He laughs again. ‘Just another way to maximise revenue. I was growing corn anyway, so I thought why not grow it with proper paths between it to create a maze and let kids run around in there. The corn’s tall enough by late July so I open it seven days a week in the summer holidays, then weekends only until the October half-term when it’s open all the time and the corn’s much taller, and of course the pumpkin patch is open too so people can come for a real family fun day out. At the end of the season, I cut the corn and sell it, and in the spring, I dig over the field and replant it in a different formation so it’s never the same maze twice if people come back year after year. One of my favourite jobs is designing the maze each year.’
‘Wow,’ I say, struggling for any other words. There really does seem to be nothing he can’t do. He’s creative and outdoorsy, and he seems to do so much to stay in business year-round.
I can sense his eyes on me and he must be able to tell how impressed I am, because he says, ‘There are a few around the UK, it’s nothing original before you tell me I’m a genius again.’
I poke another bit of pumpkin spice muffin into my mouth to avoid replying. I do think he must be a bit of a genius when it comes to farm stuff, but he obviously doesn’t like hearing it. ‘You’re really busy, aren’t you?’
‘Aye, but I like it that way. The seasonal growing business isn’t for everyone. It takes a lot of year-round maintenance, but you only get an income generally once a year. It can be a shock at first, especially when you’re used to the nine-to-five guaranteed monthly paycheque. Personally I’m lucky because my dad started Roscoe Farm long before I was born, so it’s had over forty years to build up a reputation. I also got lucky because I made the call to give a few fields over to pumpkins at exactly the time when Halloween started to get as popular here as it is in America, and British people started wanting to visit pumpkin patches like Americans always have. Sometimes in this business you make calls that are wrong, and sometimes you get it right. I’ve taken plenty of wrong turns along the way too.’ He glances over at me and his eyes flick quickly back to the road.
It makes me think about what I’ll have to do to stay in business. Noel obviously works hard to make sure things tick over throughout the year. What on earth am I going to do to make Christmas trees earn a living in any month outside of December? ‘What did Evergreene do to survive all year round?’
‘I hate to say it but he didn’t need to. Peppermint Branches was loved far and wide, it was extraordinarily profitable in the later years. He had a massive wholesale contract that was worth a fortune and turned over a huge amount of stock each year, and he spent the non-Christmas season looking after the trees.’ He taps his nose and puts on the deep, strongly accented voice of an elderly Scottish gent. ‘The more you put into a crop, the more you get out of it, my boy.’
I smile at the impression but it doesn’t ease the knot in my stomach. The wholesale contract is obviously long gone and my current crop of trees wouldn’t have a hope in hell of getting anything similar. ‘What about growing something else? You grow and sell other things outside of pumpkin season, right?’ He nods but my mind’s already whirring. ‘Strawberries? They could grow in the shade between the trees, and they’d be long gone by the time the farm opens.’
‘Depends how much time you’ve got to waste planting and caring for a crop that aren’t Christmas trees, and how many you’d have to grow to make a profit.’
‘If there were enough, I could open the farm as a pick-your-own in the summer too … Oh! Opening the farm in the summer!’ I nearly spill my coffee as I sit up straighter and the idea bubbles into life. ‘Christmas in July is a thing, right? I could do something festive at that time of year. Meet Santa in the summer for a riverside picnic or something?’
‘Drown Santa? Send a few Santas white-water-rafting down the river and have a race to see which one makes it back by December?’
‘I was thinking more along the lines of meet Santa by the river for an afternoon tea of candycane cupcakes and gingerbread houses and get a mid-year update on his preparations for Christmas? There could be festive-themed games and presents, and a theme of keeping the spirit of Christmas alive all year through, like Scrooge says at the end of A Christmas Carol when the last ghost leaves.’
I expect him to laugh at me, but when I pluck up the courage to look at him, he’s still watching the road but his lips are tucked together and both his eyebrows are raised. He doesn’t look completely unimpressed.
