Author: asamsmith@hotmail.com
Company: ss

Chapter Eight

Although as a young mother I had involved myself in mother and toddler activities, playgroups and the like, I suspect that by the time Hazel started school proper she was glad to get out from under my fussing presence. While, if I’m honest, I was as relieved - to not have my increasing redundancy as playmate-mother made daily, made hourly, so obvious.
While Hazel had been at playschool I had already started casting about for some kind of paid employment. I hadn’t though wanted to simply return to dogsbody office work. But, with no other experience, office work had seemed my only realistic option.
Prior to Hazel’s arrival I had worked here and there as a Personal Assistant. An accurate job description however would have said that in that subordinate position I spent my working days covering up for the incompetence of others - others who were mostly paid double my salary.
With Hazel’s imminent school attendance about to cast me back onto the job market, being otherwise unqualified my only alternatives to office work had been as cleaner, teaching assistant or nursing assistant, shopworker or supermarket checkout. And with every one of those jobs I knew that I’d have to negotiate with unsympathetic jobsworth managers for time off in the school holidays and for the inevitable childhood sicknesses.
Credit where credit’s due, it was Ian who suggested I start my own café.
All those years, pre-Hazel, of aimless weekend driving with always a break - pit-stops, Ian called them - for tea and cake in a country tea room or roadside café, had made me an authority on them - service, food, decor, ambience....
When I demurred, said that I wouldn’t know how to go about setting up my own business, Ian said that he’d handle the accounts, would help me with the legal side. He had all the contacts.
So it was, with Hazel at school all day, that I started looking for premises.

When first I had imagined my own café it had been set in the countryside, with plenty of discreet parking, rustic furniture, cloth napkins.... From within our suburban acreage, however, that would have meant at least an hour’s drive from our then estate before ever I reached meaningful countryside.
As it happened a premises conveniently became available in our own High Street. There was already one café in town, but it was a long strange affair, all formica and chrome, with the menus on laminated card and resentful flatfooted service. The naked plate glass windows made it almost a burger bar. Its steam-moist atmosphere not conducive to relaxation it wouldn’t have looked out of place in a bus station.
We checked with the council that we could change the use of what had last been a shop. Fortunately it already had plumbing for washbasins from when it had one time been a hairdressers; and it had a lavatory. The bonus was that it had lovely arched windows.
In that older stretch of the High Street the traffic divided and in the centre was a narrow park with flowerbeds and benches, shaded by one large oak tree. So, in raised wooden letters above the wooden arches, ours became The Oak Tree Café. (Ian and I had hesitated over what might, given what I intended, been the more appropriate Oak Tree Tea Rooms. But I hadn’t liked the almost tongue-twisting alliteration; and Ian had said that ‘Rooms’ was inaccurate as ‘to all intents and purposes’ there was only the one, albeit large, room.)
I am writing this primarily for myself, to try and clarify for me all that has happened. Occasionally, however, I find myself imagining what another may make of what I have said, am saying, and then I write for them. But be clear I am not writing to apologise, or as self-justification. Most certainly not self-justification. I don’t like myself. There’s not much about me to like.
If I have thus far seemed only to disparage Ian, and that I may now seem ungrateful for his major contribution to this enterprise, let me say that back then ours had been a working partnership, and in our going-forwards life both of us had contracted to help one another and raise Hazel to the best of our abilities. It was when Ian and I had only a past that I had decided that we should go our separate ways.

It had been easier to decide what I hadn’t wanted in the café than what I had wanted. I hadn’t wanted the stink of chipshop fat. So there was to be no cooking on the premises. Nor had I wanted one of those frothy coffee machines that hiss and gurgle at such a volume that couples sitting either side of a table have to talk to each other one hand cupped to an ear. Nor, for the same ear-cupping reason, had I wanted a speaker grille blasting out the inanities of some chirpy DJ from a local radio station.
A café does, however, need some background noise in order that the one couple alone in the café that moment aren’t made self-consciously aware of the silence squatting on the table between them. But I hadn’t known what noise to place there. I hadn’t wanted muzak so bland and inoffensive that it caused offence.
As to furnishings.... The customers’ comfort being the key I didn’t want the place to be overfussy, like a spinster’s boudoir all lace doilies and spindly chairs. Nor did I want cold to the touch easy wipe-clean plastic and mock-chrome.
Touring the antique marts and auction rooms, picking up mismatched pine tables and chairs (stripped white-grey pine, not the chunky lacquered orange variety) I chanced upon six bakelite cake stands. My intention, the moment I saw them was not for the display of fancy cakes, but as static table centre pieces. No wilting flowers to be daily replaced and easily knocked over.
I also picked up a retro radio, which looked as if it came from the bakelite era, but was actually a CD player. I toyed with the idea of using light music, big band favourites from pre-WW2, but thought - for us staff as much as the customers - such tunes would become irritatingly repetitive. So I opted for collections of string quartets, which filled the café nicely without becoming overbearing.
The cake stands and repro radio led later to regular customers bringing in various bakelite items - ashtrays (from our opening we had been a non-smoking establishment) and vases mostly - which I used as a windowsill display. Along with several genuine old valve radios - with bakelite knobs. This again dispensed with the need for having flowers - even if silk - in the window.
Within a couple of years this bakelite theme led to customers referring to the café as The Bakelite. Ian even thought that it might be a good idea, the advertising contained in the name, to rename the Oak Tree the Bakelite Café. I said that it would only need one batch of cakes to sink and the café would become known as the Bake Heavy.

