The second weekend of September was dry and still on Ash Lane.⏎
That was exactly the weather Faridah had been waiting for since the spring.⏎
She had 180 bricks stacked against her back fence, sorted into neat piles⏎
of 20. Next door, Emlyn was drinking tea and pretending not to stare over⏎
Faridah's fence. They had talked about a wood-fired oven for months,⏎
and now the bricks were real. The concrete base was already there,⏎
left behind by an old shed that came down in March. Emlyn came round at 7⏎
on Saturday morning with a bag of tools and a flask of tea.⏎
He walked around the base, tapped it with his boot and said it would do.⏎
The plan was simple: bricks on the base, a dome on top, a small fire⏎
inside. Faridah drew a circle on the concrete in chalk, a little under 3⏎
feet across. "Everything we build has to sit inside this line,"⏎
Faridah said, handing Emlyn the chalk. "How tall are we making this dome of⏎
yours? I need to know before I mix," Emlyn said. Faridah wanted a high⏎
dome, round and steep, like the top half of an egg. She said the smoke⏎
would curl up inside it and roll out of the door in a loop.⏎
Emlyn wanted a low dome, hardly taller than the arch of the doorway itself.⏎
"Heat bounces, and a low roof throws it straight back down onto the floor,"⏎
Emlyn said. Faridah answered that a flat roof would trap the smoke and⏎
starve the fire of air. They argued about it for twenty minutes without⏎
moving a single brick. In the end they did what sensible people do when⏎
nobody can win. "We'll argue about the top once the bottom is right,"⏎
Faridah said cheerfully. So Faridah and Emlyn began with the floor,⏎
and a floor needs no dome at all. They laid 36 bricks flat and tight,⏎
edge to edge, with no cement between them. Faridah swept dry sand over the⏎
top and brushed it into the thin gaps. By 11 the first ring of the wall was⏎
standing, 24 bricks set in a careful circle. Emlyn mixed sand and cement in⏎
an old tub, a little at a time. Nita from the flat upstairs came down to⏎
watch and stayed to help. Nita is 9, and she turned out to be good at⏎
handing over the right brick. Her cousin Dario, who is 11,⏎
kept count in a notebook and called the total out.⏎
"That's 60 bricks, which means a third of the pile has gone,"⏎
Dario said at noon. Faridah had counted 63 herself (nobody wanted to start⏎
a second argument about that). They sat under the apple tree while the sun⏎
moved slowly round the garden. Emlyn said he could sleep for a week;⏎
Nita said the wall wasn't finished. The dome came next,⏎
and the old argument came back with it. Emlyn had a trick for the shape,⏎
and even Faridah admitted it was clever. Nita and Emlyn piled damp sand in⏎
the middle of the floor and patted it into a mound. Then they laid the⏎
bricks over that mound, so the sand held them all up.⏎
"Sand doesn't answer back, and it doesn't charge for its help,"⏎
Emlyn said happily. Nita pushed both hands deep into the heap and looked up⏎
at the builders. "How high does this heap of mine have to go?⏎
Nobody has told me yet," Nita said, smoothing the top with one hand.⏎
Faridah held her palm level with her shoulder, while Emlyn held his at his⏎
knee. Nita looked from one hand to the other, then shaped the sand halfway⏎
between them. "Now you've each got half of what you wanted,⏎
so nobody has to be wrong," Nita said. Dario wrote that down,⏎
and Emlyn laughed until he put his tools down. They built the dome over⏎
Nita's mound in rings, each ring leaning in further than the last.⏎
The arch of the doorway took longest, because every brick in it had to be⏎
hand-cut. Faridah cut 8 of them with a saw and a lot of patience,⏎
and 2 cracked. "That's the last full brick in the whole pile!⏎
I have counted them twice over," Dario called. They set it in place at 6 in⏎
the evening and stood back in the half-dark. The oven sat there like a⏎
small red-brown hill with a neat doorway in it. What a change from the⏎
flat, empty base that had been sitting there on Friday!⏎
"We built that out of a heap of bricks and one long argument,"⏎
Faridah said quietly. Sunday began with the dull part,⏎
which is true of most building work. Emlyn and Dario dug the sand out of⏎
the dome by hand, bucket after bucket. When the inside was hollow and⏎
clean, they swept it and laid three small fires. Each fire was a little⏎
bigger than the last, and each dried the bricks slowly.⏎
"Don't rush it now, because a rushed fire cracks good bricks,"⏎
Faridah warned Nita. A new oven is full of water; the water has to leave in⏎
its own time. By the middle of the afternoon the fires had done their job.⏎
Emlyn slid a thermometer across the well-swept floor and watched the number⏎
climb past 100. "It's going up faster than I expected, so keep the wood⏎
coming," Emlyn told Nita. They pushed the burning wood to one side and⏎
swept the floor with a damp cloth. At 7 that evening the floor read 380⏎
degrees, the number they had aimed at. Faridah slid the first pizza in on a⏎
board, turned it once and lifted it out. It came off the floor in 90⏎
seconds, with its edge puffed into a golden ring. "Ninety seconds and that⏎
isn't even the best one yet! Do the next one right away,"⏎
Nita said. They cooked 14 pizzas that evening, one after another,⏎
and the floor hardly cooled. Dario added the weekend up in his notebook:⏎
180 bricks, 11 hours of work and 14 pizzas. The dome, he wrote,⏎
was neither tall nor low, but exactly as high as Nita's heap.⏎
Emlyn said the oven's low shape was doing the work of holding the heat in.⏎
Faridah said the high shape was pulling the smoke, and Dario's note should⏎
say so. Both of them were partly right, which is the usual end of a⏎
good-natured argument. Next weekend they will build a proper door and a⏎
small rain-proof roof for it. Who would guess that a stack of bricks could⏎
turn into the best oven on Ash Lane?