A loaf less ordinary

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My paternal grandparents had a bakery and shop business in a small village on the Hampshire/Berkshire border . The business started well before the onset of World War 2 and continued until the mid- `70s. The bakery was noted for producing bread from an old brick oven which was fired by bundles of wood, known as bavins. The process, which involved firing the bavins in the oven, raking out the embers, then using long-handled peels to put the loaves in to bake for 45 minutes, produced bread with a very distinctive flavour - a `woody` taste, which made it very popular.

So much so that the bakery business expanded to provide a service for half a dozen villages in the area. This meant that there had to be an efficient and reliable delivery service and one of my aunts took on the delivery role, whilst the other daughter ran the grocery shop which operated from the same location as the bakery. One of the sons - my uncle - spent his whole working life in the bakery itself, mixing and kneading the dough to make the bread.

These days, superstores have their in-house bakeries or there are the large-scale bakery production factories with their nationwide distribution, but sadly the small independant bakeries are in short supply....and certainly those with the wood-fired ovens are impossible to find.

I`m not really mourning the passing of the independant wood-fired oven bakeries but I am mourning the very personal service which those villages received from my aunt, who drove an old Ford van loaded with bread, cakes and groceries six days a week, week in and week out, whatever the weather. She drove thousands of miles and walked thousands too - anything up to 10 miles a day and on Sundays, just for a change, she would go for a walk around the village.

During the war years and the immediate post war period, people living in rural villages tended not to have their own transport and so they relied heavily on deliveries for milk, coal, bread and other necessities. My aunt`s whole working life was spent providing that service and was spent entirely within the confines of those villages she served - Mortimer, Ufton, Silchester, Pamber, Burghfield and Padworth. Small wonder that when she finally retired she found difficulty in coming to terms with the wider world and all it had to offer. Instead, she continued to live a quiet, lone, restricted life, often reliving those hard but happy working years when she knew the value of what she did for others.

She died this morning at the age of 90 and she will be missed.