by Jenny Colgan
Praise for Jenny Colgan
‘This funny, sweet story is Jenny Colgan at her absolute best’
Heat
‘She is very, very funny’
Express
‘A delicious comedy’
Red
‘Fast-paced, funny, poignant and well observed’
Daily Mail
‘Sweeter than a bag of jelly beans…
had us eating up every page’
Cosmopolitan
‘Will make you feel warm inside – it makes a fab Mother’s Day gift’
Closer
‘Chick-lit with an ethical kick’
Mirror
‘A quirky tale of love, work and the meaning of life’
Company
‘A smart, witty love story’
Observer
‘Full of laugh-out-loud observations… utterly unputdownable’
Woman
‘Cheery and heart-warming’
Sunday Mirror
‘A chick-lit writer with a difference… never scared to try something different, Colgan always pulls it off’
Image
‘A Colgan novel is like listening to your best pal, souped up on vino, spilling the latest gossip – entertaining, dramatic and frequently hilarious’
Daily Record
‘An entertaining read’
Sunday Express
‘Part-chick lit, part-food porn… this is full-on fun for foodies’
Bella
Also by Jenny Colgan
Amanda’s Wedding
Talking to Addison
Looking for Andrew McCarthy
Working Wonders
Do You Remember the First Time?
Where Have All the Boys Gone?
West End Girls
Operation Sunshine
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend
The Good, the Bad and the Dumped
Meet Me at the Cupcake Café
Christmas at the Cupcake Café
Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams
Christmas at Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop
The Christmas Surprise
The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris
Little Beach Street Bakery
COPYRIGHT
Published by Sphere
978-0-7515-5392-5
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Jenny Colgan 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
SPHERE
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery
Table of Contents
Praise for Jenny Colgan
Also by Jenny Colgan
COPYRIGHT
Dedication
A Word from Jenny
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
TURN THE PAGE FOR A DELECTABLE FESTIVE EXTRACT FROM
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To my darling Auntie Maura and Uncle Mike.
Please cancel the snake delivery now.
Thanks.
A Word from Jenny
Hello! And welcome to the Little Beach Street Bakery… if you’ve been here before, lovely to see you again! If it’s your first time, well, you are so welcome, and I hope you are hungry. Let me give you a quick catch-up before we get started. (Neil fans: don’t worry. He’s back.)
Okay, so Polly lost her business in Plymouth, and had to start all over again. She moved to a coastal town in Cornwall, where the tide comes in twice a day and covers the causeway. When she couldn’t find a job, she started baking bread, because that’s what she loves to do, and soon incurred the wrath of Mrs Manse, who ran the town bakery (very badly).
Anyway, eventually Polly won her round and started working there. Meanwhile she had a brief affair with one of the fishermen, Tarnie, then found out to her utter horror he was married. He later died in a terrible storm, and it took – and is still taking – everyone a very long time to get over it.
Polly fell in love, finally, with Huckle, a big American chap who makes his own honey. She also inadvertently adopted a puffin and has, probably against her better judgement, just decided to buy a lighthouse.
Right, I think we’re up to date! I do hope you enjoy Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery; I so loved writing it.
A Quick Word about the Setting
Cornwall to me is a place of the imagination as much as a real home to lots of people, because I spent so much time there as a child. To me, it is like a version of Narnia or any of the other imaginary lands I liked to visit – I was absolutely obsessed with Over Sea, Under Stone, and of course the Famous Five and Malory Towers.
We used to stay in old tin miners’ cottages near Polperro. My mother was a great Daphne du Maurier fan and she used to put me and my two brothers to sleep in the little narrow beds and tell us bloodcurdling stories of shipwrecks and pirates and gold and wreckers and we would be utterly thrilled and chilled and one of us, probably my littlest brother – although he would probably say, me – would be up half the night with nightmares.
Compared to chilly Scotland, sunny Cornwall was like paradise to me. Every year, we were bought those big foam body surfboards as a special treat and we would get into the water first thing in the morning and body surf, body surf, body surf until physically hauled out, sunburnt along the crossed strap lines of my swimming costume, to eat a gritty sandwich wrapped in cling film.
Later my dad would barbecue fish over the little home-built barbie he constructed every year from bricks and a grill, and I would sit in the high sweet grass, read books and get bitten by insects.
And after that (because you get to stay up very late on your holidays), we’d drive down to Mousehole or St Ives and eat ice cream while strolling along the harbour looking at the art galleries. Or we’d eat hot salty fried potatoes, or fudge, the flavours
of which I was constantly obsessed with, even though fudge invariably makes me feel sick.
They were blissful times, and it was such a joy to revisit them when I started writing my Mount Polbearne series. We went on a day trip – as required by law, I think, of anyone visiting Cornwall – to St Michael’s Mount and I remember being gripped and fascinated by the old stone road disappearing under the waves. It was the most romantic and magical thing I could possibly imagine, and it has been such a joy setting my books there. If I can convey through my books even a fraction of the happiness Cornwall has brought me in my life… well, I’ll be absolutely delighted.
Prologue
‘When I sleep, which I can’t, I can’t ever sleep, I dream about him. I dream about him being totally stupid. Like, he’s in a washing machine or something and I’m saying, get out of the washing machine, you prat. But he won’t get out of the washing machine, he’s all tiny and in the washing machine, and he gets smaller and smaller until he disappears.’
‘That’s totally normal,’ said the calm, educated West Country voice.
‘You say everything’s totally normal,’ said Selina, pushing back her short hair crossly. ‘I could come in here and say, “I ran over two hedgehogs on the way here because they reminded me of his hair. One by accident, one on purpose,” and you’d say, “That’s totally normal.”’
‘Did you do that?’
‘No, but I might have. You’d probably still say it was normal.’
