1

January 2012

Vicki Marchant breathes on her chill French windows and carefully traces a heart. A fat tear of condensation slithers down and she stops it with her finger and writes an A for Alfie. The letter weeps and she wipes the pane gently, chasing moisture with crisp squares of kitchen roll.

I must be going mad, thinks Vicki. Either that or I’m just plain miserable. Outside, ball bearings of hail pound the frozen blades of grass.

Well, it’s hard to feel cheerful in January. The joy of Christmas – a joy felt so wonderfully through three-year-old Alfie – has rudely ended; packed away along with the decorations: this year, golden pears and partridges; rococo cherubs; icicles and stars.

January – or bloody January as she tends to think of it – is all about abstinence, penitence and being sanctimonious, as friends embark on an alcohol-free, dairy-free, wheat-free month. No one wants to come to dinner in January – and if she can persuade a fellow mum to lunch it’s a frugal affair: broccoli soup without the Stilton languishing from Christmas; all offers of home-made stollen, Florentines and mince pies laughed aside quite firmly. ‘No, really, I couldn’t,’ her neighbour, Sophie, had insisted yesterday as Vicki pressed a full cake tin on her, and had sounded quite panicky as if she were going to force-feed her.

Yet it’s not the general abstinence that most frustrates her but the sense of limbo. The sub-zero temperatures mean Alfie can’t race around the garden and there are only so many times a week she can go to a soft play barn. Without the gift of snow or sunshine ‘the big freeze’, as the media has dubbed it, has become one long grind of de-icing cars and salting paths, of finding sufficient layers and contending with Alfie’s whingeing if, as invariably happens, she forgets his welly socks.

She gives a sigh, thick and laboured. Outside, the hail has stopped abruptly, the only evidence the icy marbles nestling in the grass. The grey sky is as unyielding as ever; the bare trees still; the ground quite barren. No sign of the snowdrops and tête-à-têtes she and little Alf planted in October. Her garden seems devoid of hope.

She turns on her coffee machine and measures out enough grains for a double espresso, hoping a burst of caffeine will reinvigorate her and improve her morning. For, if she is honest, and she always tries to be, her frustration has nothing to do with the weather at all.

My name is Vicki Marchant, she imagines announcing at yet another interminable playgroup, and I am a fraudulent stay-at-home mother. A mum-of-one with none of the demands of numerous offspring or any of the pressure of having to work. I have a beautiful, healthy boy who loves me. And I do adore him. But I’m still not sure I’m very good at or – whisper it – always enjoy motherhood. Oh, and here’s the joke. I’m an ‘outstanding’ primary school teacher, according to Ofsted. Someone who’s supposed to know what they’re doing. So why do I find it so hard looking after my own small child?

It wasn’t meant to be this way, she thinks, as the machine groans then belches hot coffee grains at her. When Alfie was born, the plan had always been to give up work to immerse herself in her baby and subsequent children. Her Shaker kitchen would be covered in poster-paint masterpieces; her lengthy garden would boast hens, herbs and flowers; and each day would bring new adventures for her Petit Bateauclad child. She hadn’t counted on the drudgery of early parenthood with a child who refused to sleep and a husband who refused to get up; or on her rage when her boy decorated her Farrow & Ball walls with his handprints; or her impotence when a fox massacred the hens.

You would have thought a primary school teacher would have known that toddlers prefer church playgroups, with their interminable rich tea biscuits and weak instant coffee, to babyccinos in Starbucks; and that a trip into town would always lead to dramatic meltdowns, Alfie’s body as taut as a board as he struggled against being put in a buggy, as powerful as a coiled spring as he wriggled free of her grasp.

She should have known that glitter would always be sprinkled all over the kitchen and that, at three, he could not hope to produce anything other than a sodden clump of papier mâché. Yet, somehow, she had forgotten, or been naively optimistic. She had thought she could conquer any problem with a calm voice and an endless supply of smiley stickers. No, motherhood isn’t turning out quite as she’d envisaged, at all.

