02. Three Cakes Out by Half Eight

A woman who dreamed of a café for thirty years, named it after her grandmother, and gets up at six every morning because she genuinely loves it. She works six days a week, in case you were wondering.

There is a photograph of a woman on the wall of Ivy’s Café in Plymouth.

She is four foot nine. A pocket rocket. An absolute force to be reckoned with. Every Saturday morning when Ali was growing up, she would go to her grandmother’s house and they would bake together at the kitchen table — Granny Ivy with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, Ali small beside her, learning something she wouldn’t fully understand the value of for another thirty years.

Now Ali is up at six every morning, out of the house by quarter to seven, and baking until the café opens. Three cakes out by half past eight if it’s a good day. She doesn’t sit down until five o’clock. Six days a week. She loves every single minute of it.

She wants to make sure you know about the six days a week, by the way. Just in case you were under any illusions.

What She Always Knew

Ali didn’t do brilliantly at school. Drama was the exception — she got that one — but the rest of it didn’t stick the way it was supposed to, and the dream of being an actress quietly folded itself away when the opportunities weren’t there and her mum and dad weren’t the kind of parents who said: if that’s what you want, we’ll help you get there. They were loving, but practical. You got on with life. You didn’t chase things.

So, she was shoehorned into a health and social care course at college and life did what life does — it moved forward, whether she was ready or not.

But from around eighteen or nineteen, there was always this quiet thought. I’d love to have a café one day. Not loud, not urgent. Just there. The way a dream can be there for years without making a fuss, waiting patiently for the conditions to be right.

She grew up on a council estate in Saltash. Her friends had Nike trainers; she had Gola. Her dad cleaned telephone exchanges and later worked nights at B&Q. Her mum worked at the Happy Eater in Saltash before eventually spending over twenty-five years at a supermarket. Nobody in her world talked about following your dreams. You worked for what you had. Nobody was going to hand it to you on a plate.

That lesson took root. She knows the value of money. She knows what it means to graft. And when she eventually did follow her dream, she did it with her eyes wide open and no debt behind her — because if it all went wrong tomorrow, she could sell the café for what she paid for it and start again. She’d already done that once. She knew how.

Nik Said: I Know So

The worst job Ali ever had paid her well. That was the problem with it. Great Western Railways gave her a good salary, colleagues she mostly liked, and absolutely nothing else. She went to bed on Sunday nights not wanting to get up. She dreaded every morning. She hated everything about it — the job, the structure, the way it made her feel about herself.

Eventually she went to Nik and said: if I stay, I’m going to do something silly to myself.

He didn’t say no. He couldn’t, really. Three years earlier he’d done the same thing — walked away from a job that paid well because he couldn’t stay in it. She had supported him without question. Now it was her turn.

They bought a coffee van. It rained constantly. It was freezing. There were accidents. There was one incident with a fall that was caught on CCTV that Ali describes with the particular relish of someone who has decided the best thing you can do with a humiliating memory is weaponise it for laughs.

And then one August, at their anniversary trip to Salisbury, sitting by the river with a drink in hand, Ali half-jokingly asked Nik where he saw their future going.

He said: we’ll have a café.

She said: do you think so?

He said: I don’t think so. I know so.

Nik is not a man who says things lightly. He is a glass-full person in a way that even Ali — who is relentlessly, cheerfully positive — finds remarkable. He said it like it was already true. So, they started looking.

“It’s crazy where things take you, really. And all of that came from just sitting by a river asking a daft question.”

Thanks to Natalie

The advert went up on Facebook Marketplace at around five o’clock one evening. Within minutes it had two hundred and fifty comments. People tagging their friends, people flagging it as a dream, people doing what people do on the internet — expressing enthusiasm without ever actually doing anything.

Natalie did something. She took a screenshot and sent it to Ali.

Ali’s first reaction, she is honest enough to admit, was sceptical. She’d seen the previous owner’s posts about quiet days and struggles. She assumed the café was being sold because it couldn’t make a go of it. That thought lasted, she says, a matter of seconds. Then she thought: what’s the worst that can happen? I go and view it. I don’t get a good vibe. I say no.

She messaged the owner that same evening. She viewed it the following afternoon. She came alone — Nik wasn’t with her. She walked in and looked around and told the owner she was going to buy it.

