The Baker Who Rose Before the Sun

• 3 minute read
• Ages 5-9
• Bedtime Stories

The baker got up at three every morning, which is a time most people never see.

It is not the middle of the night and it is not the morning. It is its own thing. The street is completely silent and the air is cold even in summer and there is nobody at all, anywhere.

He liked it. He had liked it for thirty-one years.

The first hour

He lit the oven first, because it took an hour to come up to heat, and while it did he made the dough.

He did not measure anything any more. His hands knew the flour and knew the water and knew when it had been worked enough, and he could do the whole of it while thinking about something else entirely, which he usually was.

By four the dough was resting under a cloth and the oven was ticking as it warmed, and the baker sat on a stool in the dark with a cup of tea and did nothing for twenty minutes.

This was the best part of his day. He had never told anybody that.

What he could hear

From the stool he could hear the whole street sleeping.

He could hear the rooftop cat going along the ridge of the tailor's shop. He could hear a baby somewhere on the second floor of the yellow house, and then the baby stopping, and someone's feet going back to bed.

Around half past four the first crow.

At five the milkman's cycle, three streets away and coming closer, with the same rattle in the same wheel it had had for years.

The smell

By half past five the bread was in.

And what happened then was the thing the baker had never got tired of in thirty-one years, which was that the whole street began to smell of it.

It went along the terrace and up the stairwells and in through the windows people had left open, and it reached the second floor of the yellow house, and the room where the child slept, and a hundred other rooms.

And in all those rooms people who were not properly awake yet turned over and half noticed it and went on sleeping for another twenty minutes, in a slightly better mood than they would otherwise have been in, without knowing why.

Then the shutter went up at six and the street came in.

And not one of them knew about the stool, or the tea, or the twenty minutes in the dark.