Presentation being nine parts of the business I made sure that there were always fresh baked cakes in the display cabinet. Anything left over I let the staff take home, that was if the cakes hadn’t all been sold half-price between 5 and 6. We had some regular customers between 5 and 6.
I also tried to make sure that there were no nasty surprises for new customers. In my tea room travels I’d found nothing more infuriating than being presented with a bill for three times the going rate for some very ordinary tea and scones. So every week I had a freshly typed price list put up in the frame on the door above the open/closed sign. The same price list - on heavy paper - was leant up against the cake stands on the tables as well as being chalked up on a blackboard at the back of the café.
All my efforts still didn’t stop people wandering in and asking for fried egg/bacon butties and burgers. With us poor staff having to once again explain that we didn’t cook on the premises.
“We do baguettes, sandwiches and cakes,” indicating the blackboard price list behind us.
To which the response of these unobservant souls would be, “Oh.” And, invariably, as if we hadn’t spoken and the blackboard had ceased to exist, they would run through a list of other things we didn’t cook.
Ah, the sons and daughters of the Great British Public.
But more of them later.
The staff first. I say staff plural, but most times there were just the two of us. Often just the one. Weekends we usually had a schoolgirl waitress for the busy times. In effect though I had one regular staff who had keys, could open and close when I was elsewhere looking after Hazel. If Hazel needed looking after for longer I got in temporary staff.
But that’s all decided later, becomes a working pattern. That first year, what with set-up costs, we made a loss. Year two, to Ian’s delight, we made a profit. And after a few false starts my mainstay staff became Franny. Chosen in the first place because she was an older woman with no childcare commitments.
As a woman one can feel that one is betraying one’s own sex when deciding thus. With two working mothers, however, and with both of us trying to cope with school holidays the staffing would have been a recipe for disaster. No, single Franny was the rock on which the Oak Tree Café was built.
My principal day-by-day contribution was the baking, which I preferred to the serving of customers unable to make up their minds and with no thought to my flattening feet. Those that say that there are few class divisions left in the UK today have not recently waited table. Waiting being the word.
Ah, the Great British Public.
To begin with I did the baking mostly in the evenings. Which Ian liked as, with Hazel tucked in bed, he was the one got to lick out the bowls. He also, when he came upon me baking - red and bustling with flour smears always somewhere about my person - would say, “I love seeing you in your element.” Variations of. Every time.
Hazel preferred the café to cooking. From primary school onwards she came in at weekends and during school holidays, and was petted by the customers and Franny. Later on she waited table and earned herself some pocket money and tips. All as anticipated. But she surprised me when a full-blooded teenager. I had assumed that she and her friends when in town would sneak by on the other side of the mid-street park. Not so: Hazel brought them into the café.
When I had been that age I had employed a myriad underhand stratagems to avoid the company, the sight, the thought of my parents. I had supposed that such deceptions were a natural and universal rite of passage. With my Hazel apparently not.
Once inside the café, again to my surprise, Hazel fiercely made sure that her teenage friends were polite and well-behaved. Although by that time Hazel had met with her share of rude customers. That snob-bound, ill-mannered Great British Public....
“Ignorant,” Hazel called them. I remember her once, chip off the old block, after a customer had grumped on and on at her because she had served someone before him. He had wanted a sandwich made, the other customer only a pastry.
“He had one of those mouths,” Hazel said afterwards. “So set in misery you know that as a child no-one taught him how to smile. So no-one since has smiled back at him. So he has never smiled back at them. Result, self-perpetuating misery. Grrrrrr.”
Customers, some of them members of the Great British Public, populated my working life. Fuss-arsing, mind-changing women for a start....
Some of them older women with creased faces like slowly deflating balloons, and who called everyone “Dear”. Over-heavy on the powder and perfume they stank out the café.
And smart young saleswomen with their backsides wider than their shoulders, their hair gelled to a shine, and their perfume as pungent as the old women’s; and who offhandedly condescended to the, not so nattily groomed, graduate waitress.
Then there were the scruffy and over-courteous, some inappropriately solicitous, “If it’s no trouble....” Wizened monkey faces who reeked of a century’s cigarette smoke on the table next to the tidy, twice-showered and imperious....
The Great British Public....
The pointed women, their round faces ending in noses pointed like pink pencils, and which pointed from cake to cake, and back again before choosing. They might even go off to consult with friends, then change their minds again. They’re always in two minds. And if tall these pointed women are bent like bows towards their pointedness.
Then there are the couples....
Childless couples mostly. Or couples with children elsewhere and long ago. Young or middle-aged these couples with unreal lives, weird priorities, voiced concerns and enthusiasms disproportionate to even their own circumstances, and which certainly had no grounding in mine or the staff’s 10-6 reality.
Whatever the weather the male half of one type of couple wore a misshapen jacket, sports or linen, and he would come clumping into the café emanating disdain and disapproval, lips twisted in semi-permanent exasperation. She would creep behind, and get told off for getting the wrong cake. It will always be the wrong cake.
Then there were the couples who had been on holiday in the US of A. They said, very loudly, “Over There Service Means Service,” and that before they had even sat at a table. Quick  to grumble, to find the tiniest fault, and slow to tip, yet they expected us to want them to Have A Nice Day. We found ourselves swayed between wishing them an obviously ironical, “Have a nice dayeee!” and between telling them in the good olde English manner to fuck off and not come back.
Then there were the couples, whole families even, who were physically familiar with one another in public. Touching touching touching. Demonstrating their right to be familiar? Mine, the kiss, the fondle, seems to be saying; only I can touch you here.
“Yes, but not in here.” I had to hold down the urge to come between them like a boxing referee.
Who we did ask to leave was anyone, male or female, who was mildewed and rancid. Especially rancid. Weathering the abuse, or ignoring the tears, we told them to not come back until they’d had a good wash.
Smokers however, their clothes leaking a pernicious carbon monoxide, but with their otherwise being socially acceptable, we endeavoured to make them unwelcome by dint of small frowns, face-pulled looks to one another, and by leaning backwards away from their chemical reek. And once they left we talked to the other customers about their smell. Committed smokers rarely returned.
Out-and-out skanks, can in hand, didn’t even attempt to come into the café. They did though sometimes sit on one of the benches opposite. Until I took myself outside, stood and stared at them. Unnerved them that staring. I did get shouted at, but they did move on. And the café windows did get broken a couple of times. No need to ask by who.
The café was my life, and I worked hard to make it a success. One success was my speciality days. The second Thursday macaroons in particular had sweet-toothed cognosenci coming in from far and wide. 
I was the boss, had no excuses, no alibis.