That evening she phoned Natalie and said: I’ve got news.

She told her the whole story and then said: if it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have seen the advert. It never even came up on my feed.

The café is named Ivy’s. Ivy’s exists because of Granny Ivy’s Saturday mornings. And it exists because Natalie took a screenshot and sent it to the right person.

Women. It is always women.

The Woman on the Wall

Granny Ivy was Ali’s mum’s mum. Anyone would tell you that her mum hadn’t had a particularly loving upbringing from her, that something had been withheld or missing in that relationship. But to Ali, as a grandchild, she was something else entirely. Warm and bubbly and outgoing and fun. A four foot nine force of nature who baked on Saturdays with a cigarette in hand and thought nothing of it.

There are other women in Ali’s story, and they are instructive in a different way. Her mum, who she loved dearly but didn’t want to emulate as a parent. Her sisters, who competed with each other so constantly and so pointlessly that Ali looked at them and thought: I don’t want to be like you. The community midwife called Beryl who arrived two days after Charlie was born, found Ali drinking a glass of orange juice, and proceeded to make her feel like she was already doing it wrong.

None of these women are villains. But they were, collectively, a very clear picture of what Ali didn’t want to become. So she went back to the beginning. Back to Granny Ivy and the kitchen table and the thing she was shown, without knowing she was being shown it, about how to be in a room with someone.

She wants to be remembered for being funny. That’s it. Funny and a nice person. She told her daughter Izzy this recently. Izzy told her she wasn’t that funny. Ali told her to ask any of her friends.

“I am funny. That is what I want people to remember. That will do.”

Did I Order the Sausages

Ask Ali how she defines success and she won’t mention money. She won’t mention ambition. She won’t mention the café’s growing reputation or the regulars who come every day or the fact that she is building something real from something she dreamed about for thirty years.

She will say: three cakes out by half eight. Did I order the sausages today? Yes I did. That’s success.

She is a glass half full person — always has been, probably always will be. She and Nik walk after work most evenings, trainers on, talking about everything. They have always been honest with each other. She doesn’t let things build. She tells him straight away. She trusts him implicitly and she knows — she absolutely knows — that this is not a given. She’s seen what it looks like when couples do everything together until they can’t stand the sight of each other. She and Nik have different interests. They just happen to also love spending time together. It’s a balance she has thought about quite carefully.

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She doesn’t hold grudges. Nine times out of ten she lets things go. Unless you have really, properly wound her up — in which case, she will remember. There is a specific incident from a specific weekend that she is still holding. She will tell you about it if you ask. She will not tell you if you don’t.

She is loyal. To her friends, to her husband, to her children — Charlie who cannot see a positive no matter how many times you show him one, and Izzy who definitely can, and whom Ali is enormously proud of in the way you can only be proud of someone who has tested every single limit you have and somehow come out the other side your best friend.

She is forty-eight. She has the career she always wanted. She has the marriage she is grateful for every day. She has a photo of Granny Ivy on the wall and she bakes under it every morning.

She doesn’t like getting older. She looks in the mirror and thinks, oh God, forty-eight. But she still feels thirty inside. She says that with zero irony and complete delight.

Chase It

If you asked Ali what she would say to a young woman reading her story, she wouldn’t give you a philosophy. She wouldn’t give you a framework. She would give you something that sounds simple and isn’t.

She would tell you: if there’s something you can absolutely see yourself doing, chase it. There are avenues. There are opportunities you won’t recognise as opportunities until you take them. You don’t never know, she says, with the double negative that somehow makes it more true. You don’t never know.

She would also tell you: be kinder to yourself. Don’t believe what the mirror says. Don’t worry about the size of your clothes or whether you’ve got your makeup on. I know, she adds, because I say this as someone who doesn’t always believe it herself.

She gets up at six every morning. She is in the café before seven. She bakes. She serves. She manages, and orders, and does the paperwork she has learned the hard way to stay on top of. She does not sit down until five. She does this six days a week.

She would not change a single day of it.

“I genuinely do love it. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t. I would have given it up by now.”

On the wall behind her, Granny Ivy looks on.

Four foot nine. Pocket rocket. Cigarette in hand.

Absolutely delighted.

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