The Ferry Bakery – Part 1: Bread by Ferry

The bread went out on the six o'clock ferry, wrapped in paper, and came back with a note.

Eleni found the first one on a Tuesday. She was twenty-eight, the baker of a tiny Greek island, with flour on her cheek, a blue headscarf and arms like a wrestler's. Each morning, before the sun cleared the hills, she baked forty loaves and sent twelve across the strait to the neighbouring island. The ferry man took them for a few euros and a joke.

On the empty bag, in black biro, someone had written: Best bread I have ever eaten. N.

She stared. She grinned. She tucked it into her apron pocket.

The next day, there was another. The crust sings when you break it. N. And the next: I ate the whole loaf standing at the window. She started writing back, small, in pencil, on the new bags. Glad to hear it. The oven is old and bad-tempered. Try it with honey and thyme.

For weeks they wrote. She learned that N was a doctor, newly posted to the island clinic, from Athens, homesick, overworked and starved. He learned that she kept three cats, that her grandmother's oven was older than the Republic, and that she hated early mornings and could not stop.

Come and see the ovens, she wrote, one dawn. Saturday. Bring an appetite.

On Saturday, the ferry bumped against the quay, and a man in a crumpled linen shirt stepped off with a stethoscope round his neck and a bag of apricots. He was thirty-two, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, with tired eyes and a smile like a lamp lit in a window.

"Eleni?" he said. "Nikos. I write on the bags."

"I know," she said, flushing to the roots of her headscarf. "You've terrible handwriting."

He laughed. She laughed. The gulls wheeled over the harbour.

"Can I ask you something?" said Nikos.

"Yes."

"May I watch you bake?"

"Green?" she said, a word from the bags.

"Green," said Nikos, delighted. "Very green. Show me."

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Oven.