The Oak Tree Café was an escape from the boredom of my marriage, and it became as much a burden, a rut, as my marriage. Yet, for want of anything other, I kept the café going through Hazel’s college years, and the nothing much years beyond. The hinterland lives of customers and staff kept me just about interested in life outside of Ian and between Hazel’s occasional visits home.
How much of this do I need to explain? Because these aren’t so much the entwining strands of my life and, so to speak, difficult to untangle. That infers a separateness to them. They weren’t separate. My life has been more like layer upon layer of transparent ply, year on year repeated. (The glaziers used 5-ply board to temporarily stop up the café’s broken windows.) I suppose the resin between each of my transparent layers would have had to be an opaque layer in itself. It was only when this board of transparencies got chipped by a new event, splintering back, that I had been able to see what may have formed that event. And then I only got to see a partial and imperfect view of the causation. Always something remained unseen.
How does anyone learn about themselves? If I hadn’t been working with all sorts of people in the café, as opposed to my being alone at home baking, following the strict choreography of cooking, I doubt that I would have realised that I am definitely a task-oriented person. For instance while chatting to a customer I would be almost painfully aware, side of mind, that there were plates and dishes yet to be washed and returned to their cabinet places.
One of the staff robbed me. A tenner a day. Which was how Ian came to be suspicious - the regularity. To stop her I had to catch her in the act - she was Franny’s replacement after Franny retired - and then I had to nervously confront her. And straightaway sack her. Then find a replacement and restore some of my little faith in humanity. The thief was a grandmother herself, shouted and wept over the sacking. I didn’t have proof enough to involve the police, said that I had just wanted shot of her.
“Bad ‘un her,” Old Bob said next day.
“Could’ve told me before,” I said.
“Would you have believed me? Got to find out for yourself sometimes. Experience the best teacher.”
After a couple more false starts - but the women just unsuitable, no more thieving - Nyrene became my mainstay.
Nyrene is a thin harsh woman. Abrupt. She jerks alert, rushes to every new task. Dealing with customers she could sometimes seem fierce. No sooner challenged, however, than hers was seen to be a misleading assertiveness, covered her state of constant anxiety.

Such was my life, the people in my life. Such were, within that café, all the secondhand lives that formed mine, that informed mine. Which is probably why I had no illusions about marriage, no reverence for it as an institution: I had listened to far too many sad and bitter histories - of staff and customers.
The café was still going when Ian was killed and when Hazel moved back in with me. Like my marriage I was unsure of the worth of the café. Unlike my marriage I was undecided regards its future, being unable then to see no alternative day-by-day activity to fill my time.