark, Edna went over to the Rainbow Room and pressed Monica for a translation.

  ‘They say, “In your mama’s arse”,’ was the helpful response.

  ‘Well, that’s nice!’ responded Edna. ‘What am I supposed to say to that?’

  Monica thought for a moment before whispering urgently, ‘Lanng kaka manman-ou.’

  ‘All right,’ said Edna, ‘what does that mean?’ But Monica just smiled and went back to her work.

  The next day as Edna walked past the group of Saint Lucians, she hollered at them slowly and deliberately, ‘Lanng-ka-ka-man-man-ou!’

  They gasped, glaring at her with rage in their eyes. But from then on they never bothered Edna again.

  The next time she saw Monica, Edna asked what exactly she had said to them.

  ‘Lick your mama’s shit,’ was the reply, and the two women burst out laughing.

  Over the years, Edna found opportunities for promotion through the union, until eventually she was made the representative for the whole refinery, bringing her unique style of negotiation and her strong sense of right and wrong to pensions meetings, pay disputes and arbitration at the highest level.

  Always a thorn in the side of the management, it came as a surprise to Edna when her manager Bill Elliot offered her a promotion to supervisor. At first she was suspicious of his motives. ‘Is this about my ability or buying my silence?’ she asked him.

  He assured her that there was no question of her having to leave the union just because she accepted the promotion. But Edna told him that she felt there was no way she could represent her fellow workers if she was no longer one of them.

  The manager had only one more card to play. ‘It’d mean a lot more money,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I don’t care,’ was Edna’s reply. ‘Money don’t mean a thing to me. Principles do. I don’t want the job.’

  Of all Edna’s achievements during her time at Tate & Lyle, perhaps the most significant was her multi-skills programme, a scheme she devised and championed which ensured that every floor worker learned how to do the jobs of her colleagues, inspired by her own experience of transfer after transfer around the factory. This meant the possibility of variety in an otherwise tediously repetitive job, and combined with an equal opportunities policy it ensured that the workers were paid the same rate.

  Bill Elliot, her one-time adversary, grew to respect and value her contributions. ‘You’ve shown a lot of balls, Ed,’ he told her at the party held in 1989 to celebrate her retirement.

  As she explained to him, all
she ever wanted was fair treatment between equals. ‘Just ’cos you’re a manager, there’s no law that says we’re different,’ she told him. ‘You wear white overalls and I wear green, but we both work for Tate & Lyle.’

  22

  Gladys

  In the Blue Room, women’s contracts were terminated when they got married, and with Betty’s wedding day fast approaching, Gladys knew she would soon be facing life at Tate & Lyle without her best friend.

  Gladys tried not to think about the future and instead threw herself into preparations for Betty’s last day. Stealing some cardboard boxes from work, she went home and set about cutting shapes out of them with her father’s pocket knife. The biggest box she flattened and cut into an L-shape, and the others she carved into several bell-shaped pieces. Then she covered the pieces in tinfoil, made holes in the tops and threaded string through them.

  When Betty arrived at work the next morning, Gladys snuck up on her and threw the biggest piece over her neck so it hung down her back like an L-plate. Then, with Betty giggling away, she set about festooning her with silver bells. Meanwhile a bench on one side of the room was quickly filling up with cards and gifts from all the other Blue Room girls. By the time they were finished with her, Betty looked like a Christmas fairy who had flown off with all the presents from under the tree.

  After their shift, the whole department went for a goodbye fry-up at their regular café opposite the factory. ‘I’m going to miss you lot so much,’ Betty said, throwing her arms round Gladys and Eva and giving them a squeeze. ‘You’re the best friends I’ve ever had.’

  Gladys couldn’t bring herself to reply, but tears dropped into her mushrooms on toast. This was the beginning of the end for the Blue Room as she knew it. Eva, Maisie and all the other girls who had recently got engaged would soon be following in Betty’s footsteps.

  ‘Why do we have to leave when we get married? It’s so unfair,’ she protested.

  Betty looked at her. ‘Aw, Gladys, we’ve just got to find you a bloke to get engaged to,’ she said, kindly.

  ‘Nah,’ Gladys said, forcing a smile, ‘I tried that once before, remember?’

  Betty was married on a beautiful July day, and she and Sid moved into a brand-new flat. Gladys and Eva went round to visit and Betty proudly served them tea in her new living room. The old giggly, daredevil Betty might have been less in evidence, but a calmer, more contented one had taken her place.

  Back at Tate & Lyle, Gladys’s younger sister Rita had joined the company and was working in the can-making department. Rita had a shock of curly red hair just like Gladys, and the two were constantly being taken for twins – an annoyance to both girls. ‘Surely I don’t look as old as her,’ Rita would say, sulkily, while Gladys despaired that she was still being mistaken for a school leaver. She also had the niggling feeling that, with her younger sibling coming up behind her at the factory, she should have moved on by now herself.

  That summer, every weekend seemed to be taken up with a different couple tying the knot, and by the time autumn came round Gladys had become well and truly sick of wedding cake and fish-paste sandwiches. The latest Blue Room bride was a girl called Dolly Stone. Her wedding was in Canning Town and, after food at Dolly’s parents’ house, the party decamped to the Trossachs pub on the Barking Road.

  It was tipping it down, and the guests arrived soaked but keen to warm themselves up again with as much drinking, dancing and singing as they could muster. A man was playing the piano in one corner, and the punters were taking turns to sing. Usually Gladys would be first up, clowning around and making an idiot of herself, but this time she found herself hanging back.

