PLACE 57 (P.3)

At four, the kitchen was still warm from the night before. On the table were the bags, packed since half past eleven, sorted by colour. Each individually filled, each hand-labelled, each unique. 75 Grams Tandoori Masala – £1.75

No two bags looked the same, because no two were created the same way.

Next to it, the cassette recorder. Tuesday's lecture was half-finished – she had lost track while filling the bags and decided to listen to the rest on the way home.

Her little son Philip was sleeping crosswise, one foot outside the blanket, as always. She put his foot back and paused for a moment. Next door, the au pair, who would get up with him in a few hours, was sleeping. Birgit quietly closed the door.

At that hour, the streets belonged to night buses and men with crates and market umbrellas. She carried her things herself: the huge sack over her shoulder, full of bags, a few baskets in the other hand, the wallpapering table under her arm, the wood already swollen from winter.

In front of the Market Office on Portobello Road, the others were already there, steam from their mouths, hands in their pockets. No permanent spot, just the registration list and the waiting. Anyone who didn't show up lost their spot for the day – and it was raffled among those waiting in line.

She was listed as The Pepper Shop.

That morning, the baker hadn't arrived.

It didn't take two minutes for everyone to know. The baker had one of the best spots on the street, for years, and the baker was never absent. He had fallen seriously ill and would be out for a long time.

The queue grew restless. People calculated who was ahead of them, how many names were still to come, and calculated their chances, which were usually slim.

Thirty people, all thinking the same thing.

The lottery began.

Then her name was called.

It took her a moment to grasp what that meant. She hadn't done anything to deserve it, she had just stood there – but the glances of the other stallholders behind her told her exactly what had just happened.

She took her slip and went to Pitch 57.

One of the best pitches on the entire Portobello Road.

She couldn't believe her luck.

To her left, Keith, to her right, Barry. Both fruit sellers, both long-term regulars with fixed pitches for years. At half past seven, the first price. At eight, the first counter-offer. And by nine, the two of them were shouting strawberry prices over her head, startling the pigeons.

And Birgit in the middle of it all.

Her stall was at a crossroads, and people streamed in from all four directions. Virtually no one passed that spot without seeing her stall.

They came for the two loudmouths, for the theatre, for the street itself: crowded, colourful, noisy, stall after stall as far as the eye could see, plus London's largest antique market. There was nothing else like it in London at the time. If you wanted to experience something on a Saturday, you went to Portobello Road.

And then they stood in front of a wallpapering table with small bags and asked what it was.

She explained. All morning she explained. What went into soup and what went with lamb. What her grandmother used for coughs. Exactly what was in her roasted potato spice. The difference between caraway and cumin – and that there were worlds between them. If someone asked how she knew all this, she said: from home. The Black Forest.

In her head, all day: her son. Philip. Whether he'd had a proper breakfast. Whether he'd finished his drawing. What she could bring him if it was a good day.

By midday, the first basket was empty. A woman bought three bags at once because her sister had a birthday next week. An old man took the roasted potato spice, smelled it and said nothing, but his face said something, and that was enough for her.

At half past three, the last bag of Tandoori went over the counter.

Completely sold out.

She didn't count at the stall. You just didn't do that. She folded up the table. Her back ached, her fingers smelled of paprika – and they would for a while, she thought on the way home.

Tomorrow, Sunday, was Camden. Monday, Wembley. Tuesday, university – someone else would be at the stall from six. Wednesdays, filling. Thursdays, Southall, dragging the sacks upstairs. Fridays, labelling until the writing became shaky. Somewhere in between, cooking, washing, putting a child to bed, catching up on half a lecture.

If you had asked her how she managed it all, she wouldn't quite have understood the question.

Later, at home, when Philip was long asleep, she sat at the kitchen table. New bags, new labels, the cassette recorder playing, she rewound until she found the point where she had lost track.

She hung his drawing, which he had left for her, on the refrigerator before turning off the light.

The alarm was set for half past four. Camden started early.

One Saturday turned into weeks, weeks into months, months into years. The regulars knew her by name now, and those who didn't know her name knew the table with the small bags.

She was registered as "Potpourri". So, selling scented mixtures.

Someone had given her the tip when she started, and she hadn't thought much about it. It worked. For years.

Until the morning her name wasn't called.

