The bread comes up at four

The alarm goes off at half past two, which Dawid no longer thinks of as night. By three he is flouring the bench at Fenn Street, where the first mix of the day, white, always white, has been proving since the evening crew went home. The radio is on, low. The ovens, older than anyone on this shift, tick as they warm.

There are four of them until six, then two more, then the shop staff, who arrive to trays already cooling and take the credit with the till. Dawid’s hands do the shaping without him; he talks in Polish to Marta about her daughter’s swimming and in English to the apprentice about steam. The first bake comes up at four, on the dot, as it has for thirty-one years.

Nobody watches the bread being made. They only ever see it arrive.

What does the city know about the people who feed it? Between two and six there are, by the last count anyone bothered to make, eleven thousand people working in this postcode alone: bakers, porters, drivers, cleaners, one lighthouse keeper of a sort. The magazine you are holding was put to bed at the same hour. It seemed only right to go and meet the neighbours.

By five the racks are full and the vans are idling in the yard. Dawid drinks his coffee standing in the doorway, watching the sky go the colour of proving dough, and says the thing every night worker says sooner or later: you get used to it, then you get to like it, and then you cannot sleep in the dark at all.

Continued on p. 18 →