Eleven O'Clock Sharp: Inside the politest scrum in Pyle — the Saturday cake queue

There is a moment, every Saturday morning on the Pyle event field, when the village holds its breath. It happens somewhere between the church bells and the first cup of tea, and it smells faintly of vanilla. At 10:45, the home bakers are still adjusting their tablecloth and squaring up the lemon drizzle. At 10:58, the first queuers arrive, pretending to look at the plant stall. By 11:02, the line has snaked past the bunting and somebody at the back is asking, rather anxiously, whether the coffee and walnut is a 'one each' situation.

Welcome to the 11am cake queue — quite possibly the most civilised stampede in the county.

The half-hour before the rush

Margaret Hollis has been baking for the Pyle market stall for eleven years, and she treats the run-up to eleven like a military operation. "You learn the rhythm," she tells me, carefully rotating a Victoria sponge so the jam shows. "First it's the dog walkers, then the grandparents with the pushchairs, then — bang — everyone else. You've got about four minutes of calm and then it's hands everywhere."

Margaret's tip for the bakers among us? Never put the best-looking bake at the front. "Front row goes first. Always. So the fruitcake — bless it — goes at the front, and the chocolate fudge cake hides behind the flapjacks until the smart shoppers find it."

A short guide to queue etiquette

The Pyle cake queue has rules. Nobody wrote them down, but everyone knows them:

1. The early bird counts. If you arrived at 10:50 and went for a wee, you may rejoin your neighbour. This is sacred law.
2. One conversation, one step forward. Chatting is encouraged; dawdling when the queue moves is not.
3. The pram is a person. Pushchairs hold places. Babies do not need cake, but they do get first pick of the free samples, and nobody argues.
4. No leaning past the bunting. The line ends where the bunting begins. This is the boundary, and it is respected.
5. Cash counts faster. The lady with exact change is a hero. The gentleman rummaging for his card reader is patient, forgiving, but internally weeping.

The two-cake dash

Every village has its legends, and ours is Pat Winters, 71, who has perfected what regulars call "the two-cake dash". The theory is simple: rather than queue once for one cake, Pat joins the queue at 10:55, buys her first cake (always the lemon drizzle), exits, walks briskly round the bunting, and rejoins at the back before the queue has fully formed for round two.

"It's not cheating," she says, entirely unbothered. "It's strategy. My grandson likes the flapjack and I'm not making two trips in the rain for anyone."

Pat's record: two cakes in four minutes and twelve seconds. She has a watch for it.

Which bake always goes first?

We polled the stallholders, and the results are conclusive. The coffee and walnut — every single week — is the first to sell out. The lemon drizzle is a close second, particularly when there's a dusting of icing sugar involved. The Victoria sponge performs solidly. The fruitcake, meanwhile, remains a Monday-through-Wednesday proposition, often discounted by Sunday afternoon and snapped up by those wise souls who know a good thing when they see it.

One baker, who asked not to be named, confessed: "I put a fruitcake out three weeks running. Same cake. Eventually Mrs Evans from the allotments bought it and said it was the best she'd had in years. I didn't have the heart to tell her."

Why we queue at all

There is, of course, a supermarket four minutes' drive from the field, with cakes stacked in plastic and available at all hours. Nobody in that queue cares. What you're buying for three pounds fifty is a slice of something made by a neighbour, in a kitchen you might have been in, wrapped in a bit of greaseproof paper and a paper bag that's already going soft in the drizzle.

By 11:20, the rush is over. The table is half-empty, Margaret is having a sit-down, and Pat is on her second lap. The bunting flutters, the tea tent next door breathes a sigh of relief, and somewhere a coffee and walnut sponge is being unwrapped on a kitchen table, already half gone.

Same time next Saturday, then. Bring exact change.