The Town Before the Town Wakes: A Winter Morning on Corby's Early Shift

There is a moment, somewhere around ten to five on a Tuesday in November, when Corby belongs to about forty people. The taxi rank is empty. The traffic lights on Corporation Street are changing for nobody. Somewhere behind the Cube a shutter is being rattled up, and the smell coming out of it is warm enough to make you forget your own name.

If you have never been out in the town at that hour, it is worth knowing what it feels like. Not spooky — Corby is never really spooky — just strangely polite. Everyone you pass nods. Everyone you pass is going somewhere with a purpose, and none of them are in a hurry, because at this time of the morning there is nothing to be in a hurry about.

This is the early shift: the people who get Corby ready for the other 60-odd thousand of us.

First light is a smell, not a colour

The bakery opens its back door at 4.40am and the street gets a preview. Marek has been in since half three. He came over from Poland in the nineties with a trade and a toolbox, and he reckons he has baked through something like seven thousand Corby mornings since.

"You don't think about the hour," he says, tipping a bowl of dough onto the bench with the kind of confidence that comes from never having done anything else. "You think about the temperature. Everything else follows."

By five there are trays cooling, a radio on low, and a young lad called Kian folding boxes with the speed of someone who has done it plenty and would rather be doing something else. He is seventeen and he works weekends and college days, and he says the best bit is the quiet: "Nobody rings you at five in the morning asking for anything."

That is the thing about the early shift. It is not lonely. It is just unbothered.

The market builds itself out of thin air

By half five, the market square is doing its nightly trick of becoming a market. Vans reverse in with that beep-beep-beep that echoes off the buildings. Tailgates drop. Crates land. Somebody is already complaining, cheerfully, about a pallet that has gone astray.

Paul has been on the fruit and veg since before most of his customers were born. He works in a coat that has seen things. His stall goes up in a sequence he could do in his sleep — and probably has — while a kettle boils on a camping stove behind him.

"People think it's glamorous, market trading," he says, deadpan. "It's not. But at quarter past six, when everything's laid out and the lights come on, for about ten minutes it's the nicest shop in the country."

He's not wrong. The light at that hour is low and orange from the street lamps, the sprouts are stacked like something out of a painting, and the first bus is just pulling in past the station, half full of people going the other way.

The 5.40 call

While the market is still being built, Sharon is already three visits into her round. She is a care worker, and her shift started with a cup of tea she did not finish.

Her first call is an 88-year-old in Lodge Park who likes the curtains opened before anything else happens. The second is a gentleman in Danesholme who will not be hurried and has Opinions about the news. The third is a lady who, according to Sharon, "has the best biscuits in Northamptonshire and doesn't let you forget it."

"It's the best part of the job, this bit," she says, pulling up outside a house with its porch light on. "You're the first person they see. If you get that right, their whole day goes right. You're not just doing medication and toast."

That is the part nobody sees when Corby wakes up at eight and finds everything already ticking along.

Two brushes and a bin bag

Down on the High Street in the Old Village, Terry is sweeping leaves with the patience of a man being paid by the hour and enjoying himself anyway. He has a route. He has opinions about the route. He has a particular dislike of a certain type of takeaway carton.

"I like it before the shops open," he says. "You can see the town properly. By nine o'clock there's people everywhere and it's all noise. Right now it's mine."

He is not being unfriendly. He offers directions to a bloke looking for the station and then tells him, unprompted, which café opens first and which one is worth the extra two minutes' walk. That is Corby in a sentence, really: on the way to somewhere, still happy to stop.

The handover

Somewhere around ten past seven the town changes hands. The café near the Cube puts out its chalkboard. Two buses idle at the stands. The first school-run cars appear, headlights on, windscreens half-scraped. The lads from the bakery are on their way home with hoods up, and the market is fully open, and the smell of fresh bread and diesel has become the smell of an ordinary Corby morning.

The people who made it happen are mostly invisible by then. Marek is in the back, Paul is weighing carrots, Sharon is on her seventh visit, Terry has moved on to the next street. Nobody thanks them, because nobody knows they were there.

But that is the deal, isn't it. Every town runs on a quiet choreography of people who get up when it is still black and cold, and do the same small things well, day after day, so that the rest of us can wander out at nine and find everything exactly where it should be.

Corby does that better than most. And now you know who to nod at.