First published 2012
On an autumn day in 1944, fourteen-year-old Ethel Alleyne walks from her East London home to the gates of Tate & Lyle's sugar refinery on the Thames. She smooths her frizzy hair and steps through the giant entrance, unprepared for what awaits inside. The factory offers the best wages and social life among all the dock factories, but the work proves back-breakingly hard and often dangerous. During the Blitz, Ethel and her fellow Sugar Girls keep Britain sweet while bombs fall around them. The refinery becomes more than a workplace. It transforms into a community where young women find independence, friendship, and romance despite the long hours and hazardous conditions. Ethel discovers that factory life brings both hunger and hardship alongside unexpected happiness. Her story captures the experience of thousands of women who left school at fourteen to work in London's bustling East End factories during and after the Second World War, revealing what it meant to be young and female in a lost way of life.
Genres: family-life, historical-fiction, 20th-century, world-war-ii
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, intimate
Tropes: coming-of-age, found-family
Setting: East London, Tate & Lyle's Sugar Refinery
Period: 1944
98 pages · Kindle Edition · Harper