This is for those who have never played a game of Conkers. I do hope it is not to long, and this is the right place to submit it.
September, when the Horse Chestnut,
(Cesculus Hippocastanum) if you wish
to call it by its it’s botanic name hangs
in clusters on its parent tree. Boys look
for the tell tale splitting of its casing
which houses a much prized nut, for
Conker time has arrived.
Upwards fly the sticks and stones which
will bring to earth a much desired champion.
Darkly stained by nature and burnished by
summers suns, their prickled casing splits
asunder spewing forth into eager grubby
hands a nut worthy to take on all on comers.
With pockets weighted with their prizes,
each boy believing that within his pocked
lies a future champion in the old age game
of “Conkersâ€Â. Maybe a conker five, or even
a rare conker twenty. But boys have a habit
of adding the odd victory to their champion.
At the end of it's knotted string, you swing
your conker in a graceful arc to smash itself
against your opponents. Whoopee, yours
remains intact, while the other has developed
a split. It is now his turn, he swings and
“crack†his conker shatters. His total number
of victories were three, now making your conker
a number four.
And so the game is played through the long
summer days until all conkers have been used.
Many are spoiled as each boy tries to harden his,
so that he will have some advantage over his
opponents. But all experiments have failed, for
the secret lies in time itself, not by baking nor
by soaking in vinegar. Time, which few boys
have use for is the secret.
A boy became a youth, and sailed to the far
off land of Egypt. But he did not forget his
boyhood game of conkers. He took with him
twelve memories all threaded on a single
piece of string. They remained forgotten
at the bottom of his kit bag until he returned
home two years later.
Two years of waiting to see again the light of
day, when the secret would be revealed to him.
That which every boy had sought after; that of
possessing the hardest conker of them all, a
champion among champions, no; twelve
champions. He smiled to himself, was he the
only one who knew the secret.
It was sixty years later when he again played
a game of conkers. This time he played against
his grand son, but instead of playing with a
Horse Chestnut they played with a segmented
plastic ball.
What happened to the twelve hard conkers? They
were offered to a boy who refused them because
they were all wrinkled and hard. He liked the new
shiny brown ones straight off the tree.
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