There’s just one thing she feels she can do with Alfie, she reflects, as she wipes the coffee grains from the surface and refills the machine, and that is baking. And so this is an activity in which they have started to excel. They began with cupcakes, over which she maintained overall artistic control. But they soon progressed from gingerbread men to tuiles; from pizza bases to sourdough; from jam tarts to tarte tatin.

Alfie, who quickly learned that he got a strong reaction if he slopped water on to the floor or glue on to the table when painting, has discovered he gets a better one if he cracks an egg correctly, the slippery white slopping into the mixing bowl ‘without bits of shell’. Mummy sings when she bakes, and if her brow creases when he becomes over-exuberant with the sieving – and flour and cocoa sprinkle the floorboards – any irritation is momentary, dissipated by the heartening smell of sponge cooking and the sensual experience of licking the bowl.

For Vicki, baking with her boy is tangible evidence that she is a good mother.

‘Did you make these yourself – and with Alfie?’ her friend, Ali, had quizzed her only on Monday as she had handed her a vintage cake tin with a smile of dismissal.

She had felt a distinct glow of satisfaction at her friend praising not only the creations but the fact that she had made them with her child.

‘God, how do you stand the mess?’ Ali had continued. ‘Must be the teacher in you! I never bake with Sam.’

As always, she had felt mild pity.

‘He loves it.’ She had shrugged, with typical self-deprecation. And, on cue, her tousle-haired boy had looked up and given her a quick grin, his hand slipping into hers as he offered Ali’s three-year-old a home-made biscuit. ‘And so do I.’

Today, however, that sense of satisfaction evades her. Irritation niggles as she takes in the sea of Lego, the washing wilting on the maiden, the socks wrenched off on a whim and discarded, one dangling from Alfie’s ergonomically ideal chair, the other kicked under a toy box and curled like a stale croissant, waiting to be swooped up.

She sighs then forces herself to breathe more calmly, taking in the aroma of lemon, sugar and butter now flooding her kitchen, bathing her in a delicious citrus fug. A timer pings and she opens the oven, and brings out an exquisitely cooked tarte au citron. The viscous yellow glows against the crisp golden pastry, blind-baked to perfection. And Vicki smiles.

2

When baking, it is important not to scrimp on ingredients or to cut corners. You must not believe you can get away with the minimum. Your family deserves the best.

I am all for moderation and economy, but no one wants a mean sponge or a poorly risen loaf of bread; a scrag-filled pie or a pitiful pudding. Remember: when you bake, you cherish.

Jennifer Briggs, pummelling focaccia on the granite worktop of her farmhouse kitchen in Suffolk, pauses for a moment and looks out at her walled garden and beyond. Her arms are beginning to ache from punishing the mixture: stretching it then kneading it then stretching it once more to release the gluten. Her nose itches and she scratches it with the back of fingers that are lightly floured.

A cat – one of two that check up on her as she bakes – stalks across the kitchen and miaows, insistent; then sits and glares at the oversized fridge.

‘No, you’re not getting any food yet,’ Jennifer tells her. Then, amused, ‘Oh, you’re wondering about that too, are you? Well, Tabby, I don’t think that’s going to happen somehow.’

The cat blinks, impenetrable, and begins to wash herself but Jennifer continues to look at the advert, neatly clipped from Eaden’s Monthly, and attached with a heart-shaped magnet to the fridge.

‘Calling Britain’s Best Bakers’ it declaims, in a mock-up of the iconic First World War Kitchener poster. ‘Your country needs you to produce the nation’s best bakes.’

In excitable italicised font, it explains that Eaden and Son are searching for the New Mrs Eaden, an amateur baker so talented they are fit to emulate the wife of the store’s founder, who published her classic cookbook The Art of Baking in

1966 and died only last year. The winner will receive a £50,000 contract to advise the supermarket on its finest baked products, will contribute a monthly magazine column, and will front their advertising campaign. The New Mrs Eaden will then be able to launch her, or his, own baking career.

