My first conker of the year collected in sniffling September. The crunchy thuds of the spiky horse chestnut shells bombing the paths, splitting and spewing out seeds. I rub my thumb over veneered surface, the deep browns and burgundies lined with curving veins - a rough heart-shaped head potential of wood.
Every September I find my childhood seeded in my hands, the same hands - smaller and less lined - that collected conkers with such excitement when I was in Elementary School. The grief of the lost summer holiday allayed by the bounty tumbling down from the horse chestnut trees, the long green leaves already browning and crinkling. Under every tree in my hometown, every town across England, children gathered and giggled. We collected buckets of conkers and selected the fattest, roundest, hardest ones to be used in the greatest game of boyhood, the simply named Conkers. Preparing the conkers meant stabbing the heart of them with a threaded steel skewer - delicately so as not to split the embryonic wood. Then we’d thread the conkers on spare shoelaces and practise the swing: conker hooked behind two fingers like a longbow arrow. The vicious overarm swing to smack down on an opponent’s conker. The school playground then rang with the sounds of cracking conkers; the swish of string slicing the air; cries of success or sudden dismay as a conker shattered; muffled swearing when the conker clips knuckles and fingers instead of the target; gossip about winning conkers. How are they lasting so long? Were they pickled in vinegar? Grumbling from the teachers: this game should be banned. Conkers was a game of reverse survival: the smallest, unfit conkers were never used or destroyed but instead planted in pots or in the garden. They rarely grew or the saplings shuffled through months later, forgotten.. In my last year, my school finalised its adult threat: the game was banned. Health and safety. Too many sore hands. Conkers would have to be a black market weekend game. Thirty years later, the International Union for the Conservation Nature puts the horse chestnut tree on its Red List as it declines across Europe, taking conkers and childhood innocence with it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
Categories |