‘Ready with the butter and sugar mix?’ Sully calls across the room.
With a good deal of skill, and aided by Patrick, the vat of bubbling, cloudy liquid gold is run into the spiced bed of flour inside the machine and Sully lowers in the mixing arm.
I take a picture of this to send to Mum. ‘She’s not going to believe this.’
Even though we’re in a great big bakery with noisy machines and clanking ovens there’s something about the scent of glossy spiced dough coming together that transports me right back to Mum’s kitchen.
I can’t help thinking of her adding a pinch more ginger or a sprinkling of water flicked in with busy fingertips and surrounded by a rising cloud of flour.
‘It’s good,’ Leo says, taking a deep sniff, and I look around at the faces of my very own gingerbread gang murmuring their agreement.
‘Right,’ Sully says with an authoritative clap. ‘Let’s get to work on the next batch.’
Leo had to leave a while ago – even with his new chilled-out approach to head teaching there’s still weekend admin to do – and so missed me and Izz giving our masterclass in cutting out from raw refrigerated and rolled dough.
Patrick proved to be quite the draughtsman by scaling up our old templates to make every building a quarter as large again – I figured Mum would have made hers massive too had she had the oven space – and we made excellent progress lifting the big slabs of cottage walls, gable ends and roof onto the trays and onward into the huge ovens.
I check them off on a list. ‘That’s Izz’s cottage, the old post office cottage, numbers three and five high street and Sully’s bakery done already.’
Sully smiles again at the inclusion of his grandad’s business in the diorama for the very first time – Mum (and me) knew how to hold a grudge just as well as Mr Scrimengor. In the end, it was the easiest of the lot to cut out; just four big squares for the walls with a long strip of window and a flat roof.
‘These would have taken me, Margi and Patrick at least three days to do,’ Izz remarks, wiping her hands on her apron, looking at the trays slotted into the oven racks.
Lucy produces a tray of teas while we wait for the gingerbreads to bake and we all take a mug.
‘And there was no running around the village to use three different ovens,’ I say.
Patrick laughs. ‘True,’ he says, shaking his head at our old, inefficient ways of doing things.
I regret not befriending Scrimengor, or at least trying to. Instead of rocking up every December the first to antagonise him with a poster for the grotto exhibit, knowing he’d say he wasn’t going to display it in his windows, I should have asked if he’d reconsider his old offer. We could have been working together for years. He might have softened earlier. Though when I picture his sour, pinched face and the glee he took in telling me he’d as good as signed off on refurbing the village hall into a fancy pad for a Cotswold millionaire, I’m not convinced it’d have worked. I can only hope Sully’s easy-going influence will change the old duffer. I wish it could be enough to get him to drop the planning application altogether, but I know that’s unrealistic.
‘We’ll have half of Wheaton high street done by three, I reckon,’ says Sully through my thoughts.
He’s keeping an eye on the ovens but I tell him it’s OK, he doesn’t have to worry. ‘We’ll know when it’s ready.’
Izz agrees. ‘You can smell when it’s properly baked.’
‘That’s what Grandad always says,’ adds Sully. ‘Trust your nose, not the timer.’
Thirteen minutes is all it takes and the trays are delivered onto the cooling racks, great slabs of sugary construction material, exactly the same colour as Wheaton’s lovely golden stonework.
‘I’ll make a start on the windows,’ I say, and I set to explaining how to melt boiled sweets to make coloured glass panes that we’ll pour into the empty window apertures so when they set hard they’ll glisten and hold firm like thin glass.
There’s a rattle at the bakery door.
‘Someone after a loaf,’ says Sully, breaking away from my demo to speak to the customer. Opening the door, he cries, ‘Fern!’
We all stop what we’re doing to gape at her, probably scaring her out of her wits.
‘You’re all right?’ asks Izz, shuffling to greet her.
‘Where have you been?’ says Lucy, drawing her away from the door and into the heat of the bakery.
Fern’s eyes dart around, seeing the gingerbreads, registering what we’re all up to.
‘I got your messages,’ she says quietly. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t around.’
Nobody’s saying anything in case we spook her right out the door again.