  Gladys didn’t normally drink – she’d always been high-spirited enough to have fun all evening on lemonade – but tonight she was on the gin and tonic. It was the favourite tipple, she realised glumly, of her mum, whose ritual after drinking it was to come home from the pub and disappear into the toilet in the back yard to cry for hours on end.

  Oh God, she thought, was she turning into her mother? Quickly, she stepped up to the piano and whispered in the ear of the pianist.

  There was only one song she could face doing tonight – only one song that would sum up her state of mind. It might be a wedding party, but they’d just have to lump it. She cleared her throat and began belting out ‘Blue Moon’.

  As she looked around the room full of half-drunk, happy couples, Gladys felt as if the song had been written just for her. This was her lot in life, she realised – always the joker, always the tomboy, and always destined to be sad and single.

  The other guests ignored her and whooped in delight as Dolly kissed her new husband. Outside, the rain was pounding against the pub windows. Maybe it was just the gin, but she couldn’t help feeling that the whole world was doing its best to make her miserable.

  Out on the street, a bus trundled along in the rain. Among its shivering passengers were two young men on their way back from the pictures at the Boleyn cinema on the Barking Road. They were headed to the Abbey Arms pub for a nightcap.

  ‘It’s tipping it down,’ said one of them. ‘Let’s get off at the next bus stop instead – there’s a pub right next to it.’

  When the bus drew to a halt, they jumped off and dashed through the rain, heaving open the door of the Trossachs and falling inside.

  Gladys, still singing, looked up and saw the two men. One of them, she noted, was a rather good-looking, well-built young bloke wearing glasses. There was something strangely familiar about him, she thought. It couldn’t be – could it? It was.

  Bum Freezer!

  Gladys almost forgot to keep singing. John, the scrawny kid she used to kick a football about with down at Beckton Road Park, whom she had taunted for the too-short leather sports jacket his mum made him wear, had grown into a strapping young man, muscular and tanned from his time in the Army.

  She felt suddenly self-conscious. What would he think of her now – the former mouthy tomboy, wailing out a soppy song like this? She did her best to mumble the rest of the lyrics with her head down, before slipping gratefully away from the piano and shoving her way through the crowd towards the ladies’ loos.

  Just before she got there a hand tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Hello, aren’t you the girl with the lovely legs?’ The voice was quiet, as John’s had always been, but deeper now.

  Gladys turned round to see him smiling at her. ‘Bum Freezer, ain’t it?’ she grinned back. ‘What are you doing here?’

  John told her he was out of the Army and living in Forest Gate. His mother and sister had both died of tuberculosis, and John was the only child his father had left. He had returned home to the East End to be with him, and to fulfil his ambition of working as a lighterman in the docks.

  As they talked, Gladys forgot about the rain outside, the happy couples around them and the glass of gin and tonic in her hand. Chatting to John was so easy, just the way talking to an old friend should be. Only this time she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  John seemed equally engrossed, but as Gladys listened to him talk in his soft, serious voice, she felt a twinge of guilt for how she had treated him in the old days. Back then, he had seemed like a bit of a wimp to her, but now she saw that he was just gentler and more thoughtful than other men. She was louder, tougher and cheekier than any girl she knew. They were like chalk and cheese, really. What was the chance of him fancying her now?

  When the landlord called time at the bar, it was as if a spell had been broken and they both looked around, surprised to find that they had been chatting for hours. John straightened up as if shaken awake. He looked at Gladys for a moment, then said, quietly but confidently, ‘Can I take you out next week?’

  The old John would never have had the guts to ask, thought Gladys. And the old, jokey Gladys would have shrugged him off.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ she said, before she could stop herself, ‘I’m on two-to-ten next week.’

  She could have slapped herself.

  ‘Well
,’ said the new John, gently persistent, ‘how about the week after that? Singin’ in the Rain’s on. I reckon it might suit you.’

  On Monday the following week, Gladys rushed home after the early shift to get ready for her date. The Teddy Girl look was in, and Eva had convinced her to get a brand-new outfit made at Phil Freeman’s, the tailors near Rathbone Street: a brown birds’-eye patterned jacket and tight, knee-length pencil skirt. She eyed the latter suspiciously; her last one had split up the back when she was dancing too energetically one evening at the Tate Institute, and had to be held together with safety pins for the rest of the night. At least tonight she was only going to the pictures.

  More worrying were the pointed stilettos she had bought to go with the outfit – hand-made at the shoe shop near Trinity Church on the Barking Road. ‘Stick toilet paper up the toe, otherwise your foot will slip and you’ll go flying,’ Betty had warned her. Gladys’s family used newspaper for bog roll, so she rolled up a bit of that and shoved it as far down the elongated nose of the shoe as it would go.

  As she hobbled down the stairs, the skirt stretching almost to breaking point with each step, Gladys heard her father give a rasping laugh. ‘Yeah, yeah, get a good old look!’ she snapped, wobbling slightly on her stilettos. But she knew that, if she were sitting in his seat, she’d be laughing her head off too. Why were women supposed to wear such impractical things for the sake of blokes?

  It was a relief to finally collapse into her seat on the bus and rest her poor feet as it made its way along the Barking Road. But now that Gladys had the space to think about what she was doing she found herself gripped by an unfamiliar fear. For the first time she was going out for the night with someone she actually liked – and it terrified her. What if John ran out on her, or stood her up?

  As the bus approached the stop before the cinema, Gladys felt as if her feet were welded to the floor. She just couldn’t get off without knowing for certain that John was there waiting for her. There was nothing for it but to stay on the bus and go right past the cinema to check that he really was outside, even if it meant hobbling all the way back.