Spring on the Little Cornish Isles: Flower Farm

by Phillipa Ashley

  Relief flooded through Jess, combined with surprise at being taken in. Yes, there was definitely a steely side to Gaby Carter.

  ‘Oh, you’ll get that … after work, anyway. We’ll keep you occupied during the day.’ Very occupied, thought Jess. Late summer through to Christmas and beyond to Easter was by far the busiest time of the year at the flower farm. While frosts and festive mayhem took hold on the mainland, the farm’s packing shed would be also manic as they picked, sorted and sent millions of narcissi to bring golden light into the dark nights of people throughout the rest of Britain.

  The buggy rattled over the cobbles onto the quayside, which was packed with tourists piling onto the ‘tripper’ boats that were moored two and three abreast. As usual, there was organised chaos as visitors clambered down the steps, asking if they’d got the right boat and climbing over vessels to get to the one they needed.

  At the end of the stone quay, more passengers collected luggage and kayaks from the Islander ferry that made its daily round trip from Penzance between March and November. It dwarfed the open tripper boats, jet boats and yachts bobbing about in the harbour on the high tide.

  ‘We’re down here,’ said Jess, heading for the steps that led to the pontoons where the Godrevys’ motorboat, Kerensa, was moored alongside the floating rafts.

  ‘I’ll park the buggy while you get aboard. I’ll bring the bags,’ said Adam.

  Jess took Gaby down the steps and along the pontoon. Gaby didn’t seem very happy with the wobbly surface.

  ‘You’ll soon get used to all of this,’ Jess said reassuringly. ‘We live and breathe boats here.’

  Gaby nodded, but she didn’t seem too sure at all. ‘Kerensa. That’s a lovely name.’

  ‘It’s Cornish for love,’ said Jess, jumping deftly onto the boat.

  She held out a hand to help Gaby, who climbed aboard more gingerly.

  Adam was soon back, handing over Gaby’s case and some shopping from the Co-op. He untied the boat and Jess manoeuvred it away from the pontoon and between the smaller craft.

  As they skirted the hull of the Islander, Gaby stared up at its crew who were unloading freight and getting it ready for its return journey to Penzance. Even as they passed it, she gazed at the ferry as if she was saying goodbye to an old friend.

  ‘Does the ferry come every day?’ she asked.

  ‘Every day throughout the summer except Sundays,’ said Jess. ‘But when winter comes, we only get the supply boat a few times a week.’

  ‘If we’re lucky,’ said Adam cheerfully.

  Gaby gave a weak smile. ‘Oh.’

  The little boat puttered out of the harbour and into the lagoon that separated St Saviour’s and the other isles from St Mary’s. Jess had been brought up around boats since before she could walk but she still had to concentrate on keeping Kerensa within the channel markers. The water was so shallow between the isles, there were even rare occasions when you could wade between St Mary’s and St Saviour’s, though Gaby was unlikely to be on Scilly long enough to witness one of those. She sat in the stern, her strawberry blonde ponytail streaming behind her in the breeze and her dark glasses hiding her eyes. Jess noted the way she gripped the edge of the seat with one hand, and kept the other firmly on the rail of the boat.

  Jess had a sneaking admiration for her or anyone who was willing to give up a comfortable life in a lively city like Cambridge for a remote place like Scilly. But she wasn’t convinced that a desire for ‘a quiet life’ and a love of flowers was the whole reason for Gaby’s decision to abandon Cambridge and head all the way out here.

  Twenty minutes later, Adam threw the rope around the bollard on the small quay at St Saviour’s and secured it to the cleat. Jess helped Gaby off the boat and up the steps with her bag. The quay rose out of a small rocky outcrop at the bottom of the island road. Deeper water lapped one side, while the other looked out over creamy sand, currently covered in a foot or so of translucent peppermint sea.

  Gaby looked around her and shook her head in wonder. ‘Wow. It’s so beautiful. I’ve seen pictures on your website of course, but I hadn’t imagined the real thing would be anything like this. It’s still England, but as if England were set in the Greek islands.’

