Sunlight and Shade Chapter One April 1887

They had been a good team these last 15 years, though she had been but a year older than Maria when he met her. Her family was from the North, and she had come down to London as a scullery maid, in service at 13. They had discovered her talent for baking and moved her into the kitchen, where he had met her. Though his parents still had the farm, he was working already in his mother’s side business then, carrying his mother’s baked goods to the fine houses of South London, Battersea and Chelsea.

He had romanced her then despite her age, and they had married when she fell for Ellen. Many children were “8 month babies” then; a man had to make sure that he would have children to carry on a business. A barren woman was a burden he couldn’t afford. So, being with child when a girl married was no stigma but a sign of good things to come. Big families were the normal thing in Victoria’s England; children were needed to work, and theirs were more fortunate than most, because their father was a tradesman, and not a labourer or factory worker. He owned his house, and his barn, and the children were always well fed, not like all those other poor young mongrels he saw in the street on his rounds every day, scrabbling for a penny on the ground.

He pulled the horses into the stall, and gave them some hay and water. Unhitching the cart he rolled it into place and uncovered the still warm loaves and buns. It was close to Easter so Maria had baked some hot cross buns, the smell of the raisins and cinnamon wafted on the air, and his customers appeared like so many locusts, in another half hour his stall was empty of everything but the unbaked rolls, still cooling under a wet cloth.

He hitched up the horses again, and headed off to the restaurants and hotels near the Station, which had opened in 1860 and was named after the Queen, and then off to Charing Cross and the Strand for more customers. His business was getting so busy he was turning new customers away, and had even been approached for his wife‘s Scotch eggs by Fortnum and Mason. Pretty soon he knew he would be able to exist on only the hotel restaurant business, and could give up the market stall. If it kept up like this, when the boys were grown he would be able to operate two or three delivery carts. With the girls baking he could envisage the whole family working in the business, they might even become rich enough to hire some real help.