The overwhelming smell of new baked bread, every morning, early, woke us up, filled our noses, our minds, our somnambulant streets. That ever-enticing aroma ate into our hunger with its pleasantness. Firing our expectations with tummy rumbling pleasure. We were happy in the knowledge that, for tuppence, a cob loaf, new baked, burnt crusty, flaky, piping hot, still steaming from its wrenching birth from a baking oven on a cold morning, could be ours: filling the hole of hunger in our stomachs; if not our souls.

Was it such a great sin? That mouth watering, desire we had, as school children, that pre-sexual enjoyment of the pungent, piping hot, cob loaf.

Taste and texture tantalising; salt butter, melting, running down chins, to be scooped up with grubby fingers which would then be eagerly, greedily, licked clean of both butter and whatever else happened to be on them?

We stood, childfree, at the baker's door. Strangers, looking onto hallowed ground, watching wide eyed, as silent, ghost white, men carried tray after tray of piping hot bread and rolls and pies and sausage rolls and every lip licking fancy we could name through that hot, noisy, flour splashed, aroma thick, bakery, to the front shop. There we rushed, raucous, into a jabbering, drooling, schoolboy, line overwhelmingly anxious to spend our, grubby, hard won, tuppence on a dab of butter and a hot, crusty, mouth-watering, cob loaf.

We would devour the cob ravenously on our way to school, silenced, at last, by the sheer sensual pleasure of what we were putting into our mouths and stomachs. We ate the cob, all of us, curiously, in a similar manner. We would rip part of the side of the steaming loaf away, like preparing a Caesarean birth, to leave a flap. A, smutty, hand would be pushed into the very hot, soft, centre of the freshly baked cob and, as if we were miniature gynaecologists, we would wrench a handful, cruelly out into the world. It would then be spread with butter from the pat, with our pen knife, or one borrowed from a friend, like we were christening this new child, just born to the world; and the golden dripping feast would be jammed into a waiting mouth. As though, we were crazy young cannibals.