She stood in line as always, the sack over her shoulder. The names were called, one after another, first the good pitches, then the bad. Hers wasn't. Instead, they waved her to the window.

Her Portobello Road selling permit was for potpourri, they explained. For scented mixtures, not food. What she was selling was for cooking – and thus not covered by her existing permit.

She asked how to get the correct one. The man at the window made it clear that she should hardly hope for it. The waiting list for selling food, he said, on Portobello Road was measured not in months, but in decades.

She didn't even unpack that morning. What she had built up Saturday after Saturday was, for the time being, over in one morning.

Only Portobello Road was closed to her. London had other markets, each with its own jurisdictions and rules. So she visited them all.

At North End Road in Fulham, she got permission. A few weeks later, she was there with her sack, baskets, and wallpapering table.

Fulham didn't make it easy for her. The market was smaller, the money too, and at first, nobody was interested in a German.

During setup, every inch was fought over. They forgot her during the headcount. They pushed her table away. They built their own stalls so far forward that no one from the street could even see she was there.

It probably wasn't meant maliciously. It just wasn't important to anyone.

She came anyway. Not once a week, but almost every day. And with each day, she knew more people.

Then the women came.

They stood in front of her table, two or three of them, shopping bags on their arms, tried the mixtures, and shook their heads. With a sideways glance that made any true diva seem friendly and approachable.

"That's not right, darling."

And then they explained it to her. Patiently, day after day. Customers from Jamaica, Grenada, St. Lucia, Dominica, and Trinidad taught her what she had no idea about: pimento (allspice), sorrel, hibiscus, Scotch Bonnet, thyme, mace, ginger – and the recipes that had been passed down for generations. They didn't give up until it was right, and Birgit didn't give up until she could do it.

On those days in Fulham, the mixtures that are known today were created. The Jamaican Curry. The Caribbean Fish Spice. The Caribbean All-Rounder. And with them, the basic spices and herbs that gradually formed the main part of her assortment – for decades.

But it didn't stop there.

People asked for things she didn't have. Nutmeg with shell. Specific peppercorns, not just any, but precisely those. Chillies with names she had never heard of. One even grinned and asked for a hard wood that was supposedly supposed to help a man get going.

She said she didn't have it. She said she'd look.

It was no use. She was asked again the following week, and the week after that – until she gave in.

So she started searching. On every bus ride, on every path, in every shop she passed anyway – she kept her eyes open, asked around, traced goods back to the actual importer. And never just the ingredient, always the best version of it.

Thus, the woman with the roasted potato spice – grown up in a tiny village called Waldmössingen in the Black Forest – immersed herself in several worlds at once.

And she was addicted to it.

The deeper she delved into these worlds, the clearer it became: a folding table would no longer suffice.

She needed shelves. She needed space. She needed an address.

So she saved what she could.

It took years. A market day here, a market day there, a little something in the tin every week, and in bad weeks, something came out again. But she knew what for. And where.

On Portobello Road. Where she was no longer allowed to stand.

She went there anyway, at every opportunity. She couldn't walk down the street without stallholders and shop owners recognizing her and shouting something across the road. And from precisely these conversations, she knew which shop was doing well, which was holding its own, and which hadn't opened for a while.

And eventually, the old watchmaker gave up. "Watchmaker & Jeweller" was still above the door, but only junk lay in the display window, and a note hung on the pane. The facade was a brilliant yellow, the same yellow as some of her curry mixtures.

She couldn't have known that this yellow house would one day be the foundation of everything that came after.

Birgit stood in front of it a few times before she even asked. She calculated what the rent cost and what a month brought in, and recalculated it again, because the result was tight. Single mother, with a degree behind her and savings that had been scraped together for precisely this moment.

Then she signed.

Her own shop. On the street from which she had been thrown out.

Inside, it smelled of dust and time standing still. That would change very quickly.

The Pepper Shop became The Spice Shop. A yellow shop, right on the corner of a crossroads, in the middle of Portobello Road.

It couldn't have been better.

With the shop, she had fixed premises, her own business address, and a verifiable location where she stored, mixed, and packed. Her business no longer consisted of a woman, a sack, and a folding table. She could prove what she did and where she did it.

However, she was still not allowed to sell on Portobello Road. The shop and the market stall permit were two different things.

So she tackled that permit again.

