Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

No governmental or police interventions could hope to eradicate the culture of ‘conkers’ – at least in the 1950s. As mentioned, I am no longer a ‘boy’ ha ha :-). Hence, I don’t know to what extent boys in Britain are still continuing the ‘culture of conkers’. Although, like other cultural trends, it is probably subject to change.

You can learn more about conkers on this post: History of Conkers

Conker Tradition

It is difficult to say what part of the conker tradition was the most important. Finding and collecting the conkers seemed to be the most exciting. All the ‘local’ conker trees would quickly lose all their conkers as soon as they ripened, as boys would take them. As the conkers became few, the skills used to get the conkers suddenly needed special tactics that can be narrowed down to two.

One method was to aim some kind of missile, such as a stick, at a branch laden heavy with conkers. If one hits the bull’s eye, the conkers would come flying down like a one-armed-bandit jackpot. The other method was to climb the tree, crawl along the branches, and reach for them. This would often be difficult, as the conkers would be out of reach. The branch would then have to be shaken by jumping up and down on it. In other words, these skills involved a strong arm, a good aim, and a fearless climbing ability. 

The Dangers Behind the Tradition

These activities would normally be carried out far away from adults, parents, and teachers because they were nothing short of dangerous. I could climb any tree, if not by natural talent, but by using a hammer and six-inch nails; these tools were especially requisitioned from the nearest building site. However, my sense of caution was perhaps a stronger element in my personal demeanour than derring-do. I was cautious not to venture out on the thinnest branches at the top of trees. Sometimes, like a cat, I find it easier to climb up a tree than to climb down.

Most times, I would often freeze halfway down the tree and feel that the world was about to come to an end. This was unlike my friend and neighbour, the fearless Billy Babcock; he who would fly up any tree on the slightest pretext. He would clamber out on any branch no matter how flimsy or dead the branch happened to be. Yet all good things come to an end. One day, we heard the news that Billy was in the hospital with his stomach all cut up after falling from the top of a tree. Fortunately, he survived because the branches had broken his fall; or so they said afterwards.

Conkers: A Gift or a Curse?

One of the best things about biking outside the village was finding a ‘virgin’ tree still undiscovered by other boys. The ideal tree should be easy to climb; with low hanging branches, you could just pluck as many conkers as you wanted. It seems funny that once you had a bucket of them, you kind of just basked in the satisfaction of possessing such a treasure. It often felt as if it was a sack of gold instead of just a bunch of inedible conkers. 

Once the conkers had been found, the idea was to find the biggest one. Every time you found a big conker, the conker seemed to be bigger than any you had ever found before. However, most of the enormous conkers, when opened, would disappointingly reveal two halved conkers.

The difficulty of opening the conkers depend on the time of the year. When ripe or half ripe especially when it’s late autumn, the conkers become easy to open; when it’s not, they become more difficult. If they were ripe and opened-up, horse chestnuts would reveal a conker with a deep brown shiny colour. If only half-ripe, they would be more of a brown and white pinto colour – a fascinating appearance, but not the best for conker battles.

Finding the Right Conker

Once a big conker had been found, it had to be treated by special secret recipes to make it hard; none of these recipes ever seemed to work well. However, one method involved baking and using vinegar. Of course, this was undoubtedly just some kind of boys’ myth – conkers became hard with age. If you had a conker from the year before, it would be old, wrinkled, pale and ugly; that makes it much harder than the young, shiny, fresh and beautiful conkers.

As we grew older, those of us who still remembered how conkers behaved with aging could see the similarities to real life. As you grow old, you might lose your good looks along the way; however, you can surely handle situations better than your younger self – you become ‘harder’.

Conker battles

Once you had found the right conker, you had to prepare it for battle. This involved making a hole through the middle of it downwards, piercing the lighter brown circular areola top of the conker. A skewer, a special tool for the purpose, would be used; it was often obtained from your father’s toolbox. A piece of string would then be threaded through the hole and a knot tied on one end. You were then ready for battle.

Two boys would stand facing each other; they would hold their conker on the end of a piece of string. They would take turns at ‘bashing’ each other’s conker. How the attacking conker was held is a little difficult to describe, but the techniques varied; usually, the conker would be held between the index and long finger, and aimed at the adversary’s conker. The conker that was smashed first obviously lost.

The winner then called his conker a ‘oner’. If you beat someone who had a ‘oner’ conker, your conker automatically became a ‘two-er’; if you beat someone that had a ‘thirty-fiver’ conker, your conker became a ‘thirty-sixer’… I hope you catch the drift.

The idea here is that when you defeated the enemy, the glory that had belonged to them then became your ‘glory’. This is perhaps reminiscent of cannibalism, where cannibals eat the flesh of their defeated enemies. They believe that in doing so, they add to their own glory by swallowing the glory of the defeated.  

The Ugliest Conkers

Due to age, the best conkers were the ugliest and most shrivelled, often exposing their innards due to countless battles. They looked like old and deformed miniature brains. The new, fresh, and shiny conkers in the front line, like the young and shiny Hitlerjugend, soon literally bit the dust. 

Boys sometimes kept their conkers as a war-trophy on a string and hung them from their belts in the same manner as the tribes of the Amazon jungle. They shrink the heads of their enemies and wear them as war-like ornaments, suggesting the strong virility of the owner.

Darwin’s evolutionary ideas led him to believe that children share many characteristics with their prehistoric ancestors (some kind of Lord of the Flies theme). For instance, children’s fascination with fire doesn’t seem to be purely coincidental. It is perhaps a bit far-fetched, though, to say that children’s fascination with conkers originally stems from aping some unimaginable prehistoric habits of their ancestors.

To end on a ‘Moralistic’ note

Conkers didn’t cost anything. In fact it would have been an absurd idea to ask any parent or adult for money to continue with some aspect of the conker ‘sport’. Children today, much more so than children of previous generations, are now part of the ‘money-economy’, and consequently only seem to participate in leisure activities, if they have some financial aspect. Although, no one has yet thought of how to harness ‘climbing trees’ or ‘playing conkers’, so as to include it as part of the leisure industry for children. 

Many of the games and toys we had as kids are still basically the same games and toys kids have today. They just have gone through a metamorphosis to increase profits as much as possible. One example is the BeyBlade culture. These toys which are mass-produced in China for next to nothing using low-wage slave labour are then sold to children in richer countries at hyped-up prices (for instance, as much as $30 in Norway for one simple plastic toy which breaks after two minutes).

Now I don’t know exactly what the weekly wage of Chinese labourers are, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it didn’t exceed $30. In other words, a worker who produces several thousand of these toys per week is then given one of the toys as wages. Ironically, a BeyBlade is nothing more than a spinning top! 

Simple Toys of Our Time

When we were kids, we considered spinning tops too childish to play with. However, the child-toy industry, undeterred by this fact, has managed, through a gigantic international marketing project, to convince children around the world that BeyBlades (spinning tops) are super cool.

Other simple toys that have been metamorphosed to maximise profit are yo-yos (which are now called something else and cost much more). The mountain-bike craze which has also spiralled into part of the adult-leisure industry was also something we used to do ‘free’ on our standard bikes.