It gives me the courage to continue. ‘There could be scavenger hunts to find presents hidden under the trees and elf hide-and-seek. Don’t you think it would be nice for kids who love Christmas to get to celebrate it in the middle of the year too?’
‘You’re planning on sticking around that long then?’
I flinch at the harshness of his words but he continues before I have a chance to snap something back at him.
‘In my experience, when things get tough, people usually don’t.’
‘I didn’t come here thinking this was going to be easy.’ I don’t mention that I expected it to be marginally easier than it is, but that’s beside the point. ‘I wanted something to completely change my life. Something my parents would’ve been proud of. I’m not going to give up at the first hurdle. That would defeat the object.’
‘Well, summer Santa and elves and scavenger hunts sound great. You’re not going to make Santa wear his summer uniform of tiny red Speedos with a white furry trim, are you? I don’t think my eyeballs could take all the bleach they’d need after that sight.’
The thought makes me giggle even though I’m annoyed at him for thinking that I’m going to leave or that I’d dress Santa in swimming trunks that don’t look good on anyone, especially a man of Santa’s traditional age, body type, and hirsuteness.
‘Maybe we can team up and do some co-advertising next year, your festive summer picnics and my corn maze. They’re close enough that people can easily visit both, and we could think of a way to incorporate each other’s produce and extend both the Christmas and Halloween season.’
‘I’d like that.’ I accept it for the concession it is. He must’ve been hurt by someone leaving, and he hasn’t got a high opinion of anyone from a city, and he obviously doesn’t like me enough to tell me about it, so there’s no point in pushing it.
I finish my muffin and slurp the last of my coffee, then pull my hair over my shoulder and try to finger-comb it into resembling something other than a rats’ nest. I push my fingers through the top and flatten it down, trying to work it into a plait without a mirror.
I can feel him watching me and it makes me blush even though there’s no reason to. When I tie the end with the spare band that’s always on my wrist and flip it back over my shoulder, I feel fluttery for no reason at all.
‘Welcome to the lively, buzzing centre of Elffield.’ Noel slows down when we eventually reach a more built-up area. I’ve lost track of how long we’ve been driving. The distance between things seems so wide here, and everything seems so far away from everything else.
I realise he’s being sarcastic as we turn down a narrow street with houses on both sides. Among them is a post office on one side and a convenience shop on the other. That’s it.
‘We’re a village that relies solely on our market, but there’s a good community here. We support our own.’ He lifts a hand and points directly ahead of us. ‘That’s the market.’
I look towards a large set of pillars ahead of us. They look like columns from ancient Rome, holding up the sharp angled roof of a covered market building. The lights are on inside, making it look warm and inviting, and the area in front of the entrance is paved with slabs in shades of grey. Noel drives around it and takes a narrow side street that winds around the back of the huge building and eventually opens up to another set of pillars wide enough to let vehicles through. ‘Trade entrance,’ he says. ‘If you sell trees here, get customers to drive round this way to load their car, it’s much easier
than dragging an eight-foot spruce between all the stallholders.’
I nod, wishing I’d brought a notebook and pen to jot all his tips down. I’m never going to remember all of this. Also, just how heavy are eight-foot trees?
I’ve never seen anyone drive as slowly as Noel creeps through the wide market lane, already buzzing with people setting up their stalls. There are people on stepladders stringing up bunting and fairy lights across their awning, people carrying crates of goods to and from their cars, and people merrily chatting away with cups of coffee in hand.
Noel stops at a covered stall, a series of long trestle tables in a backwards L-shape with a wide space in front of it, bright orange awning emblazoned with a big Roscoe Farm logo and ‘Pumpkins’ in swirly calligraphy doodled underneath. I stand on the flagstone floor and have a look around while Noel shouts good morning to other traders in our lane and greets them with a wave and a smile.
It’s a good spot. One lane back from the front entrance, just enough for a bit of protection from the elements, easily visible from both side entrances, and on the corner before the market opens out into a much larger space with many more stalls. In the chaos of set-up time, I catch sight of a Scottish souvenir stall, a used bookseller, a baker whose scent of freshly baked bread has wafted through the building, a handmade jewellery stall, and a cheese seller offering chutneys and crackers along with a selection of locally made cheeses.
