Have you ever wondered what life is like for the person who makes your bread? Here, a baker speaks frankly to author Charlie Colenutt

Breads, we do white, granary, oat, muesli, mixed-seed, wholemeal, teacakes, ciabatta, focaccia, olive. Then things like quiche, sausage rolls with the pork mince from the butchers round the corner. Everything’s fresh, all locally sourced.

I worked at a supermarket for ten years. One of the managers offered me a baker’s position.

He said, ‘Do you want it? ’

I said, ‘Yeah.’

But I had a thing where I cringed when I touched flour. After I accepted the job I thought, shit, I’m going to have to work with flour. I got over that when I was sent down to the Midlands for a full-day crash course in supermarket baking.

I was then a baker at the supermarket for three years before I applied for a job at a proper bakery. I didn’t get it because they went for someone with more experience, but he left after six months.

The owner called me up and said, ‘Job’s there if you want it.’

I’ve been working there on and off ever since. I’m unofficially the head baker, but the owner hasn’t announced it because she’d have to give me a pay rise [he laughs]. It’s still the best wage I’ve had, as much as I’d like it to be more. Twenty-six-and-a-half a year.

At the supermarket, it was cheating in a way because it was packet mixes. A bag of red stuff goes in there. A bag of blue in there. Whereas at my bakery, you have to weigh your sugar out, you weigh your salt out. It’s proper baking.

There was one bloke at the supermarket who didn’t give a shit what the bread looked like or how it was done. When it was on the shelves, I’d look at it and think, come on, really?

He’d been doing it for years and getting away with it for years. Nobody told him. You could just tell he didn’t want to be there.

Now, if something looks shit, I’ll make it again. Because if you get a bad loaf, then you’ll start losing customers. I want to take care in what I do.

It’s a little production line. You’ve got me mixing the dough. Another guy chops it, moulds it. I’ll jump in and mould the dough as well and another guy proves it and bakes it. Each day, we get through four or five 16kg bags of flour, Monday to Thursday. But on a Friday night we’ll put out hundreds – nearly thousands – of teacakes. Five hundred loaves. We don’t have a break.

Everyone says, ‘Ah, you’ll be used to the hours now.’ Not really. You don’t get used to it, you just cope with it. Come six o’clock on a Saturday night, I’m out like a light.

I try not to go to bed ’til 9 p.m. during the week.

Sometimes I’ll have a little nap when I get home but I don’t want to sleep my life away. I want to make the most of my time with my missus, my dog, my friends, my family. It’s hard at times. I’m constantly tired. I’m probably still catching up on sleep from a year ago.

One time when I was working at the supermarket, I fell asleep standing up and I woke up three inches away from the oven.

I even quit the bakery once because my Fridays were a complete write-off. I’d start one shift at 2 a.m. Friday morning, and I’d be back in for another shift at 10 p.m. Friday night.

Going to work, I’d drive through the city centre and see people out and getting drunk.

I’d think, I’m twenty-six, that should be me, and so I left to work in sales, selling tracking systems for agricultural machinery. It was awful. I just couldn’t speak. When I spoke to customers, my words came out like mush. You have to have a certain way about you to persuade someone to buy something, and I couldn’t do it.

I was bullied at school, just for being fat. And if you’re a fat kid, you’ve just got to take it. It made me quite subdued. Recently I saw one of the people who’d been shitty to me in the pub.

He said, ‘How you doing? ’

I said, ‘Don’t speak to me. You were a twat to me at school.’ Then he was buying me pints all night. Sometimes, you’ve got to stand up for yourself.

I am a bit louder now. I went to Kavos one year and I came back a totally different person. I enjoyed myself and I felt like I could be me, and that’s who I am today.

I feel like baking is what I’m here to do. When you see all the bread on the shelves, all looking nice, you think, I’ve done that. There’s a sense of achievement.

It’s the same feeling when you make something, and it sells out. You think, well, I’m doing something right.

Or when my grandad, who loves his Eccles cakes, has one and says, ‘Oh, this is brilliant.’

– What do you think about when you’re working?

There’s not a lot that goes through my head when I’m baking. I like my mind being somewhere else. We’ve all been doing it so long that we’re on autopilot and the time just flies. But it’s not like being a robot. No, the four of us are so close to each other that we’ll just chat shit and have a laugh. We’ve all been there at least two years. We talk about literally anything.

The oven guy, Rob, he’s set in his ways and he’s a little bit autistic. We call him that because we think he is, and I think his wife thinks he’s autistic as well. He comes out with these one-liners, and I can’t even remember them but it’ll be the funniest shit you’ve ever heard. We’ll be crying with  laughter. He’s also got his routine and if you break it, he’ll have a breakdown. Sam’ll do something like hide his rolling pin to try to get a reaction.

Sam is a Jack the Lad type, who won’t think twice about punching someone. He was a chef before he became a baker. We often say to him, ‘Cooking is an art, baking is a science.’ But he’s still got his chef hat on, and he’ll throw little bits of this and that into the mix. It upsets the balance of the dough and sometimes it doesn’t prove right. You try to tell him, but he doesn’t listen. The boss knows all this, but she loves him.

People stay working here a long time because the boss is decent. If you’ve got any money worries, she’ll do her best to help you out. We get to go an hour early, take cake, things like that.

And as much as we scream and shout at each other we do all get on, like a dysfunctional little family.

The girl I’m with now she works in the shop, so I’ve got to be a bit reserved at work. If she heard some of the stuff that was said in the kitchen, shit’d fly.

It’s just letting our hair down a bit. It’s a lad thing, innit? We don’t mean anything by it.

There was one bloke at the bakery called Paul, who was a stereotypical grumpy little old man. He was good, very good. Everything he did was perfect.

Him and Sam clashed because Sam wanted to do it his own way. I’d stand next to Paul and listen and just watch him work. When you’d do something wrong, he’d point it out.

There were quite a few harsh words in there, ‘You cunt, do it like this.’

He wasn’t very complimentary but if you did a good job he’d say, ‘Yeah that’s all right.’

Before he retired, he pulled me to one side and said, ‘I don’t want to say this in front of everyone, because I don’t want them thinking I’m being nice. But you’re the only one good enough to fill my shoes.’

For that to come from him, that was everything to me. I told my mum, everyone.

Hopefully I’ll be here for however many years and some young’un will come in. I’ll start off grumpy and one day say, ‘Ah you’re all right.’

This is an extract from Is This Working?: The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them (Picador) by Charlie Colenutt, which is available from 6. March. Pre-order a copy here.

Or pre-order from Blackwell’s here.

Charlie Colenutt will be talking about the state of modern work on this week’s “A Drink with the Idler“, Thursday 27 February, 6-7pm. Free to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

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