Script quote on a thigh

The ovens were already ticking when I came in this morning, and Mr Okafor was standing at the back door with his flour-dusted cap in his hands, which is how I knew something had happened. It was not the sourdough. The letter from the council had arrived, the one he has been waiting on since March, and he had read it four times before pinning it to the board above the proving baskets. Permission to trade from the corner unit on Harrow Street. Eleven years of drawings kept in a biscuit tin, and now a yes.

He did not cry, though he came close. He just set the kettle on and talked about the shop as if it were already built, which, I suppose, in his head it has been for a decade. Where the counter would go, how the window would glow at five so the early buses could see the loaves. I let him run on. Then I asked what he was going to bake first, and he looked at me as though I had asked entirely the wrong question.

So I'm writing this from the flour bin on my break, because I want you to know I'm putting my name down for the Harrow Street job too, if they'll have me, and not just sketching it in the margins of my shifts. You always said I'd rather plan a thing to death than put a single loaf in an oven. Maybe you were right. Maybe that's why I'm telling you now.

The first batch goes out at half four. Come and eat one, and tell me whether the crust is worth all those years of waiting.

Love, Tess