The decades had made no sense to her from the beginning. She had since completed her degree and knew how to dissect a matter – and this one didn't stand up to a single inquiry. The decades were not a law. They were information given at a window by a man who wanted to go home.

Birgit had learned that most people pass on what they have heard at some point, without ever having checked it themselves. And that, above all, they want to get rid of the person standing in front of them – especially if that was a German woman back then.

She was hard to get rid of.

She asked her way through, from office to office, from department to department, until she found out who actually decided the matter. She brought documents, then the next, enclosed her shop's address. She contacted them again if no one responded, and if that didn't help, she appeared in person. She couldn't afford a no, so she didn't accept one.

It took time. But eventually, she had the permit in her hand.

She was allowed back to her market.

And she needed it too. The shop was not yet known to anyone, still needed to be renovated and furnished, and in the meantime primarily served as a workshop: storing, weighing, packing. The money still came from the market.

Her old spot between Keith and Barry was permanently taken again – the baker had returned.

That meant: back to queuing, with no guarantee. Back to the morning line, back to waiting to see if her name was called, back to hoping that someone wouldn't show up somewhere. And above all, hoping it would be a good spot.

Pitches were scarce and becoming scarcer, the queues a little longer each year. Once you were in, you didn't give it up.

But one pitch was almost always available. One week it would be occupied, the next it would be empty again. No one took it twice.

The one next to the fishmonger.

You just couldn't get rid of it. The location would have been good though: right at the beginning of the market, everyone had to pass it.

Only no one wanted to pass it.

Fish stench in the air, from six in the morning, when the ice started to melt. Guts and fish on the floor. Anyone who didn't explicitly want to buy fish would rush through here as quickly as possible.

Absolutely no one wanted this pitch.

Until Birgit one day decided not to listen to the others, and took it.

She was no longer the same after Fulham.

Instead of a pasting table and two small baskets, she now arrived with a cart laden with sacks: curry, tandoori, chili blends, Caribbean blends, roasted potato seasoning. Sometimes she walked back and forth between the stall and the shop two, three, four times a day, restocking until the cart couldn't hold another inch.

She had mastered the curries like everything else: in the corner shops, at the cash-and-carry stores, from anyone who was willing to explain something to her – and many were. She asked what belonged in them and what didn't, and learned what was good and what wasn't in the finished blends. No additives, no extenders, pure ingredients, just like it's made at home.

In the end, it was so close that people from the very countries these blends originated from would stop at her table, smell them, and say it smelled like home.

She just had a knack for it. Like one of those grandmothers who never measure anything: scoop, pour, smell, taste, add more, start over – until it was right. She had learned to season by feel from home, from her mother and grandmother.

All of this smelled. And she knew very well that she wouldn't lose to the fish.

They out-stank each other.

Two stalls next to each other, each at full force, and half the street waited to see who would give up first.

What happened next, neither of them expected.

The combination worked. Fish and spice, it harmonized, it didn't smell like a stench, it smelled like something good. Plus the street, the oil from the fish and chips shops, which seemed to be on every corner back then, the smoke, the greasy smell of London on a Saturday morning.

Together, it produced the smell of a kitchen. Of something freshly marinated in the pan. Of sea and spice. Of dinner.

The people who had held their breath on this corner for years suddenly stopped. Because the smell no longer drove them away, but held them.

They bought the fish from him and the spice to go with it from her.

The spot that no one wanted became one of the corners people went to Portobello Market for.

She did markets day in and day out, and someone else covered for her at the shop. Sometimes a friend, sometimes a neighbor, sometimes someone she knew from the market.

Philip was five, six years old by now and came along. He stood among the sacks, knew the people at the stalls left and right, knew who would give him something for free and who was better not touched. A true market child. He felt more at home there than most adults.

And around the two of them, people had gathered who stuck together. They looked out for each other's stalls, borrowed change, helped dismantle if it rained. That's how it worked there.

Birgit Erath was on a path that could no longer be stopped. A woman who had moved to London as a German, without a plan, without money, without language. And who now had her own shop, a pitch at one of the city's most famous markets, and a name that meant something.

She could tell her Caribbean and Indian customers things about their own food culture that some of them didn't even know. Not because she was smarter. But because she had taken the time to truly ask – and then to listen.

The boundaries others had set for her no longer applied. In her mind, they had never applied.

She only understood that much later.

To be continued.