Before the bakery opens

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

I joined the bakery team at four in the morning, expecting a quiet room and a few trays. The shopfront was dark, but the workroom behind it was bright enough to make the street outside look unfinished. Five people were already working. My job was to carry empty trays to the packing bench and keep clear of the ovens. The head baker gave me a clean apron and told me where I could stand safely. Then he returned to a row of dough that appeared, to my untrained eye, to be doing nothing.

The room was conducting an argument in metal. Trays clattered against racks; a mixer growled beneath the voices; oven doors delivered sudden, weighty full stops. Through it all, the bakers moved with an economy I could not imitate. One turned a tray without looking down, another caught a falling cloth before it reached the floury floor. I moved a single stack and seemed to occupy every available inch. The clock above the bench did not hurry, but everybody else had made an agreement with its hands.

Then the first bread emerged, and the room's severity acquired a generous smell. Heat breathed through the racks. The crusts were small brown landscapes, ridged and cracked, each carrying evidence of pressure I had not seen. I wanted to stand there admiring them. The woman beside me was counting orders. Six rolls for the café, four loaves for the van, another tray for the shop. My beautiful landscape was already somebody's breakfast, and breakfast, she explained, could not wait for me to finish looking.

By seven, the window lights were on. Customers began discussing whether the morning felt cold, unaware of the hours of heat behind the counter. I had imagined baking as a comforting alternative to hurried work. It contained comfort, certainly, but somebody had to produce it on time. When I bought a loaf at the end of the shift, I noticed the neatness of the folded paper and the pale flour caught at the baker's wrist. The shop's calm was real. It was also something the back room had worked very hard to make.

Refer only to the second and third paragraphs of Source A. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the activity in the bakery. Support your answer with evidence from these paragraphs.