Читать книгу The Sugar Girls: Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End - Duncan Barrett - Страница 11

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 local 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 stood 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.

Near the bus stop was a coffee stall and newspaper stand where the workers were picking up their morning’s necessities. The crowd thronging towards the gates of Tate & Lyle was particularly heavy, but amid the bustling movement one man stood perfectly still. He was a slim, elegant-looking fellow in a pale mackintosh, with grey hair slicked back across his scalp, and he stood scribbling in a little notebook.

His name was Bob Tyzack and he had never got over being given the sack from Tate & Lyle. He stood outside the factory day in, day out, noting down the lorries coming and going, for reasons known only to himself. This was particularly awkward for his brother Bill, the head commissionaire, who was charged with making sure he never stepped onto the factory grounds. The Tyzacks were a well-known Tate & Lyle family, and their name was soon to become famous across the country when Bill’s niece Margaret became a film star.

Gladys headed across the road with the rest of the throng. She looked up at the big white clock above the factory gates, which read two minutes to six: she wasn’t late yet.

Suddenly a collective groan went up from the crowd – a train was about to pass along the tracks in front of the gate. They waited impatiently for it to go through. ‘That’s it, we’ll be docked a quarter of an hour’s pay now!’ grumbled one girl.

Gladys turned to her. ‘But the train won’t take that long, will it?’

‘Don’t matter,’ said the girl. ‘You’re even one minute late here, they close the gate and make you lose 15.’

This harsh rule prompted some Tate & Lyle workers to risk their lives by scrambling under the trains as they slowed down, and stories went round the factory of the injuries suffered by those who had miscalculated.

When the gates finally reopened there was a great rush towards a board on the wall, where clocking-in discs were waiting on hooks to be collected and taken to the various departments. Gladys was almost knocked over in the fray, but fought her way to the commissionaire and asked for the Blue Room charge-hand, Julie McTaggart.

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 Wednesday, 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.

‘Pick up your things immediately,’ she barked, as Gladys scrambled to collect the offending items. ‘The turbans are for safety, not for making fashion statements.’

Gladys hurried back to her machine, but when Miss Smith had circled the room she stopped by her again. ‘I’ve got my eye on you,’ she said, before marching out of the door.

On Thursday morning, Gladys’s mother brought her freshly washed uniform up to her room, along with her bowl of bread and milk.

As Gladys pulled on her dungarees, they seemed smaller than she remembered, and she had trouble getting her feet through the leg holes. By the time she had squeezed her thighs and bottom in, the once-baggy dungarees seemed to have become even tighter than any in the Blue Room.

Gladys attempted to sit back down on the bed and felt a sharp pain around the tops of her legs as the material pinched her skin. She ate her breakfast standing up, before hobbling painfully down the stairs.

At work, Maisie regarded her pityingly. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You didn’t take the dungarees in before you put them in the laundry, did you? They always shrink the first time you wash them.’

Gladys spent the morning standing rigidly at her machine, trying not to breathe in too deeply and dreading the inevitable moment when Miss Smith would come by on her daily round. When she saw the matronly form entering the room, she rolled her eyes. ‘Here we go,’ she muttered to herself.

‘Gladys Taylor,’ said Miss Smith, with undisguised pleasure, ‘I know you’re intent on making an impression here, but how on earth do you expect to bend over in those?’

By Friday, Gladys was almost beginning to feel at home in the Blue Room. She might not have been as glamorous as the other girls there, but they seemed to have accepted her as the department’s token tomboy. She had even proved useful by piercing a few of the girls’ ears in the toilets, and at break times she had begun to join the reel boys in a game of football in the yard rather than spending all her time chatting in the café.

After a week of trials and tribulations, she felt she had been well and truly initiated into life at the factory. But the reel boys had other ideas.

Among Tate & Lyle’s male workforce, the tradition of initiation rituals was strongly embedded, and usually involved sugar or syrup being poured down the new recruit’s trousers. Girls weren’t generally subjected to this sort of thing, but Gladys had unwittingly set herself up as fair game. So what was the appropriate initiation for a boyish girl?

Barry, Joey, Johnny and Robbie put their heads together. It couldn’t be anything too mean, they reasoned, or they’d look like bullies. But Gladys didn’t seem like the kind who’d burst into tears at a bit of good old-fashioned fun, either.

‘I’ve got it,’ said Joey, with a sparkle in his eye. ‘The telpher.’

The telpher was a large wooden crate which went around the outside of the building on a cable, carrying items from one department to another. It made its journeys a good twenty feet in the air and was most certainly not designed for human cargo.

The others looked at him apprehensively. ‘What if she breaks it and falls out?’ asked Barry.

‘Nah, she won’t,’ insisted Joey. ‘She’ll be safe as houses.’

The boys bided their time until after breakfast, when they saw Julie McTaggart go into the office to talk to Peggy Burrows. A quick wink between them signalled the moment, and once again Joey was dispatched to distract the unsuspecting Gladys.

‘I think your ink duct needs refilling,’ said Joey, struggling to keep a straight face.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Gladys, raising her eyebrows. ‘What are you buggers up to this time?’

She turned and caught sight of Barry and Johnny attempting to sneak up behind her. ‘Oh no you don’t!’ she called, setting off at a sprint across the room. ‘You’ll have to catch me first!’

The boys gave chase after Gladys, whose years spent playing football in Beckton Road Park had made her a lithe and speedy runner. As she zigzagged in and out of the machines she elicited cheers of ‘Go, Gladys!’ from the other girls. But with four boys to contend with she eventually found herself cornered.

‘You won’t find nothing in my turban but my brothers’ old socks,’ Gladys told them.

‘Oh no, we’ve got other ideas for you,’ Barry replied, as they scooped her up and carried her to the opening for the telpher.

‘You’re going on a little trip,’ said Joey as they deposited her into the crate.

‘Oh am I?’ said Gladys. ‘Fair enough then. I quite fancied some air!’

She waved as the telpher set off on its jaunty journey and the boys waved back, clutching their sides with laughter. Gladys sat back in the crate, taking in the view of the sky while it made its way along the cable. It wasn’t a bad way to get out of work for a while, she thought to herself, although it was probably best not to look down.

Eventually the telpher arrived back where it had started. Gladys scrambled to her feet to alight from the crate. ‘Anyone else fancy a ride?’ she called cheerily. Then her heart sank.

Waiting for her by the opening was Miss Smith. ‘My office,’ she commanded. ‘Now.’