Thirteen hours for five minutes, by Sam Midgley

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

By half past seven, the queue outside number 14 Calder Street stretches past the launderette and round the corner to the bus stop. A nurse coming off a night shift buys a cinnamon bun and eats it on the step. A builder orders six sausage rolls for his crew. A small girl in a school uniform presses her nose to the window and points at the doughnuts. Behind the counter, Ondine Brannock knows most of them by name. She has been on her feet since three.

‘You get used to it,’ she says, meaning the hours. Then she laughs. ‘No, you don’t. You just stop complaining.’

Ondine and her business partner, Kasimir Haverly, opened Daily Bread six years ago in a former bicycle shop, with a second-hand oven, a loan from Kasimir’s grandmother and no idea, they admit, how hard it would be. Six days a week, they start at three and finish at four in the afternoon. In six years, Ondine has taken one holiday. She spent most of it, she says, dreaming about proving times.

The work is relentless and physical. Each day they shape around 400 loaves by hand, lifting sacks of flour that weigh sixteen kilograms and dragging trays from an oven that runs at 250 degrees. Kasimir’s forearms are freckled with small pink burns. The air is thick with flour, which settles in eyebrows and eyelashes until both bakers look prematurely grey. In summer, the kitchen is so hot that they work in shorts and wet bandanas; in winter, the back door has to stay open so they can breathe.

And yet, watching them work, it is impossible not to be charmed. There is a rhythm to it, almost a dance: Ondine folding and turning the dough, Kasimir sliding loaves into the oven with a long wooden peel, the two of them moving round each other in a space the size of a bathroom without ever colliding. The radio murmurs. The dough sighs as it is knocked back. Each new tray comes out crackling as it cools, and the smell drifts through the shop and out along the queue like an invitation.

Ondine calls the first batch of sourdough ‘the best five minutes of the day’. She breaks open a loaf, still steaming, and hands me half. The crust shatters; the inside is soft, glossy and slightly sour. It is, without exaggeration, the finest bread I have ever eaten.

At eleven, when the shelves are half empty, Kasimir loads a dented white van and sets off on the wholesale round: two cafés, a primary school kitchen and a care home, where one elderly resident waits in the porch every morning for his small brown loaf, and has done for five years.

‘It’s daft, really,’ Ondine says, wiping flour from her cheek. ‘Thirteen hours of work for something people eat in five minutes. But for those five minutes, we’ve made their day.’ Then she yawns, enormously, and goes back to the oven.

The work at the Daily Bread bakery is described as exhausting but deeply rewarding. How does the writer try to show this?

You should comment on:

• what is said
• the use of language, tone and structure
• other ways the writer tries to show that the work is exhausting but rewarding

You must refer to the text to support your comments, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.