Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery
Page 5

They’d recently started selling hot beverages, and Polly had spent a very long and over-caffeinated day at a trade fair trying to find a machine that could dispense drinks that weren’t absolutely disgusting and tasted all the same. She’d found one eventually – you could tell it straight off by the way everyone was clustering around the stand trying out the freebies, even people who were trying to sell other coffee machines – but of course it was by absolutely miles the most expensive one there. She’d be lucky to make her money back on it if she kept it for thirty years. There was a limit to how much you could charge a freezing fisherman who’d been on the water for eighteen hours for a hot Bovril, and it only just covered their costs. But it was nice to have it.
Except for the hot chocolate. Nobody could make hot chocolate properly in a machine. After it had arrived, Reuben, their loud American friend (some might say pain in the neck, but Polly had grown quite tolerant in the last couple of years), had marched in shouting, ‘I make the best hot chocolate ever. Don’t even think of doing it in a machine, otherwise this friendship is totally at an end,’ and brought her several tins of his specially imported Swiss chocolate.
No slouch in the kitchen himself, he’d shown her how to make it, with gently warmed milk and whisked cream and the chocolate folded in until it became a thick, warming syrup that tasted like liquid joy, finished off with special small American marshmallows, a touch of whipped cream and a Flake.
Polly charged for those separately and only served them in the winter, but there was absolutely nobody in town – and for a long way around – who didn’t think they were absolutely worth it, much to Reuben’s complacent happiness. In fact, the start of the Little Beach Street Bakery’s hot chocolate season was, as far as many local inhabitants were concerned, the first bell of Christmas.
‘There’s a sou’wester out there,’ observed Jayden sadly. ‘I hope Flora’s all right.’
‘She’s in a centrally heated hall of residence, on a campus, on the mainland, and will still be in bed for another three hours,’ said Polly. ‘I think she’ll be fine.’
Jayden sighed. ‘I miss that lass.’
‘She misses you too! That’s why you get so much post.’
As if worried he wasn’t getting enough baked goods, Flora was sending Jayden the results of her efforts through the post every couple of days. Some made it in fairly good shape – the French cakes were a particular highlight – but others, like the croquembouche, were something of a disaster. Dawson, the postman, was threatening to sue them for ruining his trousers, repeatedly. He was already furious because he was always either missing the tide or getting caught in it. Mount Polbearne wasn’t the jewel in a postman’s round, to be honest. On the plus side, they’d all agreed that he could bin the junk mail at the recycling centre on the mainland, so that helped everyone. Until Flora’s cakes had come along. Jayden had offered to share the results with him, but Dawson had declined the first time and was too proud to change his mind now. If they came out particularly nicely – the cream horns had been surprisingly unspoiled – Polly put them on sale and posted the proceeds back to Flora. This made Dawson annoyed too, especially if she put coins in the envelope.
‘Morning, Dawson,’ said Polly now, answering the back door and taking the pile of bills and one slightly soggy jiffy bag off him. ‘Want a cup of coffee?’
Dawson muttered to himself – he’d obviously had to come extremely early this morning, on his bicycle, in the pitch black, to catch the tide, and he really wasn’t happy about it. The post delivery tended to vary between six a.m. and two o’clock in the afternoon.
‘On the house?’ added Polly. She worried that if Dawson ever got too cold and miserable he’d simply stop coming altogether and throw all their post into the sea. Mind you, she thought, leafing through the usual pile of endless bills, some days that wouldn’t necessarily be the worst idea.
Dawson muttered some more and retreated into the inky darkness. Polly shrugged and shut the back door.
‘It’s amazing how well I’ve integrated into the community after a mere two years here. Accepted everywhere.’
Jayden sniffed. ‘Oh, Dawson’s always been like that. I was at school with him and he used to cry if they made him eat gravy. So we used to always give him our gravy, like. That seems wrong now, looking back on it, I suppose. We used to call him Ravy Davy Eat Your Gravy. Yeah, I think that might definitely have been wrong.’
‘Oh!’ said Polly, pulling out a letter from a plain brown envelope postmarked Mount Polbearne, which meant Dawson would have had to pick it up from the old-fashioned red pillar box on the town’s little main street, cart it over to Looe, then bring it all the way back out with him again. ‘Well, it’s funny you were talking about schools…’
Jayden and his contemporaries – now in their mid-twenties – had been the last generation of children educated on Mount Polbearne, in the little schoolhouse on the lee of the island that was now used for village get-togethers and parties. The tables and wooden desks were still stored there, rather forlornly, and the old signs carved into the lintels on each side of the tiny building, marking the entrances for ‘BOYS’ and ‘GIRLS’, were still visible, even though, like everything else on the tiny island, they were gradually being eroded by time and tides and heavy weather.
But here now was a letter from Samantha, who, despite only having a holiday home on Mount Polbearne with her husband, Henry, always liked to get her fingers into as many pies as possible. She’d also had a baby last year and had started making worrying noises about schools in London and nursery prices and children being too jaded and sophisticated in the big city (even though Polly and Kerensa had thought that being jaded and sophisticated was absolutely Samantha’s favourite thing). The letter was a typed circular, announcing a meeting to discuss the possibility of appealing to the council to reopen the village school, seeing as there were now upwards of a dozen children being bussed to the mainland every day – expensive – and lots more babies on the way.
Jayden smiled when he saw it.
‘Ah, school was fun here,’ he said. ‘You know, except for Dawson, prob’ly.’
‘It would certainly improve the children’s attendance in the winter,’ said Polly, who had noticed how often they couldn’t go because of bad weather making the crossing too difficult.