The Bakery Before Dawn

Oscar’s dad was a baker, and bakers get up when it is still the middle of the night.

Oscar had always known this. He had always known that when he woke up in the morning, Dad was already gone, and had been gone for hours, and that the bread on the table had been made by him while Oscar was still dreaming. But he had never seen it. He had never been there.

“When I’m six,” he had said, for a long time. And then he was six, and it was a Saturday, and Dad came into his room in the dark and said, very quietly, “Do you still want to?”

He did.

It was four o’clock. Oscar had never been up at four o’clock. The house was a different house. The stairs creaked in places they did not creak in the day, and the kitchen light was too bright, and outside the window everything was black and still, and there was a moon, a thin one, lying on its back over the roofs like a smile.

He put his coat on over his pyjamas. Dad said that was allowed. Nobody would see.

The street was empty. Not one car. Their footsteps sounded very loud, and Oscar walked on his toes for a bit, and then stopped, because it was silly, and there was nobody to hear. The lamp posts made pools of orange on the pavement and he went from pool to pool. A cat sat on a wall and watched them go past and did not care.

The bakery was at the end of the road, on the corner, with the blind down and the sign turned to Closed. It looked shut. It looked asleep. But when Dad unlocked the side door and they went in, it was warm.

“Ovens,” said Dad. “They stay on.”

He turned the lights on, one row at a time, and the room came up out of the dark. It was bigger than the shop at the front. There were long steel tables, shining. There were racks on wheels, with trays in them. There were sacks of flour against the wall, white and heavy and dusty, and a great steel bowl on a stand that was as big as Oscar, and along the back wall, the ovens, with their doors shut and their little red lights on, and a low hum coming out of them like something purring.

It smelled of yesterday’s bread. Oscar thought that if a smell could be warm, this was.

“Apron,” said Dad, and gave him one. It went round twice. Dad tied it at the front. “Hands.”

They washed their hands.

“Right. Watch first. Then help.”

Dad worked. Oscar watched. Dad tipped flour into the great bowl from a scoop, and salt from a small pot, and something from a jug that was warm water with a smell of beer, which was the yeast. He turned the bowl on and a hook went round in it, slowly, and the flour and the water went from two things to one thing, a rough, shaggy thing, and then a smoother thing, and then, after a while, a thing that was dough, pale and soft and pulling away from the sides of the bowl.

“Now,” said Dad. “Hands.”

He took a lump of it out, a big one, and put it on the table, and dusted it with flour, and showed Oscar. You pushed it away with the heel of your hand. You folded it back. You turned it. You pushed it away. Fold, turn, push. Fold, turn, push.

Oscar tried. The dough was warm. It was softer than he had thought, and stickier, and it pulled at his fingers and would not let go, and his first fold went wrong and his second fold went wronger.

“More flour,” said Dad. “Don’t fight it. It’s not a fight.”

More flour. Fold, turn, push. It got easier. He found that if he did not think about it too hard it went better, and that the dough had a sort of rhythm, and if you went along with the rhythm it stopped sticking and started to feel like something that wanted to be bread.

They did that for a while. The ovens hummed. Somewhere at the front of the shop a clock ticked. Dad had the radio on, very low, talking, no music, and neither of them listened to it.

Then the dough went into bowls, under cloths, to rest.

“What’s it doing?” said Oscar.

“Growing.”

“How?”

“Yeast. It breathes. It makes the bread full of little breaths.” Dad lifted the cloth on one of the bowls from last night’s batch, which had been resting for hours, and it had grown. It had doubled. It was round and full and soft, and when Dad pushed his finger into it, slowly, it made a little sigh, and the hole stayed.

“Ready,” said Dad.

Now it was fast. Dad tipped the dough out and cut it with a scraper into pieces, all the same size without weighing them, and rolled each piece under his hand until it was a ball, and the balls went on trays, in rows. He gave Oscar the last three pieces. Oscar’s balls were not as round. They went on the tray anyway, at the end of the row, and Dad did not move them.

The ovens opened. The heat came out in a wall. The trays went in. The ovens shut.

And then there was a bit of waiting, so Dad made tea, and Oscar had milk, warm, in the mug with the chip in it that lived at the bakery and was Dad’s, and they sat on two upturned crates by the ovens and had it, and did not say much.

The window at the back had gone from black to grey.

“Is it morning?” said Oscar.

“Nearly.”

“Does it always look like that?”

“Every day. Nobody sees it but the bakers.”

The smell began. It was the smell from the kitchen at home, the one on the table when Oscar came down, but this was where it came from. It came out of the ovens and filled the room and went, Dad said, all the way down the street, so that people woke up in their beds and thought about breakfast without knowing why.

The timer went. Dad opened the oven.

The bread was gold and brown, and it had cracked along the top where it had grown too fast for its own skin, and it had steam coming off it, and Dad took the trays out with a cloth and tipped the loaves onto the rack, and they rang, actually rang, a soft hollow sound, when he tapped the bottoms.

“That’s how you know,” he said. “If it rings.”

At the end of the last row were three loaves, not quite as round as the rest.

Dad tapped one. It rang.

He broke it open, which he never did with the shop bread, and steam came out, and the inside was white and soft and full of holes. Little breaths. He gave half to Oscar. It was too hot to hold and Oscar held it anyway, passing it from hand to hand, and blew on it, and ate it, standing there in his coat and his apron in the warm, with the window going pale behind him and the day not yet started for anyone else.

It was the best thing he had ever eaten. It was made of the middle of the night.

They walked home at seven with the sun coming up. The street was still empty, but it was a different empty now, an early one, a waiting one. The cat was gone from the wall. The moon had gone too. Oscar carried a loaf under his arm and it was still warm through the paper.

He was asleep by half past. Mum found him on top of the covers with his coat still on and the loaf beside him, and she took the coat off him and left the loaf, because it seemed like the right thing, and pulled the curtains, and let him sleep.

He slept through the morning and into the afternoon. He slept the way bread rests. Full of little breaths.