Chapter 22 Gammon's Oven

The bake failed on the sixteenth of February and it nearly broke the village. What happened was this. The snow had come down hard on the fourteenth and sat on the Selborne chimney for two days, and on the morning of the sixteenth Gammon went down to his bakehouse, opened the firebox, and found about two inches of green ice in the flue and nine feet of the same in the cowl outside. "He can't get the flue open," said Bredon, who had walked down that morning for the school bread and had walked back up again because the cowl had come off in the wind and gone across the green. "He's been at it with a poker since seven. It's a green flue and a cold range and he's got forty loaves due by noon for a village of two hundred and he has got a bakehouse that is exactly the temperature of a churchyard." "How long?" "Two days, he says. Three if the cowl doesn't go back on." * * * The midwinter feast was on the eighteenth. It was the one feast of the year that a mountain village did not cancel, because it was the day the year turns and a whole valley eating together in one room was the arrangement that kept two hundred people from sitting in two hundred separate kitchens. Gammon baked for it every year. Forty years of it. Sixty pounds of flour and eleven households' worth of dough and a great deal of butter that came over the pass in November in a clerk's cart and went straight into a store cupboard in a bakehouse in Fernhollow. "It's the one thing I can't fake," he said, sitting on the upturned bucket in his own dead bakehouse with his hat on his knee. "There's no way to do two thirds. A village notices a feast bake." "How much do you need?" "Two days of fire, three hundredweight of flour, and a range that draws." "There's a range at the Hollowell that draws." * * * She had it out of the books and up the stairs before he could argue. The Hollowell kitchen range was nine feet of iron and it had not been lit since the twenty-seventh of December, when they had all slept in one room, and its flue was stone and warm and eighty years old and it drew like a thing that has been fed properly by people who cared about it twice a day. "We'd want the whole kitchen," said Gammon. "The whole kitchen. The whole day. I'll want it back by six and Tibb will want the range at three for supper." "You'll want to be there yourself." "I'd have thought you'd made me." He looked at her for a moment. "Made you," he said. "I did say that." He got up off the bucket. "That's the trouble with this valley, miss. There's nobody in it who can be told anything. You have to say it out loud, in words, as though it were a job, and then it goes." * * * They baked for two days. Pippa stood in the middle of her own kitchen with her arms out of the way and flour to the elbow while four people she had come up the mountain to sell a house to worked at the same table. Tibb took the plain — the loaves, the rolls, the oatcakes that eleven families would take home and eat with cheese. Bredon took the shapes, because a schoolmistress could make a rose out of a piece of dough and had been asked in nineteen eighty-eight and had refused, and said no now, and did it beautifully and would not explain herself. Elverston made a bread that was entirely a joke and entirely inedible and that four people ate a slice of out of politeness. And Bel Starveling, who had come up the mountain in a wedding dress with a note in the register saying that the pass had closed and nobody had told the groom, made sixty small honey cakes, because her mother had taught her at eleven and because the making of them took her from eleven o'clock to two, which was three hours in which nobody asked her a single question. "You'll have to send somebody to tell him," Gammon said at the end of the first day. "I've written. Three times. It goes down on the Tuesday post and it sits in Wintergate for eleven weeks now and it will come up the road the day the road opens, and he'll have given up by then and married somebody else to be getting on with it." "Are you all right?" "No," said Bel Starveling, "and I'll tell you what is actually the matter, since it's evidently the custom in this house." She put the last cake down. "It's not the groom. He was a fool and I'd have found that out by June. It's that I was to have been given away on the sixth of December and I have spent nine weeks in a mountain inn being handed things, and I have not once in nine weeks handed anybody anything, and I have discovered that I would rather do that than be given away." * * * The feast was on the eighteenth and it happened in the Hollowell long room, which had not held a village since 1961. Two hundred and eleven people came up the lane in the dark in weather that had no business being walked through, and sat down on benches that had not been carried in since the year Pippa's great-aunt was a girl, and Tibb and four Selborne women cooked for two hundred in a kitchen built for thirty, and it went wrong four times and came out right. Pippa stood at the door for the first hour and then gave up standing at the door. She ate. She sat down between Nancarrow and a man she had never seen before who was called Fenwick and had walked up from the far end of the valley with two others, and they talked about nothing for an hour, and she thought: *this is what it is for.* * * * At midnight, when the benches had gone and the long room had straw on the floor and about thirty people were still sitting in it, Gammon came and found her and put something into her hand. It was a carved stamp. Wood, about the size of his palm, the handle worn round. On the face of it was a die in the old cut, a bird with its wings half up. "That's the mark," said Pippa. "That's the mark. It's a seal, not a stamp, and it's a bakehouse seal, and it came from the coast in my father's hand in 1929 with a hundredweight of flour when the old mill at Sandsgate burned and half the men on that coast were out of work." He turned his own hands over. "My father kept it. He never used it. He said a bakehouse didn't need a seal unless it had a bank account, and he'd not have a bank account, and he brought it up the mountain in nineteen twenty-nine because he liked it and there was nowhere else he wanted it to be." "Where's the old bakehouse?" "Four days' walk, and half of it underwater at high water, and it's not a bakehouse any more. It's a wall." He looked at her. "The flour came to us in 'sixty-one and 'sixty-two and there was a woman on the coast who sent it, and I have never known her name, and she has never once been written down anywhere in this valley except in the back of your register, and I've read that book the same as everybody else." * * * Pippa went down to the lectern with the seal in her hand and found the page. There it was, in the damp grey ink, and it had stopped being a strange thing weeks ago and had become a bookkeeping matter, which is what strange things become when you attend to them properly. *Second of January, 1961. Flour. Sack.* *Fourteenth of January, 1961. Flour. Sack. Asked at the smithy, asked at the fold, asked at the gate. Nobody knows. Twice now.* *Third of February, 1961. Flour, nine sacks, and the seal with it, and I have asked Cressida's aunt to take it in the deep room and she says it is not a thing you may put under a hearth-stone, and I have said it is only wood and only iron and it has no business being anywhere else. C.* "Only wood and only iron," said Pippa aloud, in an empty passage. * * * She came back up and put the seal in Gammon's hand. "Keep it," she said. "You're the only person in this valley who can use it and you've just used it on two hundred and eleven loaves, and if anybody asks you what a seal is for you may say it is for proving that something happened, and it has just been proved." "What do I do with the other thing?" "Which other thing?" "The stamp on the sacks." He was not letting it go. "The flour that turns up on this step with no name on it. I've been thinking about it for nine weeks. There's a woman on that coast who sent flour to a mountain for two winters and never gave her name, and there's a housekeeper here who sent flour for thirty-one years and never gave his name, and there's a Thawkeeper here who sent flour in the winter of sixty-one without giving her name either, because I have read every line of that book and I know how to read a signature that isn't one." * * * They walked out into the yard where the whole village was standing about in the cold, waiting for the broth, and Gammon said: "I'd like to find her." "Who?" "The one on the coast. Sandsgate." He turned the seal over. "There's no house there now. There's four families and the church and the wall of the old bakehouse. But there's a woman, because my father kept the note, and the note has a name on it and a thing she wanted, and it's in a tin in my loft in Fernhollow, and I have never taken it out of the tin in thirty years because it's the only paper I've got of my father's handwriting and I wasn't ready to read what my father wrote to a stranger." "Read it tomorrow." "I'll read it tomorrow," Gammon said. "Not tonight. Tonight I'm going to sit in that room with two hundred people and be the man that baked for them, and that's all I've been since I was twenty-two, and a thing like that you don't step out of to go looking for a letter." ---