‘There is nothing normal about grief, Selina. It is common. But it is never normal.’
Selina let out a long sigh.
‘Why can’t I… why can’t I get over it? Start getting over it? Everyone else wants me to have got over it bloody ages ago. I can see it in their faces. It’s embarrassing for them. I want to get over it. I want to get to sleep without drinking too much wine, and wake up without seeing the face of my bloody dead husband in the washing machine and stop bumming everyone out all the time.’
‘Where are you living now?’ said the voice smoothly, as if Selina’s outburst hadn’t happened.
Selina shrugged.
‘Don’t know. I think I’m going to give up the Manchester lease. It’s getting more expensive, and I don’t feel any more settled there than I did anywhere else.’
‘Maybe it’s time to think of going… home? Your home, or Tarnie’s home?’
‘I’m never going back to that place,’ said Selina, shivering. ‘I never want to go back there.’
Chapter One
‘Stop it,’ Polly said in a warning voice. ‘It’s not funny.’
Neil ignored her and continued to beat on the little high window with his beak until she could be persuaded to go over and give him a snack.
He was outside the lighthouse they had moved into the previous month, all three of them together, Polly, Neil the puffin, and Huckle, Polly’s American boyfriend, who had parked his motorbike and sidecar at the bottom of the tower. It was their only mode of transport.
The lighthouse hadn’t been lived in for a long time, not since the lamps were electrified in the late seventies. It only had four floors, and a circular staircase that ran round the sides, thus making it, as Huckle had pointed out more than once, the single draughtiest place in human history. They were both getting very fit running up and down it. One floor held the heavy machinery that had once turned the workings, which couldn’t be removed. On the top floor, just below the light itself, was their sitting room, which had views right across the bay and, on the other side, back towards Mount Polbearne, the tidal island where they lived and worked, with its causeway to the mainland that covered and uncovered itself with the tides.
From these windows you could see the little Beach Street Bakery, the ruined shop that Polly had revitalised when she had moved to the village just over two years ago, getting over a failed business and a failed relationship back on the mainland.
She hadn’t originally expected to do much in Mount Polbearne except sit and lick her wounds until she was ready to head back into the fray again, back to working a corporate lifestyle; hadn’t for a moment thought that in the tumbledown flat above the shop she would come back to life by practising her favourite hobby – baking bread – and that this would turn into a career when she reopened the old closed-down bakery.
It wasn’t the most lucrative of careers, and the hours were long, but the setting was so wonderful, and her work so appreciated, by both the townspeople and tourists, that she had found something much more satisfying than money: she had found what she was meant to be doing with her life. Well, most of the time she thought that. Sometimes she looked around at the very basic kitchen she had installed (her old flat in Plymouth had sold, and she’d managed to get the lighthouse at a knockdown price, mostly, as Lance the estate agent had pointed out, because only an absolutely crazy person could possibly want to live in a draughty, inaccessible tower with a punishing light shining out of it) and wondered if she’d ever manage to fix the window frames, the window frames being number one on a list of about four thousand things that urgently needed doing.
Huckle had offered to buy the place with her, but she had resisted. She had worked too hard to be independent. Once before she had shared everything, been entirely enmeshed financially with someone. It had not worked out and she was in no mood to repeat the experience.
Right now, she wanted to sit in her eyrie of a sitting room at the very top of the house, drink tea, eat a cheese twist and simply relax and enjoy the view: the sea, ever changing; clouds scudding past so close she could touch them; the little fishing boats bobbing out across the water in faded greens and browns, their winches and nets heavy behind them, looking tiny and fragile against the vast expanse of the sea. She just needed five minutes’ peace and quiet before heading down to the bakery to relieve her colleague Jayden for the lunchtime shift.
Neil, the little puffin who had crashed into her life one night in a storm, and remained there ever since, did not agree. He found the activity of flying outside, high up, and still being able to see her through the window utterly amazing, and liked to do it again and again, sometimes taking off to fly all the way round the lighthouse and come back in the other side, sometimes pecking at the glass because Huckle thought it was funny to feed him titbits out of the window even though Polly had told him not to.
Polly put down her book and moved over to the window, struck as she never ceased to be – she wondered if she would ever grow tired of it – by the amazing cast of the sun silvering in and out behind the clouds over the waves, the gentle cawk of the seagulls, and the whistling wind, which could turn thunderous on winter days. She still couldn’t quite believe she lived here. She opened the old-fashioned, single-glazed window with its heavy latch.
‘Come in then,’ she said, but Neil fluttered excitedly and tried to peck in between her fingers in case she had a tasty treat for him.
‘No!’ she said. ‘You are a fat puffin and no mistake. Come inside and stop tapping.’
Neil thought this was a brilliant game and shot off round the lighthouse once more to show her what he could do. When he landed back on the windowsill, his big black eyes were expectant.
‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ said Polly, then – and she would never have done this if Huckle had been there – she leaned over and gave him a scrap of the cheese twist, which the little bird wolfed down happily, pecking up the few remaining crumbs. He pecked so hard he ended up hopping backwards and slipping off the window ledge.
‘Neil!’ shouted Polly, then felt a complete idiot as he flapped his wings and fluttered back up to window level.
‘You are scaring the life out of me,’ she said. ‘Come in or go out, not both.’
Neil chose to come in. He landed on the floor, then waddled across the room, inspecting the rough-hewn wooden floor carefully just in case there were any crumbs there Polly had missed.
‘Right,’ said Polly. ‘I’m going back to work. Behave yourself.’
She took a glanc
e round the sitting room, making sure she had everything. Once you got to the bottom of the lighthouse, you very much didn’t want to find you’d forgotten something and have to go all the way back up again. Huckle wanted them to get a fireman’s pole, but Polly was highly resistant.