Jennifer, an avid baker, has been intrigued by the competition – and, much to her surprise, has entered. Well, she was brought up on The Art of Baking, her mother deferring to Kathleen Eaden and her odes to the most decadent of cakes.

Jennifer shops at Eaden’s and believes this will be a proper baking competition – despite the rather silly YouTube clips each task’s top two bakers must make. The judges are certainly credible: Dan Keller, that attractive artisan baker, and Harriet Strong, author of over thirty cookbooks and star of a long-running cookery series. This isn’t a reality TV show but a contest run by the country’s most upmarket supermarket:

a business that champions high-quality, free-range and freshly produced food and assumes its shoppers love nothing better than to bake.

Well, Jennifer is one such customer and submitted an application form just before Christmas. She is still chafing with disappointment at not having been contacted. And yet she is not surprised. In small print, the competition website explained that the supermarket reserved the right to choose applicants who accurately reflect the nation’s different demographic groups. There had also been excessive emphasis placed on the importance of candidates submitting photos, and she suspects that, at fifty-two, she is too old and too fat to be a contender.

She sighs and imagines how she must have been viewed by those sifting through the applications, young adults, she assumes, not much older than her three newly grown-up girls. Hair cropped in a sensible short bob: unflattering, boring, but eminently fitting for the wife of the local dentist and member of the W.I. A broad, open face, flushed with rosacea, testament to her wholesome living and her apparent lack of vanity. And a weightiness that allows her to be seen as a caricature: the fat, jolly, asexual cook.

She resumes her kneading.

Fat, she accepts as she pounds more vigorously in a sudden flush of anger, is something she has grown used to as her burgeoning love of baking has coincided with her expansion into middle age.

‘Never trust a thin cook,’ she sometimes twinkles as she folds her still neat arms beneath a bosom – it is definitely a bosom now, rather than distinct breasts – that continues to swell as she moves up each dress size. Now a size twenty, she can no longer be described as voluptuous, curvy, or even cuddly. Her thighs, which rub together when she walks, are silvered with stretch marks like the tears appearing in her stretched focaccia. Her stomach flops with the moist consistency of softly whipped cream.

Her daughters, if they ever bothered to consider it, would assume that their mother is nonchalant about this. Jennifer looks what she is: a rosy-cheeked mother earth figure; an excellent home cook who will rustle up a dozen scones or a Victoria sponge with eggs from her own Sussex Whites if friends give her twenty minutes’ notice; the ever capable linchpin of their family.

Only Lizzie, her youngest, who has just started at Bristol, wonders if her mother is truly as happy as she claims.

‘Are you OK, Mum?’ she had asked her, tentatively, at Christmas. ‘Do you mind rattling around here, just cooking for Dad, now we’re all at uni?’

Jennifer had smiled. ‘Do you mean: what do I do all day?’

The elder girls had been less concerned. ‘Oh, it’s what she loves doing, looking after all of us, taking care of the old grump, isn’t it?’ Kate, now twenty-three, had chipped in.

‘Course it is. She’s our mother hen, aren’t you?’ Emma, twenty-two, and more typically acerbic, had slipped a slim arm round her waist and squeezed her. She had felt discomfited by the sentiment, but relaxed into the hug.

‘Well, I do have plenty to do: there’s still loads of cooking and gardening . . . and the hens, of course.’ She had sought to make herself sound busy. The girls, wanting to believe the best, had laughed.

‘Stop fussing, Lizzie,’ Emma had bossed her younger sister. ‘You heard what she said. She’s just doing what she’s always done.’

It did not seem to occur to them that, once, she had had a career, though, admittedly, she had stopped nursing when she had her first baby. By the time the girls were at school, nobody wanted her to work out of the home – and so she stayed there.

Now, when she worries about her, Lizzie fires off a loving text and is reassured by a swift and cheery response. ‘Lovely to hear from you, darling. Had a glorious day in the garden and now making sticky toffee puddings. Xxx’

Jennifer, who has agonised over getting the tone of the text just right, watches the phone, willing it to ring. It remains silent. And so, alone in her kitchen, she bakes and bakes.