Wartime for the Sugar Girls by Duncan Barrett

Author:Duncan Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2009-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

12

Gladys

The Blue Room had recently moved to the top of a new building at the eastern edge of the factory – strictly speaking it wasn’t blue any more, but the old name had stuck. The girls now had to climb many flights of stairs every day to reach their department. On the plus side, a new set of toilets had been installed, and they came with some intriguing additions: a row of bidets.

‘What are those sinks doing all the way down there?’ Gladys asked when she first spotted the unfamiliar objects.

‘Don’t know,’ replied Betty. ‘They must be for washing your feet in.’

‘Why do they think our feet need washing?’ asked Maisie, a little insulted, as she took a seat on one of the bidets and lit up a fag. Several girls followed her example.

‘It’s quite comfy like this actually,’ said one of them as she straddled the porcelain basin.

As the others chatted away, Gladys crept stealthily up behind them on her tiptoes. Then, in a flash, she ran along the back of the row, flicking the taps on full blast.

Maisie and the other girls leapt to their feet screaming, while Gladys legged it, crying with laughter, back to the Blue Room, where her friends spent the rest of the day attempting to hide the wet patches on their bottoms.

As well as extra equipment in the lavatories, the new Blue Room also afforded quite a view – of the stinking mountain of animal carcasses in the yard of John Knight’s soap works next door. From their vantage point on the top floor, the Blue Room girls could see the swarm of over-fed bluebottles that buzzed constantly around the rotting pile. Every so often, the poor men would appear whose job it was to shift the putrid mound, and as they shovelled away, rats measuring at least a foot long would come scurrying out, only to be chopped in half by the men and added to the top of the pile.

The first time the inhabitants of the Beauty Shop witnessed this event there were screams of horror, cries of ‘I’m going to be sick’ and at least two near-fainting fits. ‘Get away from that window at once,’ commanded Julie McTaggart.

‘I’m never using soap again!’ declared Maisie. ‘Me neither,’ said Betty, wiping her brow.

But for Gladys the spectacle held a grotesque fascination, and thereafter she kept an eye out for the men and their shovels. ‘Quick, they’re chopping up rats again!’ she would shout to the reel boys, who like her found it morbidly fascinating.

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