Kitty is so funny, so energetic, it is hard when you meet her now to imagine anything different. Strangers would collar Kitty in the Co-op supermarket and ask how they could get hold of one of the loaves: “It was like being the drug lord of Watlington.”

Pretty quickly, the Taits had more bread than they could ever get through as a household, so they started offering it to neighbours. “Everyone should have a bed in their kitchen,” she writes in Breadsong. Kitty and Al made more and more loaves Kitty took to sleeping in the kitchen, because she felt more comfortable being around her dough. “It was like alchemy,” she recalls.īoth agree that the routine was as appealing as the bread. It wasn’t particularly special, but Kitty took an interest. One afternoon, out of ideas, he made a loaf using New York baker Jim Lahey’s no-knead method. Al, who worked with dyslexic undergraduates at Oxford University and the charity Now Teach, which encourages older people to go into teaching, pretty much wound down his career. At home, Al and Katie tried everything they could think of with Kitty: gardening, sewing, painting. The sessions, though, never made much headway. Kitty had depression and started to see a therapist in Oxford twice a week. Soon, she couldn’t get out of bed, and stopped going to school. She ate less and less, was hardly sleeping and began to have panic attacks.

Kitty was doing well at school and was known for her infectious giggle, but, almost imperceptibly, she became less sociable, more anxious.

It began in spring 2018, when Al and his wife, Katie, started to notice that something was up with Kitty, then 14 and the youngest of their three children. “I wouldn’t wish what’s happened to us to happen to anybody,” says Al when he picks me up in the work van, a Nissan S-Cargo called Dodo. The Taits are exceptional bakers but the story behind the Orange Bakery might be even more remarkable. If you can’t make it to Watlington, there is a new Orange Bakery cookbook called Breadsong, named after the hiss and crackle that loaves make when they come out of the oven, a sound that some bakers think sounds like faraway applause. One of their proudest creations is Happy Bread, made from doughnut dough, caramel and sea-salt flakes, with an optional sprinkling of chocolate-infused CBD oil, the (legal) chemical extracted from marijuana. Kitty’s favourite loaf is The Comfort, which is laced with Marmite and has a salty, umami crust with a Twiglet-like flavour. They come, and usually queue, for the sourdough, baguettes and focaccia, but Kitty and Al throw out all sorts of unusual and wonderful bakes. The boy, actually, was the expensive one.” I think that bread, just like Dad, will always just be a part of me Kitty Tait When I tell Kitty that later, she replies: “Well, I did pay him. When I’m hanging around the shop, a man with his toddler son tells me, unsolicited, that the Taits make the best bread in the world. An artist called Biddy who makes work about “anything that’s dead”, describes it to me as the heartbeat of Watlington. The Orange Bakery, especially, has developed a cult following.

I tell myself, ‘There’s a dark underbelly here…’” “We’re working on the candlestick makers,” says Kitty, smiling. On a Friday morning in March, shoppers with canvas bags nip between – on one street – an excellent butcher, Angela’s veg stall, a fancy chocolate shop and the Orange Bakery, which the Taits opened in early 2019. Watlington may be diminutive but it is perfectly formed. “We are,” agrees Kitty, who has inherited her father’s vivid red hair and blue eyes.

Cookbook bakery story 2