“There’s nothing like cake to bring people together,” Deb reckons.
The Yorkshire Cakery and Tea Rooms popped up in a corner of Motueka’s New World carpark in the middle of winter. Run as a non-profit, owner Deb’s vision is to combat the social isolation that she knows is prevalent in every community.
Deb’s cakery will be going against the grain by opening its doors on the 25th because, although Christmas Day is a joyful day for many, “for some people it’s the unhappiest day of the year”.
“That’s when people get desperately lonely,” she says.
Deb has come a long way to open her cakery, and not just in terms of geography.
She tells of being born in North Yorkshire to parents who didn’t want her and, by 11, she was on the street doing whatever she could to survive.
“My early messages as a child were that I was useless.”
She clawed her way up from a terrible start in life, eventually studying to become a mental health nurse to “nurse the people I had been”.
“I went back to the streets of Manchester and nursed the homeless.”
She came to New Zealand in the early 2000s to help set up a psychiatric emergency team in Taupō, followed shortly after by the man who was to become her husband and the love of her life.
They were married in the Taupō rose gardens, and when he died five years ago from cancer, “I lost my life really,” she says with tears in her eyes.
His death almost took Deb, too, but after an enormous effort, she rallied. After shifting to Motueka and volunteering in the foodbank, she decided to undertake an enterprise that combined her love of baking with her determination to combat social isolation.
Finding a premises was difficult and expensive, and Deb works at the cakery through its opening hours of 8am to 8pm every single day of the week, with the assistance of three staff members. After hours, she bakes. It is exhausting and lonely work, and yet “it meets a need in me as well”.
Deb does not want any pity for her story – “I’m not f***ing Mother Theresa,” she says fiercely.
Her experiences have made her who she is – a person who has lived “one hell of a life”.
“Bring it on. I’m not frightened of anything. I can survive anything.”
She wants her business to be a haven to help others survive, too. But running it as a non-profit means that she walks a difficult line. The business needs to pay for itself, but alongside this is her vision to offer portions that are affordable for most, and large enough to share. She asks that if people can pay a little extra, they do so, to offset those who cannot pay at all.
She has debt, but she is determined to keep going, so that her regular pensioners can continue to come in to share a pot of tea and a piece of cake between them, she says, and so that the mother with the crying baby has a place to sit and nurse in the evening when most places have locked their doors for the day.
“I need to be able to do that for people, because I know what it’s like to have nothing.”
Deb is encouraging the community to support her enterprise by popping in to try her wares, which include filter coffee, toasted sandwiches, enormous scones and colossal pieces of cakes in a dozen different flavours. She would also love to receive donations to help spread cheer and ensure that no one gets left out or left alone on Christmas Day.