Noel pulls the cover off the bed of his truck, uncovering wooden crates which are so packed with pumpkins that they’re spilling over the edges. ‘Do you think you brought enough?’
‘It would be a good day if I didn’t,’ he says, completely missing the sarcasm.
‘Can I help?’
He grunts as he sets the first crate down in front of the back table. ‘Pick the best ones and display them along the back of the stall. The side area is for baked goods.’
I crouch down beside the crate and wonder what on earth constitutes a ‘best’ pumpkin. He unloads another two crates and puts them next to the one I’m still poring over. He stops on the way to get a fourth one and leans down beside me, plucking one I’d already rejected from the crate with one hand and plonking it onto the table with a thud. ‘That’s a good one. It’s not a nuclear chemistry exam, just grab anything. All defects make interesting features to a pumpkin carver’s eye. People like the dodgiest-looking ones.’
He hefts yet another crate from the truck and dumps it on the ground next to the others. I pick a random pumpkin from the second crate, examine it for anything that could be defined as an interesting feature, and plonk it quickly onto the table to show him that I’m not completely useless.
The fourth crate of pumpkins seems to be the last, because he moves onto another crate, and this one smells so good that I can tell what it is before he’s even pulled the cover back. It’s full of pumpkin spice muffins packed in boxes of two, individually boxed pumpkin cupcakes with buttercream swirls, wrapped sugar cookies in the shape of pumpkins and iced with orange icing, bags of roasted, salted pumpkin seeds, and jars of pumpkin ginger jam and pumpkin orange marmalade with handwritten labels and gingham tops.
‘Your mum made all these?’ I ask, impressed with the many uses Glenna can find for a pumpkin and how delicious everything looks. I had no idea pumpkins were so versatile.
‘Yep.’ He retrieves a large sandwich board from the truck, sets it down in front of the stall and crouches in front of it. He pulls a pack of chalk from his pocket and starts sketching on it. When he stands up, it’s got orange pumpkins and green vines decorating the edges and in the middle, in neater handwriting than I’ve got on lined paper in biro, is written ‘Pumpkins: 75p each or two for £1’ in swirly, fancy white writing, complete with green leaves sprawling from each letter. It’s a work of art and it’s only taken him three minutes.
‘Two for a pound?’ I say in surprise. ‘They’re, like, three quid each in the supermarket.’
‘Exactly. If a busy mum with a family of four goes to the supermarket, that’s quite an outlay – she’s probably only going to buy one pumpkin for all the family – but if she comes past here, at fifty pence each, it’s easier and cheaper to say, ‘oh, you can all have one’. I sell more pumpkins, her family gets to enjoy themselves for minimal cost. It might seem counterproductive to someone who’s used to paying over the odds for everything in the city, but here we sell cheap and we sell more.’ He lays out a handful of Roscoe Farm branded carving kits beside the pumpkins. ‘Remember that.’
I clearly have a lot to learn about the pricing of Christmas trees.
‘Oh, look, there’s Fergus and Iain now.’ His hands touch my back and push me across the aisle to where a car has pulled up next to a little wooden stall covered by red and white striped awning. ‘This is Leah. She’s just bought Peppermint Branches,’ he shouts across as a white-haired man leaning on a walking stick gets out of the passenger door and a man in his fifties emerges from the driver’s side.
‘Could you shout a bit louder?’ I turn back to hiss at him. ‘I think there’s a deaf chap in Cornwall who didn’t quite hear.’
‘I was telling her you used to work there, Iain …’ he calls over as I shake both their hands.
I don’t know how it happens, but I start telling Iain about the state of the trees and the overgrown hedges while Fergus hands me a tray of neatly wrapped gingerbread … llamas. Llamas in biscuit form. I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m not mistaken as he directs me to put it on the stall. While I help them unload the car, Iain talks about cutting trees and keeping the weeds down, and the heady scent of all the gingerbread makes me take leave of my senses, because before I know it, I’ve offered him a job and he’s starting on Monday.
