Breadsong by Kitty Tait

Author:Kitty Tait
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635578058
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

MAN THE BARRICADES

SHOPPING LOCAL WAS about to become more important than we could ever have imagined. It was Ben who acted like a canary in the mine about the arrival of COVID-19. He worked freelance for a big insurance company where they suddenly announced that they were cutting back on staff as they could no longer conduct house visits in London. Ben came to help us in the shop full time, but soon the virus was everywhere. The first full coronavirus lockdown was announced.

At this point, Watlington came into its own, as if it had been waiting for this moment. It was a historical glimpse of how the Home Front would have worked. All the shops on the High Street got together to plan out who could deliver what to whoever might be isolating. Every street was given a warden to look after anyone on their own and there was a surreal moment when we got a visit from a member of the Parish Council asking what our baking capacity might be if the town was ‘cut off’ for a while. Albert went from working flat-out for his A levels on a Friday to a sudden juddering halt and no school or exams on the Monday. I went to Bristol to pick up Aggie from her halls of residence, leaving most of her things behind in her room with no idea when she might return. Wife Katie disappeared entirely into a world of Zoom calls and barely seemed to move from the computer as her charity, Maggie’s, attempted to support the thousands of people with cancer who were now isolating.

There was a constant low-level thrum of anxiety and panic. Kitty and I responded to it by making more and more bread.

It felt like that was our responsibility. We had everything we needed; the flour from Wessex Mill kept coming, our starters pretty much fed themselves and all the other ingredients were on our doorstep, from eggs to milk. The shop is so tiny that we decided to sell from the doorway, like Andrew and Eilidh did from their kitchen window, so we could keep social distancing. We wheeled up an old hospital trolley from home that we had kept wool blankets on. It acted as a barricade across the door (more Carry On Matron than Les Misérables) and was perfect as a makeshift counter. We could even use our payment machine through the glass of the side window, so we felt safe and our customers did too.

The atmosphere in the shop changed completely. Before the shop was always packed and the chatter rate inside was deafening. Now only one person could come to the sheltered doorway at a time and it became like a confessional: a short murmur about the latest pandemic news, then an agreement over how lucky we were with the weather, a bread order (with at least one bun for morale) and then a careful move away with a nod to the person behind. Shop Katie understood

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