This Side of the Pond

My mother was a champion in her schooldays at the only sport that mattered. She could wield a conker like no other, earning the respect of many a peer, and it was decades before anyone figured out the reason for her success.

At this point, I’m sure you’re wondering what a conker is and why anyone would want to wield one, and that’s a reasonable line of thought. You have the delightful gifts of nature we know as conkers in North America, although you call them by the more sensible name of horse chestnuts, but the playground activity of smacking them against each other doesn’t seem to have crossed the ocean.

On the other hand, it’s an unquestioned element of tradition back in my homeland. As fall approaches in the UK, you’ll see weather pundits commenting that this might be a particularly good season for conkers, or lamenting in all seriousness when that’s not the case. Some of us never quite lose the inclination to pick up the chunky seeds of the horse chestnut tree, remove them from their prickly casings and attach them to the end of a string.

My grandfather introduced me to the concept, himself a lifelong aficionado of the sport. The traditional game is simple: drill a hole through the best conkers you can find, bore a hole through the center, thread them with a piece of string and then find yourself an opponent.

Now settle in for the battle, because your task is to hold the conker by the string and take turns striking the other person’s conker until one of the two conkers breaks. This is a literal game of destruction, because nobody wins until one of those seeds is in pieces on the ground.

There are ways to make your conker stronger, but not all of them are deemed legitimate. One is to make sure the hole you drill for the string is as clean and cylindrical as possible, because notches can make the conker crack or split.

Good craftsmanship is fine, but hardening conkers is frowned on. You can do this by keeping them for a year before you start playing with them, baking them or boiling them in vinegar.

If you fancy getting competitive, I wouldn’t do this, as it’s usually regarded as cheating. In fact, the British Junior Conkers Championships (the mind boggles, but yes, we do in fact have entire sporting events where all anyone does is smack things with a seed on the end of a string) banned contestants from bringing their own conkers in 2005 to prevent it from happening.

People were peeved by this decision, of course, and thus began the Campaign for Real Conkers. Yes, that’s a thing too: a movement of people who believe there should be no rules, regulations or teams and no commercial sponsorship to sully one of the few sports that can be played for free.

I wouldn’t say we take conkers quite that seriously, just to be clear. However, we are invested enough to occasionally have a panic about the future of our beloved childhood sport.

For example, in 2015, scientists were apparently “worried” that conkers were getting smaller, which they attributed to a bug called the leaf-mining moth. More distressingly still, the horse chestnut tree was put on the official extinction list in 2019 due to moths and disease; according to a professor at the University of Aberdeen, it’s unlikely they will disappear completely, but enough will die off for conkers to be a much rarer treat.

We’re not entirely sure how long people in Britain have been bashing each other’s conkers, but it can’t have been going on any earlier than the 1500s because that’s when the tree was introduced to the UK from the Balkans. We do have the memoirs of poet and writer Robert Southey to tell us that, around 1821, the game was played with snail shells and hazelnuts, and we know the first recorded game happened a couple of decades later on the Isle of Wight.

We’re not even sure why it’s called “conkers,” although there are theories that it was a dialect word for “hard nut” or it came from the French word for a conch, or even that it’s a shortened form of “conquerors.” All we know is that it’s long been a rite of passage for British children, and even though its popularity is on the wane, some of us never grow out of it.

My mother, sadly, has not taken part in conker contests since she was a kid, so I never got to see her in action. I do, however, know why she did so well.

But before I reveal the secret to my mother’s success, I should like to stress for the record that she is an innocent. She had no idea why her conkers were so consistently tougher than anyone else’s conkers.

My grandfather knew, though. Oh yes, the mischief of our family was well aware of the truth behind her skill.

It turns out that he was secretly varnishing her conkers after he’d threaded them with string. He was careful to use a clear coating so that nobody would ever notice – not even my mum.

I’m not sure when he finally admitted it, or why he felt the need to come clean, but I do know he kept it secret until after my own childhood contests were done and dusted. Like my mum, I have no way to go back and check the status of my weapons, but if you’re wondering whether I had similar success when I took up my mum’s mantle on the battlefield… why yes. Yes I did.