  Jess followed Gaby’s gaze towards the long sweep of white sand that ran half the length of the island and the myriad rocky skerries dozing in the lagoon between the main isles. St Saviour’s, like Gull Island and its neighbour Petroc, were all clustered around the shallow ‘pool’ with only lonely St Piran’s lying to the west across a deep-water channel.

  ‘It is lovely on a day like this,’ she said, quietly proud of her home.

  ‘Not so lovely when you’re trying to get the mail delivered in a howling gale or when the fog drops down,’ said Adam.

  Gaby turned to him in surprise. ‘Oh, you’re a postman, then?’

  ‘Yes. I deliver the smaller islands’ mail.’

  ‘You must have the best post round in Britain.’

  He grinned. ‘You can say that again.’

  Jess squeezed his hand behind Gaby’s back. ‘Better get going. Will’s going to be … um … eager to welcome you too.’ She mentally crossed her fingers that her brother was in. ‘We can walk to the farm from here.’

  Despite Gaby’s protests, Adam carried her case and the shopping. Jess had given up trying to stop him long ago. She took the chance to chat to Gaby as they trudged up the slope from the quay and onto the road that ran along the spine of the island.

  With Adam a few feet ahead, Jess slowed her pace to allow Gaby to take in her surroundings. She stared out over the Atlantic and spoke softly, almost reverently.

  ‘I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely seas and the sky

  And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.’

  Jess waited, a little taken aback.

  Gaby turned towards her with a smile. ‘Sorry, couldn’t resist. That’s from Sea Fever by John Masefield. Do you know it?’

  ‘I think I might have heard of it but I’m not that great on poetry to be honest,’ Jess replied, quietly amused and also, if she was honest, thinking the lines were very apt for the way she often felt about the spectacular spot she lived in: drawn to the sea.

  ‘The view is incredible,’ said Gaby, echoing Jess’s own thoughts.

  ‘Yes, you practically see most of Scilly from up here and Land’s End too on a clear day. Look, there it is.’ Jess pointed out a shadowy but unmistakable hunk of land on the horizon to the east.

  ‘Wow,’ said Gaby. ‘Exactly how far is it?’

  ‘Twenty-eight miles, though it may as well be Canada on some days. The fog can roll in and you can’t see the sea at all, let alone the mainland,’ said Adam, waiting for them.

  ‘Wow. That must feel like being cast adrift in the middle of the ocean.’

  Jess felt a quiet sense of pride in Gaby’s awe. ‘It can be but on days like this, it’s gorgeous. And actually, we’re here.’

  Chapter 2

  ‘Wow.’

  Jess hid a smile as Gaby gazed at the five-bar gate set in a high hedgerow. A wooden sign was fixed on the front of the bars.

  St Saviour’s Flower Farm

  A, J & W Godrevy

  The sign had been replaced once already since Jess’s father, Roger, had left the family home to live with a younger woman, fifteen years previously. Their mother, Anna, had insisted on having his initials erased and a fresh plaque put up showing her children as joint owners. However, the ‘new’ one needed repainting again, as the names were fading under the onslaught of wind, rain and salt. Olive lichen had started to crawl slowly over the ragged edges of the wood, but it was so familiar that Jess didn’t even see it these days. It was only because Gaby paused to examine it that Jess noticed it at all. One more job to add to the maintenance list, though being non-urgent, it probably wouldn’t get done at all until it dropped off.

  ‘Come on,’ said Jess, smiling inwardly at the impact her home and business was having on
Gaby.

  She pushed open the gate, letting Gaby go ahead of her. Adam closed it behind them and followed them both in while Gaby scanned the house, outbuildings and fields with sharp-eyed wonder.

  The rambling farmhouse where Jess and Will lived with Anna was set back from the road behind a large concrete yard. Jess and Will had no choice but to take over the running of the place while they were still barely out of their teens. Their father had left the farm’s finances in a perilous state, but gradually Jess and Will had pulled it back from the brink and developed it into the thriving business that Gaby was now taking in.

  ‘The high hedges are there to protect the flowers, aren’t they?’ she asked Jess.

  ‘Yes, they spare the crops from the worst of the winds we get in the winter. The office is over here. You never know, Will might even be in there.’

  ‘While you introduce Gaby to Will, do you mind if I check out the Athene?’ said Adam. ‘I want to see how the renovation’s coming along. I reckon it’ll be ready for some trials after Christmas if we all pull our fingers out.’