‘There you go, that wasn’t so difficult,’ Noel says when I go back across to the pumpkin stall. ‘You’ve got your first employee. And if you come and talk to my seasonal workers this afternoon, you’ll easily have two more.’
‘And suddenly I’m an employer.’ I feel a bit shellshocked. ‘I wasn’t expecting this. I intended to plod along by myself, learning as I went. I didn’t expect to be employing three people. That’s quite a responsibility. Don’t I need some kind of insurance? What if I can’t pay them?’
‘You need employers’ liability insurance, and public liability when you open to the public. It’s easy enough to sort out. And whatever you’ve got left of the budget has to go on the workers’ salaries. It’s going to be a vicious circle otherwise. Without help, you won’t be able to get the trees anywhere near sellable or the farm anywhere close to opening standard, so you won’t sell any trees and you’ll be in an even worse position next year. This is great. You’re off to the right start.’
I wish I felt as confident as he sounds. Instead, I feel overwhelmed again. I glance back towards Iain, who is now giving his father an animated demonstration of shearing Christmas trees. He was so happy about the prospect of working there again, and Noel has made it sound so magical and loved by so many people … I can feel the pressure building on me. What if I let everyone down?
‘You should go and introduce yourself to everyone, start getting the word out that Peppermint Branches is opening again.’
‘Talk to strangers? Just, like, randomly go up to people and tell them I bought the tree farm?’ My heart jumps into my throat and my palms start sweating. ‘You are joking, right? People don’t actually do that, do they?’
He laughs, not realising that I’m not joking. ‘Everyone’s very friendly. And Peppermint Branches was really popular around here, people will be overjoyed to hear it’s opening again.’
‘I can’t just go up to people I don’t know and tell them I’m opening a tree farm!’
His eyes cast over me with a contemplative look. ‘You had no trouble giving me a piece of your mind the other day and I was a stranger. Where’s this lack of confidence come from?’
‘Yeah, but you’re infuriating. There’s a difference.’ I don’t give him an answer to the
confidence question. If I had time to think about it, I’d tell him about Steve taking advantage of my vulnerability after my parents’ deaths, and that discovering I was one of a handful of women he was sleeping with was enough to make me want to hide away and never speak to another human again.
Except I wouldn’t, because that would be oversharing, obviously.
‘Elffield survives on its community. If you’re going to live here, you’re a part of that. Just go and say hello, tell them you’ve moved into Peppermint Branches and the conversation will flow from there, I guaran—’
‘Don’t do the guarantree thing again, it wasn’t funny the first time.’
‘I know. That’s why you laughed.’ He gives me a wink. ‘And I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to tell you to go out on a limb.’
Despite my best efforts, it makes me laugh and eases some of the nerves as he shoos me away.
The market is quiet at this time of day. Most people have finished setting up their stalls and are standing next to them, chatting to other stallholders over cups of takeaway coffee from the hot drinks counter. It’s almost light outside and there’s a cold breeze blowing in through the open front. As I pass Fergus and Iain, Fergus calls across to the man selling hats and scarves at the next stall and tells him that I’ve bought Peppermint Branches, and it makes it surprisingly easy to start a conversation. As the hat and scarf seller asks me where I’m from and what I was doing before, the lady selling Scottish souvenirs catches wind of the conversation and comes over to join in, and then she drags me across to her stall, gives me a fittingly pine-scented air freshener of the Scottish flag, and introduces me to the woman who sells handmade candles on the stall behind her. Before I know it, I’ve been given a sampler candle, a loaf of bread from the breadmaker, the souvenir woman has weaved a string of tiny paper flags into my plait, the bookseller has gone through his stall and handed me a book about Britain’s native trees, and if anyone pays me another compliment on my hair, which I haven’t even brushed this morning, I might burst into tears.
Snowflakes at the Little Christmas Tree Farm Page 13