Smayle’s concrete grey face was a Niagara of perspiration. War was ongoing with the slugs and snails. He had three large dustbins on his plot, where he mulched food waste into fertiliser. Little burrowing creatures got in there sometimes, and partook of dinner. Birds, butterflies, and he didn’t know what, slipped under the netting around some of his raised beds. But none of them had inflicted damage on his most prized growth: his pumpkins. His wheelbarrow bulged with them, fat, comfortable, like the heads of yellow turbaned oriental aristocracy.
None of the other allotment holders grew them in such volume Once fully grown these mighty plumped fellows were allowed access to his house, just yards from the allotment gate. Sometimes there were so many, he believed they could practically march down there in military columns.
The house often had pumpkins about it as the Romans had statues. Chairs sagged with their weight, skirting boards were lined with them like passengers queuing for a ship. ‘That small allotment plot of yours seems to yield half the world’s pumpkin crop,’ Mrs Smayle said. Her first effort to deal with the glut had been to turn it into pumpkin soup, and they’d had to buy a second freezer to store it all. Months on, both freezers were still crammed with unused and unwanted pumpkin soup. It was as thick as mud, and despite the belated addition of onions and spices, it never tasted of anything.
Smayle wondered if he could sell the soup to the builders about the estate. It might, for instance, be a cheaper form of exterior cladding than what they’d recently put on the tower blocks just up from them: ‘Mightn’t its thermal qualities render the flats a lot warmer?’ Mrs Smayle said such an idea was nonsense, but she did give brain time to her husband’s suggestion that it could become a form of alternative, green (or rather orange) energy, semi-renewable. ‘Why not run the Hinkley Point nuclear reactor, just across the River Severn, on pumpkin soup? All that’s needed are some scientists to analyse the stuff for its kinetic potential. Plus, it’ll free up half the freezer.’
While he studied the internet in search of creative-minded physicists, Mrs Smayle had taken to making pumpkin cake loaves. Remarkably, they were delicious! ‘Finally, we may have a use for all these rotund fellows,’ she said. But she did wish there weren’t so many of them congregating in the house. ‘There are enough of them to make a large choir, Smayley. But despite me singing to them they resist my musical endeavours. Perhaps they are tone deaf?’
‘Bingo! An American physicist has emailed me. She wants a sample for analysis!’ he said.
‘Mind you, I believe some of them stood to attention when Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau was played on the radio.’
‘I’ll put that in my reply. That’ll pique her. Better say though it’s The Star Spangled Banner. My pumpkins are going to save the planet, Mrs S!’