  Jess rolled her eyes. ‘That’s optimistic. It still needs a lot of work.’

  He smiled. ‘We’ll get there. I won’t be long.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jess, amused at his enthusiasm for a half-built boat.

  After Adam had left, she led the way to the office, chatting to Gaby along the way. ‘The Athene’s a vintage rowing boat – though we actually call them gigs. Will and Adam are hoping to restore it to its full glory,’ she explained.

  ‘Sounds exciting. Do you row?’

  ‘I’ve no choice,’ Jess laughed. ‘Most of us do. I’m in the St Saviour’s Women’s crew, but we don’t take it as seriously as some. What about you?’ She eyed the diminutive figure of Gaby.

  ‘No way. I did try out for cox once and crashed the Third Eight into the bank. Did a lot of damage. They haven’t asked me back again.’ She grinned. ‘Worked a treat.’

  Jess laughed.

  As she guided Gaby towards the office, Jess’s thoughts were on her new employee but also partly on the sign at the gate. Even fifteen years on, Jess had mixed feelings about their father: she still loved him, as did Will, even though they hadn’t seen him for several years and their brief phone conversations with him were usually tense.

  She and Will were twins, and having grown up so closely, they had a strong bond even if they didn’t always see eye to eye about the farm. Jess was the steady hand on the tiller: calm, practical and ready to pour oil on troubled waters. She oversaw the business side of things, dealing with suppliers and the bigger customer accounts that required tact and diplomacy.

  Will worked every bit as hard as her but his forte lay with the horticultural side of the business. He knew everything about coaxing the different varieties into bloom at exactly the right moment. Storms, fog and even the occasional frost didn’t faze him, but he could be impatient and prone to gloomy moods.

  One thing they both agreed on, and would have sealed in blood, was their loyalty to their mother and the farm. They’d sided firmly with Anna as the innocent party, but that hadn’t stopped them missing their dad in private. They’d felt hurt at being abandoned and angry at having to set aside any of their other hopes and dreams to stay and run the farm. Jess had settled down more quickly to her life as boss, but Will had wanted to go to university and for a long time resented being thrown in at the deep end.

  However, this was all now in the past and everyone had moved on: they’d had no choice or the farm would have gone under faster than the Titanic.

  One sign of the twins’ success after fifteen years of hard work was that the business had long outgrown the original small office attached to the farmhouse. Jess opened the door of the new admin block, a large timber-clad building off the centre of the yard. The room was filled with workstations, each with phones and computer screens. The silence hit Jess as she showed Gaby inside.

  ‘This is our admin area and sales office,’ she said to Gaby. ‘It seems funny to see it empty like this. Normally it’s mayhem in here.’

  Gaby walked into the middle of the room and took in the blank screens.

  ‘We process the bulk orders from supermarkets and the wholesale market here and take orders from individual customers,’ Jess explained. ‘I keep an eye on the admin and sales, though Lawrence, our general manager, is in charge of operations. Will’s more likely to be found out in the fields or the packing shed. Or the gig sheds,’ she added after a pause. ‘He’s also a stalwart of the St Saviour’s rowing club, but he won’t be there today. He’ll be around here somewhere. He knows you were coming and he’s looking forward to meeting you,’ she added, hoping that Will would turn out to be more enthusiastic about their new recruit than she feared.

  Jess moved on from the office to the packing sheds, which would also normally have been buzzing with workers.

  ‘This is where we grade and arrange the flowers into bunches or ship them out in bulk to wholesalers. You’ll be alternating between here and the fields, depending on demand. We all muck in together wherever we’re needed.’

  Gaby’s gaze swept the building, which was open to the rafters. Jess saw her eyes flick from the carpet-topped arranging tables to the floor, where rejected narcissi lay scattered on the concrete. Jess knew that if it wasn’t a bank holiday, the place would have Radio Scilly blaring out and be full of people hurrying into the chiller with huge plastic boxes of flowers from the fields or to the quay, or carrying cardboard boxes and tissue paper to and from the arranging tables. It was eerily quiet – and there was still no sign of her brother.

