The Sugar Girls: Tales Of Hardship, Love And Happiness In Tate & Lyle’s East End (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
. If you are looking for social commentary or a class analysis you won't find it in this book. It tells the real stories of four real women working at Tate's and Lyles post second war and briefly exploring the home front war experiences they had prior. You have to draw your own political analysis or of course you can read them as stories at face value.I gave this the full five stories because they chime with the stories my grandparents told. The worker on the Hesser floor who told the 14 year old girl to use paper thimbles because her hands world be torn to ribbons reminded me of my nan telling me about the dockers backs after unloading the sugar ships. The stories of the beanos of the 1950s made me think of how my great nan met my great grandad. She was dancing over crossed beer bottles on a table on a silver town rubber factory at the turn of the last century. My austere Victorian pop fell in love at first sight the story goes.. Stories of weekly tin baths, a weekly chunk of loco rice, Whitening steps, blacking grates, ffamilies of 9 or more kids squeezed into tiny but spotlessly clean homes litter so many of our pasts. My grandparents did not write down their stories. I am glad others did 3.5 Ever since reading the Midwive's series, I have taken a great liking to these kind of books. A group of women, who at various times had worked for the sugar factory. Book explains how easy it was to get employment, a far cry from current times, a woman could start one job in the morning, decide she didn't like it and get a different job by the afternon. A good series, highlighting the many sociological and personal prejudices of the forties and fifties. One girl is forced to give up her child, because unmarried mothers were finished as were their families. Such an innocent time, while at the same time woman had little personal freedom. The prose is rather simplistic, but this is the author just setting down the words the women told him. Tate & Lyle were once two different companies, they merged and were the biggest employer in the East End.
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