Listen to Ruth (Need help?)1973, I'd been sick suffering from post-natal depression. My mother's death, plus the birth of my two children and a miscarriage in between. I had to find a way out of the darkness.
I started entering competitions, bakery competitions, slogans, anything that might drag me out of the pain.
Then I won the Cook of The Realm for Wales and suddenly people were asking me to make cakes and cater small parties.
I started to supply a farmhouse and one day pushing the double pushchair into James Howell, where my husband was the optician, with some cake deliveries, I was approached 'Would I be interested in supplying James Howell with cakes and pastries?'.
They wanted to see the baking the next day, in the boardroom! I spent that evening and the whole night baking. Scones, eclairs, danish, cheese cakes, sponge gateau and rock cakes, fruit tarts and black truffle cakes rich with chocolate.
2pm and the boardroom. A vast wood-panelled room, a table as large as my sitting room. The row of directors sat and tasted. There and then the order arrived. Thirty nine dozen fancies three times a week. Ten gateau and a change of dessert trolley every day and all for the Orchid Room at James Howell.
It was a very select restaurant on the top floor, where hatted and gloved ladies met their friends for lunch served by uniformed waitresses wearing stiff semi-circles of fabric over their foreheads to denote their station.
My rum-ba-ba became their Orchid Gateau. Coloured pink and decorated with rose-petals and strawberries. Twenty two pence a portion and coffee for eight and a half pence.
My cakes were arranged on silver cake stands and eaten with forks and starched linen serviettes. What would health and safety say about that now?
At the end of the year I'd only cleared £50, but I didn't mind. I had a job and my baking was a symbol that I was well and happy again.
Stories from the
Streets of Cardiff - this film was made as part of a
Digital Storytelling workshop run by BBC Wales.