  ‘Will’s probably outside,’ she said with a tight smile that hid her growing disquiet over Will’s absence. They walked back out into the sunlight. Jess wondered whether to try his phone, not that he’d always answer. ‘Let’s try the bottom field. This way, across the yard.’

  The goats spared them a fleeting glance as she and Gaby walked past their pen, before going back to their dinner. Jess also pointed out the beef cattle who were grazing on the heathland next to the farm. She saw Gaby taking in the small rectangular fields where the flowers were grown. Each one was protected from the wind by thick hedges and the green shoots of the first narcissi were just showing, even though it wasn’t quite September.

  ‘How long have the Godrevys been farming here?’ Gaby asked as Jess pulled her phone from her pocket.

  Adam had sent her a text: ‘Any sign of the Man yet? Any chance of getting away If You Know What I Mean? Got a surprise for you …’

  Jess felt her cheeks heat up and pushed her phone back into her jeans.

  ‘Three generations now,’ she replied, trying to refocus and not think too much about the shivery feeling that Adam’s text had given her. ‘Apparently when my grandparents started the farm in the 1950s, there were ninety flower farms on St Mary’s alone. Now that people buy so many imported flowers from abroad, there are only a handful.’

  ‘St Saviour’s survived though,’ said Gaby. ‘And this set-up is very impressive.’

  ‘Thanks. We try to have as many varieties and markets as we can. We also sometimes work with other farms at busy periods. They supply us with flowers to supplement what we can’t grow, or sell ours when we have a glut. It’s a fine art, trying not to have too few or too many flowers – that’s the tricky part. Too much warmth or too much cold can spell disaster or not being able to get the flowers to market. It’s taken years to get the balance right and we’re still experimenting and keeping our fingers crossed.’

  Jess looked around her at the green shoots starting to appear in the brown earth of the outdoor fields, ready for the new season’s harvest. Hard to believe that the first tight buds of the earliest types would be ready to pick in a few weeks’ time. These days, sixteen types of narcissi were produced through autumn and winter, far more than in her father’s time. It had been Jess’s idea to expand their range shortly after he’d left.

  Gaby crouched low to touch one of the emerging sho
ots. She had a dreamy look on her face. ‘Do you think the legend is true?’ she asked.

  ‘Which legend would that be? Scilly has quite a few,’ said Jess, amused.

  ‘The one about how the narcissi first came to Scilly on a Dutch ship.’

  ‘Ah. The onion story.’ Jess had heard the tale many times. Supposedly, the first bulbs were given to the Governor of Scilly’s wife by the captain of a Dutch merchant ship. She mistook them for onions but threw them out of the window of her castle because they tasted so horrible. The bulbs bloomed in the moat and that’s how the islands’ flower industry began. ‘It’s a great story and there may be some truth in it, but we’re not so concerned with the past,’ said Jess wryly. ‘It’s the present and the future we want to secure, which is why you’ll find plenty to keep you occupied,’ she added with a smile.

  Gaby nodded enthusiastically. ‘Oh. Absolutely. I came here to help you do just that.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. I’m sure my brother will be too. Hold on. There’s Len,’ said Jess, spotting a middle-aged man striding over the yard through the open door. ‘He might have seen Will. Do you want to wait here?’

  Leaving Gaby looking at the farm set-up, Jess caught up with Len as he headed into the packing sheds.

  ‘Hi Len. Have you seen Will? I want him to meet Gaby, our new worker.’

  Len Scarrock’s forehead, already as lined as a contour map of the Himalayas, wrinkled even further. ‘That kid over there?’

  ‘She’s not a kid. She’s twenty-seven and she’s had plenty of experience.’

  Len snorted. ‘As what? A pixie in fairyland?’

  Jess clung onto her patience. Len had worked as field supervisor with the Godrevys for years and what he didn’t know about flower farming on the isles wasn’t worth knowing. But he was as spiky as a whole field of thistles. ‘Have you seen Will?’ she repeated.

  He sucked on his teeth and shrugged. ‘Might be in the fields. It’s been a good hour since I saw him.’

  Jess’s heart sank; she was beginning to think Will really had forgotten Gaby was coming and gone to visit his rowing mates. ‘OK. Thanks.’