Cake Paid for London Slowly. Then the Plates Arrived.

The bake sale is the most inefficient machine ever built by parents. I have run four. The best one raised €212, of which €40 came from my husband buying back his own lemon drizzle so it would not be seen unsold.

So I salute the eleventh-year class at the José Estêvão school in Aveiro, which in the mid-1990s wanted to go to London and began, as Portuguese classes do, with cake. Every Friday a tray went into the staffroom. Every Friday it came back empty and sticky. The fund rose at the speed of a fund that depends on cake.

One of the bakers was also a teacher at the school, which meant she bought her own cakes back on Friday afternoons. I recognise that face. I have worn it.

Then a classmate had an idea. He had a family connection at a crockery factory, one of the big ones near Aveiro, where plates come off the line in thousands and a certain number come off slightly wrong: a bubble in the glaze, a handle at an angle, a blue line that has wandered off. Seconds. Could the factory donate some, and could the class sell them at school?

Some arrived in a van. The van was full to the roof: plates, cups, soup bowls, in boxes packed with newspaper. It was unloaded into the main atrium, which by lunchtime looked like a market.

And then the teachers came to buy.

This is the reversal I would pay to see. For one lunchtime the pupils had something the staff wanted, and the staff had to be nice about it. A teacher who had given you a poor mark in the first term was now haggling over a dinner service. Pupils who were struggling in economics learned the whole syllabus between the bell and the end of lunch.

Not everything sold. For a while there were boxes under the stairs and the school was lightly furnished by accident. But the fund jumped, and in June the class flew to London. For at least one of them it was the first flight. In London they walked for three days, and the thing one of them remembered best was a record shop so big it had a radio station behind glass on an upper floor, with a man in headphones talking to the whole city while teenagers from Aveiro watched through the window.

I have taken the lesson. For the spring fair I wrote to a Belgian chocolate factory asking whether it had any seconds.

It sent a voucher for ten per cent off and a leaflet about allergens. The lemon drizzle goes on sale on Friday. My husband has his wallet out.